(MONEY Magazine) – Art fraud is probably as old as art itself. In the 14th century, Italian stonecarvers copied Greek and Roman busts and other statuary, then purposely chipped their works so they could peddle them as antiquities to royalty. The prices for those literal knockoffs were as princely as the unsuspecting purchasers. Today art fraud is for the masses. Forgers and other charlatans turn their often considerable talents to producing piles of moderately priced prints, paintings and other artworks. Their dupes are often novice or naive collectors who can afford at most to spend a few thousand dollars for a work of art. No less an expert than Thomas Hoving, editor of Connoisseur magazine and formerly director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, estimates that 40% of the art on the market today, with the exception of contemporary works, is fake.

Affordable fakes are sold everywhere -- at auction houses, in traditional art galleries, in shopping malls -- and increasingly over the telephone and through mail-order catalogues. Collectors can't count on protection under the law. Criminal prosecutions are rare because it is extremely difficult to prove that a seller knowingly unloaded a fake. In addition, fraudulent works tend to be resold many times. Collectors who get stuck with dubious pieces usually don't go to court. Instead, they attempt to return a problem piece to the person they bought it from, or if that's not possible, pass it on to another unsuspecting buyer. As the stories that follow make clear, collectors must proceed with caution. Chain of deception. The oil paintings of Edward Willis Redfield, an American Impressionist who lived from 1869 to 1965, are an excellent illustration of the trickle-down theory of art fraud. One fraud victim, a Washington, D.C. restaurateur, told his story on the condition that his name not be published. His ordeal began in June 1983, when he bid $5,000 at a local auction house for what he thought was a Redfield titled Rocks in Winter. Hoping to learn more about the painting, he got in touch with Thomas Folk, a graduate student at the City University of New York who is writing his doctoral dissertation on Redfield and other Pennsylvania Impressionists. Folk concluded that the picture was a forgery. Redfield used five sizes of canvas generally, and Rocks in Winter was painted on a size that he didn't favor. The forger's brush strokes, which were far more controlled than Redfield's, were another giveaway to Folk. The denouncement of the painting by Folk, the world's foremost Redfield expert, was only the first step in the restaurateur's battle to get his money back, however. When he approached the auction house, he was told that it would have to get its money back from the painting's consignor. The consignor, in turn, said he purchased the painting in 1979 at Christie's in New York City for $3,000 and wanted his money back. Christie's gave it to him. The restaurateur got his $5,000 back in September 1984. Christie's, however, has yet to get its money back from the individual who consigned the painting there, which is as far back as the chain of deception has been traced. It seems certain that the restaurateur's tale of woe will be repeated by many other Redfield fanciers. Since Folk examined Rocks in Winter, he has noticed a number of Redfield forgeries at galleries and auction houses. Although he says it troubles him to see people buy fakes, he usually doesn't cry fraud unless a collector pays him his $200 fee to authenticate a painting. Of the 15 or so Redfields that Folk is hired to check each year, two-thirds turn out to be fakes in his estimation. Redfields, by the way, sell for as much as $100,000. Mechanical art. Although forgeries of moderately priced paintings are on the rise, they are still rare in comparison with the fakes flooding the limited- edition print market. Reason: forging a painting is a painstaking process, but prints can be mass-produced mechanically like posters. The victims of these frauds are usually novice collectors whose stories are much like the one told by John Kemmet, a 47-year-old communications consultant from the Chicago suburb of Lombard. Kemmet's interest in investing in art was piqued by a postcard he received in the mail in 1982 touting lithographs by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali. After Kemmet sent the postcard back, he received a catalogue from Convertine Fine Art with a letter signed by gallery president Carol Convertine stating that each work listed was selected by the gallery's erudite curator, Martin Fleishman. ''It took a few phone calls from Convertine to get me,'' says Kemmet. ''They told me that Dali had Parkinson's disease. Prices for his work would go crazy as prices did for Picasso's work after his death. Every few days they'd give me an update on Dali's health.'' Kemmet ordered Dali's Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus for $3,085. Five months later in May 1983 he paid Convertine another $1,625 for what he thought was an original Picasso lithograph titled Notre Dame. When he unwrapped the print, however, he noticed that it wasn't signed by the master, but by his daughter, Marina Picasso. Kemmet started to worry about the authenticity of both prints. His suspicions were further aroused when he saw another Discovery of America print at a Chicago gallery for about half the price he paid. Had Convertine's curator misjudged the value of Dali's work? Kemmet's qualms about the pictures were confirmed finally in the summer of 1985 when he received a letter from the New York State attorney general's office informing him that the staff was looking for witnesses to make a case against Convertine. In reality, the Convertine gallery wasn't filled with pictures but with banks of telephones. In 1982, when Kemmet was first solicited, Convertine did business on Manhattan's West Street, which is known for its