Who Are the Most Faked Artists in History?

There’s a famous quip about French painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot from art historian René Huyghe, who claimed that “Corot painted three thousand canvases, ten thousand of which have been sold in America.” Corot was one of the most copied 19th-century painters, with fakes produced abundantly between 1870 and 1939. A single Belgian studio manufactured 235 fake Corot landscapes in 1888 alone. Even so, Huyghe’s number is exaggerated, and there are as many fake Corots in Europe as there are in the United States (entering museum collections in the early 20th century, including the Louvre’s).

Corot’s success, especially in his later years, inspired other artists to forge his work. The artist also had a lax attitude toward forgeries. sometimes adding finishing touches to fakes and passing them off as his own. According to one anecdote, a man showed the artist some small Corot canvases that he had just bought, to which Corot replied, “How the devil can you think I painted such horrors? And you actually paid money for these?” The man then told him how much he’d paid; taking pity on him, Corot offered to fix it and touched up the painting by the next day, turning it into an “authentic” Corot.

When a curator was preparing a 1937 exhibition of HonoréDaumier works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he struggled to find pieces that were absolutely authentic. An article published in Time magazine around the time of the exhibition opening lamented that “more than any other great 19th century French artist, Daumier has been imitated, forged and mistreated.” Dedicated to presenting only real deal Daumiers, the exhibition catalogue included technical notes describing the X-ray and infrared photo studies done for certain works.

In the case of the prolific French artist and caricaturist, only prints produced in his lifetime and by his authorized publisher are considered originals; all others are fakes. According to the Daumier Register, a digital catalogue raisonné for the artist, Daumier created 1,340 drawings in total, but there are another 1,562 drawings designated as “after Daumier” and “unconfirmed.” His oil paintings are even more off balance, with the Register claiming that he created 283 paintings but that 609 additional works are purported to be by the artist. “It is not even possible to calculate the number of forged lithographs or reprints,” notes the Register. “This is a great compliment to the artist Daumier, who already complained during his lifetime that many of his works were forged.”

French sculptor Auguste Rodin has been forged so often that some of his forgers are known by name. Among these is Odilon Roche, who collected drawings by the artist. Another prolific forger was Ernest Durig, who claimed to be Rodin’s last student and sold his forged drawings under the pretense that they were gifts from the master (including one that made it into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Nine fakes by Durig were included in a traveling 1971-72 exhibition titled “Roding Drawings: True and False,” which showed at Washington’s National Gallery of Art and then moved to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Mseum in New York. It included 132 Rodin drawings alongside 28 forgeries of his work, and a “true and false” section where viewers were challenged to look at 30 unlabeled pieces and see if they could determine what was what.

Rodin’s bronze sculptures are also catnip for forgers. Posthumous bronze “originals” have repeatedly been cast from the artist’s plaster models, often lacking clear markings that they are reproductions. In 2019, for example, the Musée Rodin (which holds the rights to the artist’s works) pressed charges against Parisian art dealer Robert Crouzet and American art dealer Gary Snell; Crouzet sold 16 Rodin models to Snell, who proceeded to cast around 1,700 works that weren’t marked as reproductions. Some of Snell’s casts even bore Rodin’s signature and the Fonderie Rudier foundry mark (instead of the mark of the foundry where they were actually made).

Hailed in his lifetime as the “pictorial historian of the Great West,” Frederic Remington is among the most copied, faked, and forged American artists. His paintings and illustrations were featured often in popular magazines, which boosted their popularity and rendered them copyable.

A large-scale Remington exhibition at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, was the catalyst for a catalogue raisonné, and between 1985 and 1996 the museum formalized an authentication process for Remington works. The artworks had to be inspected at the museum, and so 248 works were reviewed for the eventual two-volume catalogue. Of those 248, only 53 were deemed authentic (roughly 20 percent, a proportion that has remained consistent in ongoing authentication reviews since).

The review committee categorized four types of inauthentic works: pastiches, copies, fakes, and forgeries. Pastiches (the smallest category) are intended to deceive; they copy parts of multiple Remington artworks with the addition of a faux signature. Copies could be unsigned, are the most prevalent, and presumably could have been painted as an artistic exercise. Fakes account for almost a quarter of the inauthentic works submitted for certification and consist of fraudulently signed paintings or drawings unrelated to known Remingtons but of a subject that interested the artist. A forgery is a work by another artist whose name has been removed or covered and replaced with an inauthentic Remington signature.

The former global director of Art Basel, Marc Spiegler, once quoted a Parisian dealer as saying: “The drama here is that I could find a Modigliani in an attic tomorrow, with a letter from Modigliani attached to it, and people would still hesitate.” The hesitation is warranted—given the drama surrounding the modernist painter’s forgery market and the unsettled state of Modigliani scholarship and his catalogue raisonné.

Modigliani gave away many drawings, making provenance hard to track. His lack of a firm paper archive makes it easier to try to slip new works into his oeuvre. Some believe that fellow artist and close friend Moïse Kisling completed some of Modigliani’s unfinished works after the latter’s death. Whether or not that is true, fakes started emerging right after the artist’s premature death at age 35 in 1920 and have persisted ever since. The situation is so extreme that in 2017 a Modigliani exhibition at Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale ended abruptly when one-third of the works were seized by the Italian police on suspicion of being phony.

