In preparation, Dalloul is creating a database containing details for each work, including the chain of provenance that establishes authenticity.
The family plans to open a museum in Beirut in 2020 to showcase the collection. Today, it includes more than 4,000 works by Arab artists and constitutes “the largest collection of its kind on planet Earth in private hands,” according to Dalloul. The Dalloul Art Foundation’s extensive collection was started by Dalloul’s father, Ramzi, 45 years ago. “The rise of forgeries, if I had to tag it to something,” he said, "it would be around 10 years ago when Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Bonhams and all the big auction houses started coming to the region when there was a resurgence of interest in Arab art and the value started going up.” “Here in this region, we’re on a very sharp learning curve.” Added to the lack of experience is the problem of regional conflicts, which have left archives and records - particularly in Iraq and Syria - damaged, destroyed or missing.ĭalloul’s campaign comes roughly a decade after Arab art experienced a boom. “In Europe there is 600 or 700 years of experience of dealing with that,” he told Al-Monitor. Having uncovered several forgeries in his own collection, Lebanese-American art collector Basel Dalloul, managing director of the Dalloul Art Foundation, is on a mission to promote more stringent controls across the regional art market, which is still relatively young and facing issues like forgery - both of artwork and of certificates of authenticity - for the first time. As prices for work by Arab artists have risen over the past decade, forgers have taken notice. In today’s globalized art market, such astronomical sums regularly change hands - sometimes for a single work - and forgeries remain a lucrative source of income for unscrupulous artists and dealers. The ingenious forger is thought to have tricked buyers out of the equivalent of more than $30 million.
Fearing a death sentence, he shocked the art world when he admitted that the painting was a forgery, one of more than a dozen he had produced over several decades. In 1945, Dutch artist Han van Meegeren was arrested and charged with selling a painting by Johannes Vermeer to Nazi leader Hermann Goring. For as long as art has commanded high prices, it has attracted forgers.
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