meat-packing plants and sex clubs, not art galleries. The company did move to a chic Madison Avenue address when it was reincorporated as Carol Convertine Galleries in September 1983. Also in 1983, curator Fleishman, who was Carol Convertine's husband, began to identify himself in financial reports as Mr. Fleischinos. Fleishman's new identity followed his arrest in January of that year in connection with a land-sales fraud. Seven months later he pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to make restitution of $78,000, which he paid with Convertine galleries' profits. That land-fraud conviction wasn't Fleishman's first trouble with the law. Seventeen years earlier, he had pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to probation. What did Kemmet buy? The New York State attorney general contends that Kemmet's Dali is a crude photomechanical reproduction of the oil painting Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus that hangs in the Salvador Dali Museum/Foundation in St. Petersburg, Fla. The museum's president, A. Reynolds Morse, says that the museum owns the painting's copyright and did not authorize its reproduction. He estimates that the version Kemmet bought for $3,085 is worth $10 to $15. The reproduction was made by photographing an image -- perhaps from an art book -- through half-tone screens and separating the colors in the image. Such blatant copies are easy to detect because the tiny dots of color that combine to form the picture can be seen under a magnifying glass (see the illustration on page 74). The highest-quality photomechanical reproductions lack dots because they are made with screenless processes. The Picasso that Kemmet bought for $1,625 is one in a series of reproductions of the artist's works published by his daughter Marina. They were produced by artisans called chromistes, who copy an artist's work onto a printing surface such as a metal plate used in lithography. Still, it seems obvious that Kemmet overpaid. A genuine signed Picasso linocut (a type of print made by etching an image into linoleum) titled Notre Dame recently sold at auction for only $1,200. Kemmet's $1,625 print is probably worth no more than $90. To date, Kemmet has not got any of his money back from Convertine. In February, New York authorities charged Martin Fleishman, Carol Convertine and two sales managers they employed, Dennis Flanagan and Dennis Huculiak, with selling $500,000 worth of bogus prints to collectors across the country in three years. Flanagan and Huculiak pleaded guilty to conspiracy and were sentenced to three years' probation and ordered to pay restitution of $4,325 and $13,935, respectively. Fleishman and Convertine have pleaded not guilty. Fleishman and Convertine did not respond to Money's requests for interviews. Other companies selling Dali prints have been raided as well by police and the U.S. Postal Service in Colorado, Connecticut, New Mexico and New York. All contend that the confiscated Dalis are not fakes. Odile Gorse, president of one of these companies, Castillon Fine Art in Manhattan, has a notebook crammed with copies of contracts between Dali and European publishers that she says authorized the production of the confiscated prints. She adds: ''If Dali were bothered by these prints, he would have raised hell before the U.S. Postal Service started to investigate. I'm sure Dali is laughing.'' Dali himself has helped blur the distinction between genuine and fake. His attorney, Michael Stout, admits that the artist and his late wife, Gala, signed away the reproduction rights to dozens of his paintings in the early 1980s for $40,000 to $50,000 a title. The trouble is, according to Stout, that the Dalis didn't own some of the rights they signed over. In addition, Stout claims that many contracts purportedly signed by Dali have been forged. Why don't the real owners of the rights to reproduce Dali's works sue for copyright infringement? Dali museum head Morse says that it is difficult to trace the reproductions to their sources. Stout adds that Dali is unlikely to testify in court because he has been gravely ill since 1979 and lives in virtual seclusion in Figueras, Spain. Even if Dali were well, it is questionable whether he would cooperate. Says Stout: ''I once approached Dali to stop this mess, but Dali said it was society's problem.'' $ Experts point out that selling Dali prints of suspect authenticity has not been the sole province of boiler-room operations. American Express and Diner's Club have sold prints attributed to Dali that he had only the slightest role in producing. Both companies offered their Dalis in conjunction with Collector's Guild, a 21-year-old New York City firm that sells limited-edition artworks through the mail and at three galleries at New York and New Jersey shopping malls. American Express cardholders who didn't carefully read all of the sales literature they received in 1984 could have come away with the impression that they were being offered four original lithographs by Salvador Dali inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland for $975 each. A certificate of evaluation included with the sales literature and signed by appraiser Laurence Casper asserted that the lithographs are ''genuine and authentic, new and original works of art by Salvador Dali'' and went on to say, ''If these lithographs were being made available through art galleries, I would expect the price to be significantly higher.'' Casper says he withdrew his appraisal from later American Express mailings because of controversy about the prints' originality and other reasons he refuses to disclose. A specifications sheet included in the American Express package, but not in the Diner's Club mailing, qualified the originality claims by explaining that a chromiste prepared the lithographic plates for the edition by copying works that Dali had created in the 1960s for a deluxe edition of Alice in