So what’s an auction house or gallery to do? Many require that a Modigliani be included in art critic Ambrogio Ceroni’s catalogue raisonné, first published in 1958 and updated in 1970, which lists 337 works but does not include pieces Ceroni didn’t see in person (such as those in the United States). Modigliani scholarship, however, is changing all the time. Just this past year, a long-anticipated catalogue raisonné by Marc Restellini was published (following lawsuits) and a public online catalogue was released by the nonprofit Modigliani Initiative.

It’s one thing when artists are forged by others, and another thing entirely when artists forge themselves. Such is the surreal case of Giorgio de Chirico.

His early works of dreamlike, eerie vistas, his “metaphysical style,” remained highly popular even after he moved on to painting in a neoclassical technique that collectors found less desirable (including subjects such as horses and knights in armor). Ever the pragmatist, de Chirico retreated to duplicating his earlier (and more his commercially successful) works himself, which wouldn’t be entirely problematic in and of itself—except he also backdated them. He dubbed them verifalsi, meaning “true-fakes,” and didn’t see an issue since the originals were his intellectual property.

In one instance, in 1919, de Chirico imitated one of his own paintings after Surrealist collector Simone Collinet asked if she could buy a work that he had already sold; he painted the same thing to please her. A few years later, in 1924, de Chirico copied his painting Le muse inquietanti (1918), which was owned by art historian Giorgio Castelfranco, for Paul Éluard and his wife, Gala. He would go on to paint many more. Complicating matters, de Chirico wasn’t the only one forging himself. Some Surrealists, such as Óscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, and Remedios Varo, allegedly created de Chirico replicas. So did others.

The artist took to policing his own market, publicly calling out forgeries. According to a 1961 article in Time, a Milanese art critic said that “sixty percent of the paintings he sequesters are really fakes. Thirty percent he painted himself, and ten percent he painted himself but has forgotten about it.”

The artist who famously melted clocks and bent reality also played with authenticity, signing thousands of blank sheets of paper for publishers to use later for limited-edition prints. Unsurprisingly, many of these sheets were misused. (According to Dalí’s secretary, John Peter Moore, the artist signed around 350,000 blank sheets of paper over the course of his career.) Provenance standards are looser with prints since they exist in multiples, making them easier to forge, but there have been instances where even Dalí’s pre-signed papers were forged. As a result, the artist’s print market is riddled with fakes.

Forgeries are often exposed when they go on display at prominent museums. In 2025, Italian art police seized 21 Dalí artworks from the exhibition “Dali: Between Art and Myth,” at Palazzo Tarasconi in Parma, claiming that they were forged. According to art fraud investigator Colette Loll, the incident was the third major seizure by the carabinieri of Dalí works.

The subject gets trickier with artists such as the frequently forged Andy Warhol, who intentionally played with issues of originality. A master of the mass-produced look, Warhol used a popular photo-silkscreen technique that is relatively easy to duplicate.

According to Warhol expert Richard Polsky, there are a few telltale clues that a work might be a fake Warhol. For one thing, the ink on Warhol’s silkscreens wasn’t perfectly uniform—in some places too heavy on the ink, in others too light—so prints lacking this variation might be off. Also be wary of anything in mint condition, a possible indication that a work was re-screened by a print shop. Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe works are among his most commonly faked, a telling giveaway being the hand-drawn slash used to differentiate between the print number and the edition size (which forgers usually get wrong). Besides the Marilyns, other commonly counterfeited Warhols are the Flowers, Maos, and Electric Chairs. Of his pre-Pop works, Warhol’s drawings of shoes and cats are popular among forgers.

In 2021, the Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF bought a $20K Warhol drawing, Fairies (1954), and created 999 identical copies. Destroying the record that identified the original, the perpetrators mixed in the real Warhol with the shuffled lot and the drawings were sold for $250 each. “The capital-A Art World is far more concerned with authenticity than aesthetics,” the collective wrote. “By forging Fairies en masse, we obliterate the trail of provenance for the artwork. Though physically undamaged, we destroy any future confidence in the veracity of the work. By burying a needle in a needlestack, we render the original as much a forgery as any of our replications.”

Works by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been sought after since his heyday in the 1980s, but a steady stream of fakes cropped up after one of his paintings sold for $110.5 million at a 2017 sale at Sotheby’s New York. Just five years after that, a 2022 Basquiat exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art was shuttered prematurely when FBI agents seized all 25 artworks on view, on the grounds that they were part of a fraud and conspiracy. (The museum’s director was fired, and the FBI later announced that someone had confessed to forging most of the pieces.)

According to Richard Polsky, who authenticates Basquiats, there are a few hints that a Basquiat may be a fake. Forgers tend to include gold crowns and prominently sign works on the front or the verso (even though Basquiat never signed his works on the front, and many are unsigned). Paintings on found objects, or works that have an incredible backstory (one that conveniently explains the lack of a paper trail for the work) are also frequent offenders.

Unlike earlier artists, whose forgeries can be identified through scientific testing of materials, this part of the three-legged authentication stool isn’t helpful in weeding out fake Basquiats since the materials he used are still widely available.