Hang about. That's a genuine fake, isn't it?

By Sunanda Creagh
August 6, 2005

When an Italian professor, Daniele Ermes Donde, decided to sell the family art collection in the 1980s, he got a nasty shock: nine of his 11 masterpieces were fakes.

He tracked down the artists who forged the works but rather than exacting his revenge, Professor Donde offered them work painting replicas of famous works.

So began La Banca dell'Arte, a gallery specialising in handpainted forgeries of works by some of the biggest names in Western art history: Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Klimt and others. A branch of the gallery opens in Double Bay on Thursday.

The gallery's director, Michael Sidorenko, says there's no shame in owning a phoney. "People should be able to have art on their walls; it shouldn't be locked up in museums or in people's personal safes," he says. Works sell for between $3000 and $10,000.

A group of 29 Italian artists are employed to produce up to three forgeries a week, which come complete with a forged signature of the original master and a certificate guaranteeing it to be a handpainted fake. "With the naked eye you can't see if they are original or not," Sidorenko says.

Some clients ask for works to be forged with slight personalised changes, such as a shop name inserted into a street scene, he says, or a loved one's face painted into Renoir's 1881 Luncheon of the Boating Party.

The gallery has the permission of the European museums which house the real works to sell the fakes, but it can only reproduce work by artists who have been dead for more than 50 years.

The concept has been a hit in the United States, and celebrities such as Madonna, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Donald Trump have bought fakes. Princess Diana owned 12 such works and Sidorenko says some "famous Australians" have already placed orders with the gallery.

Sidorenko says the works have more warmth than digital prints and are sold with an exact copy of the frame the original works are displayed in. "You wouldn't put a print on the wall because it has no texture, no emotional feeling," he says. "These works are created with passion."
