Coffee is art. It’s art that you make. But also, with coffee, it’s art that you can fake? Turns out you can. Well maybe not you specifically, but a network of forgers, who figured out a way to use coffee and tea to fake works of art from renown artists like Picasso, Edvard Munch, and Paul Klee.
And before we go any further, you already know where this happened. I don’t need to say but I’m going to anyway, for reporting’s sake. Of course this was in Italy. I mean, you combine two of the country’s greatest traditions, coffee and art, and what did you expect was going to happen?
As reported by Airmail, the Roman forgers focused on a specific type of art that to replicate, one that had previously been thought to be impossible to. Back at the end of the 19th century, a French art dealer named Ambroise Vollard ran a publishing business and was “the only place to buy prints for up-and-coming young artists such as Pablo Picasso.“ Vollard and Vollard exclusively used a very distinctive type of paper, in terms of both weight and texture. And it is this uniqueness that many believed made it impossible to copy.
Except that the forgers figured it out. Using a paper that was similar to Vollard’s, the forgers would then “age” the paper by dipping it in coffee. With the right paper, they selected easily-repeated image to produce, primarily line drawings, which they created multiple copies of using a printing technique similar to that of a lithograph.
The forgeries were so successful they were able to fool auction houses and had been distributed to 23 different countries. And in fact it took a pan-European team of investigators 12 months to track the forgers down to their workshop in Rome’s Tuscolano quarter, where they seized over 100 forgeries—worth around $1.16 million—and froze another $350,000 in bank accounts.
Now I’m not going to tell you to go do crimes and that theft is cool. I’m simply not. Buuuuuuut… I’m maybe with the forgers on this one? It’s coffee, it’s art, it’s sticking it to rich people, it all sounds kinda cool. But obviously don’t do it, because it’s illegal. No matter how cool it is.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
