Art: True or False?

In a small, brightly lighted Paris room, a group of connoisseurs intently studied a small canvas—a sunny Italian seascape dotted with boats and fishermen. After a second, a hawk-eyed old man in the center of the group shook his head. "False," he growled. "It was never executed by Corot. Take it away." Paris' celebrated art expert, 73-year-old Andre Schoeller, had just pronounced judgment on one more fake in the outbreak of art frauds that has plagued Paris since the war.

No one knows how many fakes are circulating, but enough crop up to keep Schoeller and his colleagues busy. Since 1948, some 600 counterfeit paintings have been reported to the police; Paris experts believe they have found at least 4,000 others that the cops never heard about. Schoeller alone has passed on as many as 40 fakes in a week. And so far this year, he has seen no less than ten phony Corots, plus several false Utrillos, Vlamincks and Modiglianis.

The artists are generally hungry unknowns from the Left Bank or Montmartre. Unscrupulous dealers pay them a few francs to paint "in the style" of a recognized master, then peddle the pictures to gullible bargain hunters, often—the experts believe—to unwary tourists from Latin America and the U.S. Most of the time the fakes are incredibly crude, but sometimes the canvases are so clever that they defy even a shrewd buyer.

"Corot Was Ill." After nearly half a century at the work, Art Detective Schoeller can usually spot the flaws within minutes. He started out in 1905 as an assistant in a Paris gallery, and soon discovered that mere study was not enough; a true expert had to have "a sense" for fakes. One of the greatest connoisseurs he ever met was an uneducated genius who made his living running a brothel. In his spare time he hung questionable paintings on a clothesline in the house, invited Pupil Schoeller to find the fakes. "What!" he would scream when Schoeller made a mistake. "Look here. The whole corner has been painted in—and clumsily at that. See the different false shades?" Schoeller would look again, and sure enough, the entire aura of the painting seemed to change.

Schoeller learned to trust his senses, and backed them up with hard study. Today, he has huge cardboard files crammed with information on his specialty, the 19th century masters. He knows the painters' lives almost as well as his own: "You must be able to say, 'Corot was ill in bed that winter and did no painting. He was at Cannes on such a date—hence the canvas marked "Corot, Paris" is false.' "

Monet Remembered. Occasionally Schoeller needs a little time. He asks his client to bring a disputed painting back the next day when he has "fresh eyes." Once he makes a decision, laboratory tests rarely prove him wrong. He remembers a friend who bet 50,000 francs that he owned a genuine Monet; indeed, he had the artist's written assurance to prove it. Schoeller still insisted it was false. Finally Monet himself remembered: it was a scene from his childhood haunts. A friend had painted it, but when Monet saw the picture years later, it looked so familiar he thought he had painted it himself.