Top Ukrainian Art Historian Believes Italian Museum Holds 14 Fake Russian and Ukrainian Modernist Works

Konstantin Akinsha, a top curator and art historian of Russian and Ukrainian art, said he believes 14 artworks attributed to Russian and Ukrainian modernists in the collection of the Palazzo de Nordis, a museum in the northern Italian town of Cividale del Friuli, are not authentic.

In a Substack post published in late September, Akinsha analyzed the De Martiis Collection, a cache of 64 modern and contemporary works donated to the palazzo in 2015 by the late local collector Giancarlo De Martiis. The collection includes works by significant Italian modernist artists, including Mario Sironi, Afro Basaldella, and Giuseppe Santomaso, as well as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Boudin, and Graham Sutherland. But it is 14 works attributed to several Russian and Ukrainian modernist painters that have drawn Akinsha’s scrutiny.

In a recent interview with ARTnews, Akinsha—who has previously covered fakes and forgeries in the Russian art market for this publication—said that the attributions and provenances listed for those works “raise serious suspicions.” In both the interview and his Substack post, Akinsha noted that the collection’s online catalogue lists Jean Chauvelin in the provenance of many of the works. Chauvelin, who died in January, was a French art dealer and self-proclaimed Russian art expert implicated in numerous scandals involving paintings falsely attributed to Russian artists. Other figures named in the provenances include Boris Gribanov, a convicted Russian art forger.

Elisabetta Gottardo, the municipal head of culture for Cividale del Friuli, which manages Palazzo de Nordis, told ARTnews that the city accepted the works in the De Martiis Collection “based on documentation that include, for each work, an expert’s authentication, a historical report, an analysis of the materials and colors, and a graphic technical opinion.” However, she noted that Akinsha’s “opinion is certainly authoritative, and we will take it into great consideration for further investigation of these works.”

In the Substack post, Akinsha takes particular issue with a still life attributed to Russian artist Olga Rozanova and dated 1915-17, which he claims “shows virtually no resemblance to any of her authentic works.” He further argues that the work’s composition and style are “nearly identical” to a 1999 painting by Andrei Saratov, a contemporary Russian artist. Akinsha wrote that it was unlikely Saratov was the artist behind the supposed Rozanova, but that the “neo-modernist style of this contemporary Russian painter was deliberately exploited by forgers, who recognized in it a convenient template for fabricating works that could pass as Russian cubo-futurism tailored to satisfy Western expectations.”

Saratov told ARTnews in a WhatsApp message that he did not paint the work in the De Martiis Collection. “No, of course I didn’t paint it,” he wrote. “It’s a low-grade copy [of my work].” He then sent an image of the 1999 still life cited by Akinsha, saying the work “still hangs in my kitchen.”

“On the one hand, I am glad about this development because only good works tend to be counterfeited, but on the other hand, the museum could have bought my original,” he joked.

ARTnews also asked Maria Timina, a curator of Russian and European art at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum, to assess the supposed Rozanova. Timina similarly found the work “questionable.”

“Taken as a whole, the painting in question is unconvincing and reflects only a superficial understanding of Rozanova’s artistic work around 1912–13,” she said

Timina continued that the De Martiis painting “entirely misses the essence of Rozanova’s style” and makes “an awkward attempt to align itself” with several still lifes produced by Rozanova in 1912 and 1913. But in actuality, it shares only the genre and “a seemingly cubo-futurist painterly manner.”

Rozanova’s “forms do not wobble for no reason, as they do in the painting in the De Martiis Collection,” Timina said. She added that each object in the painting “is outlined with coarse, heavy dark lines, which creates a sense of stiffness and rigidity uncharacteristic of Rozanova’s approach.” She also noted that Rozanova rarely signed her paintings—and never with her full surname, as shown on the De Martiis work. She more often signed simply with her initials, “O.P.”

Another work in the De Martiis Collection scrutinized by Akinsha on Substack is a painting attributed to Russian painter Marie Vassilieff and titled Portrait of a Man (circa 1918). “It bears almost no resemblance to her works of the period,” he wrote.

“In this case, stylistic analysis is largely irrelevant: the painting is far more plausibly a pastiche, directly ‘inspired’ by Portrait of Sandro Fazini by Sigismund Olesievich, an artist from Odesa,” he wrote. He published the two paintings side by side, and the similarity is striking.

The Olesievich work is co-owned by Ukrainian art collector Andrei Adamovsky. When asked by ARTnews what he thought about the painting possibly having been copied, he replied, “What can I say except that it is a real crime.”

Another work in the museum, an untitled painting attributed to Russian artist Natalia Goncharova and dated to 1913, is described in the online catalogue as a preparatory study for a similar painting by Goncharova, titled Electric Lamp (1913), which resides in the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

James Butterwick, a London-based dealer of Russian and Ukrainian modernism, cast doubt on that work as well, telling ARTnews that Goncharova was not known for repeating her compositions.

“There’s a well-known quote by a Russian art historian called Irina Vakar, who curated a Goncharova show at the Tate, that goes something like: ‘Goncharova hardly ever repeated a composition,’” he said. “So why would she go and make a copy of an electric lamp, for God’s sake? She was an unbelievably original artist with a width and depth of creativity of a staggering scale. Why would she suddenly start doing copies?”

Cividale del Friuli is just over 10 miles from the city of Udine in the foothills of the Italian Alps. Until De Martiis, an entrepreneur who died in 2024, donated his collection to the municipality, it had no notable collections or institutions dedicated to modern art. Palazzo de Nordis was loaned to Cividale del Friuli by the Italian state in 2014. When restoration work on the 15th-century building was completed in 2020, it was inaugurated as the gallery housing the De Martiis Collection.

“I wanted to donate my collection to Cividale del Friuli because I worked here for 40 years and, in one sense, it was here that I gathered the resources to build my collection,” De Martiis is quoted as saying on the Palazzo’s website. “I have never had a true art advisor but I frequented museums and galleries trying to understand for myself what I saw…all of my choices were dictated solely by my taste and the pleasure I felt in observing the works.”

Akinsha, who recently curated a major exhibition of Ukrainian modernism at London’s Royal Academy, told ARTnews: “Sadly, De Martiis’ taste was not sustained by knowledge, and it was not enough to navigate the risky waters of the market of Russian modernism polluted by fakes.”