Wonderland. Max Munn, president of Collector's Guild, who supplied the text, contends that the prints were correctly described as originals in the American Express and Diner's Club materials. According to museum head Morse, however, the only works Dali created for that edition were watercolors, not lithographs. The specification sheet further explained that Dali signed the paper that the lithographs were printed on before they were pulled. Ideally, an artist supervises the entire printmaking process and signs only the finished prints that satisfy him. Beyond that, cardholders might be interested to learn that the four Dalis that American Express offered are available for half the price at a Collector's Guild gallery in the Riverside Square mall in Hackensack, N.J. Naomi Baka, a spokesman for American Express, says that the company believes the prints to be authentic but stopped selling them because of bad publicity. Doreen Edelman, marketing director of Diner's Club, declined to comment on the Dali prints that the company is still selling. Donkey-eared doorstops. Multiple casts of a sculpture pose the same sticky question as fine art prints: What is the difference between an original and a reproduction? Generally, art historians consider a sculpture original if the mold from which it was cast was created by an artist who also supervised its casting. A reproduction, on the other hand, is cast by making a new mold from an original sculpture without the artist's participation or permission. There is nothing wrong with reproductions advertised as such, say art dealers and museum curators, but reproductions sold as ''original limited editions'' are fraudulent. Consider Frederic Remington's rugged bronzes of cowboys and their steeds that are often advertised in newspapers and magazines. Most people don't realize that the ads are for reproductions worth only a few hundred dollars for their bronze content and decorative value. An original casting of the same sculpture commands tens of thousands of dollars. For example, the 160 or so Bronco Buster bronzes that Remington cast from 1895 until his death in 1909 are now worth $100,000 to $150,000. The artist's will permitted his widow to cast bronzes for the rest of her life, and she produced about 110 more Bronco Busters before she died in 1918. Remington's mold was then supposed to be destroyed, but the foundry that possessed it cast about 105 Bronco Busters before the molds were destroyed under court order in 1920. Remington's finely sculptured mold showed signs of wear when his widow was casting cowboys, and the last Bronco Busters were even less detailed. At one point, the horse's ears broke and were reconstructed by a none too nimble craftsman who turned out donkeylike ears. Nevertheless, even with this doctoring, Bronco Busters cast between 1909 and 1920 now sell for $25,000 to $50,000. As early as 1930, con men made molds from original Bronco Busters and sold the recasts as originals. Western art specialist Rudy Wunderlich of Chicago's Mongerson Wunderlich Galleries estimates that there are now 6,000 copies of the Bronco Buster on the market -- 20 times the number of originals -- with most of these reproductions selling for $1,000 to $6,000. Says Wunderlich: ''You can buy these bronzes as decorations or use them as doorstops, but I don't think they're ever going to increase in value because there are simply ; too many around.'' Recasts are always an inch or two smaller than originals because the hot bronze cast at the same size as the original shrinks as it cools. Ersatz Aztecs. Collectors who focus on the artifacts of antiquity have no such tricks to rely on. As a result they stand an even greater chance of being bilked. History shows that the more collectors search for authentic ancient artifacts in foreign lands, the more natives start churning out forgeries to meet the demand. Fleecers have flourished in Mexico and Latin America in the field of ancient Azteca, Incan and Mayan works for several reasons. The pool of potential victims is fairly large, and most pre-Columbian pieces sell in the affordable range of $1,500 to $5,000. In addition, it's illegal to export pre-Columbian artifacts from their countries of origin, so con men can appeal to collectors' avarice by promising illegal treasures at bargain prices. Forgers south of the border use the same bait to snare American tourists. Says Fatma Turkkan-Wille, the director of pre-Columbian art at Sotheby's auction house, who sees a lot of tourist booty: ''Ninety-five percent of it is fake, no matter how much they paid for them or how plausible the story is.'' Many modern forgeries are mass-produced in Mexican factories and buried in barnyards for a month or two until they attain the patina and odor of an ancient artifact. Some are sculptured from clay and baked in kilns to dry, leaving them with burn marks that ancient pieces left to dry in the sun do not have. Scholars can spot some fakes because their details reveal the workings of modern man's mind. For example, Gillett Griffin, a lecturer on art history at Princeton University who has collected pre-Columbian art for more than 35 years, deemed a figurine a fake because of its pose: it was a modern boxer's stance. Unfortunately, scholarly advice is usually reserved for individuals who are likely to bequeath valuable objects to a museum or university. With fraud as prevalent as it is today, collectors are well advised to take the precautions in the box on page 78 and heed an often repeated cliche: buy art because you love it, not because you think it will rise in value. And remember John Kemmet, who paid more than $3,085 for what turned out to be a bogus Dali, an artist he doesn't even like. Says he: ''If I didn't have a little bit of larceny in my heart, I couldn't have been swindled.'' BOX: What to do before you buy -- Find out as much as you can about the market for the type of art you are acquiring. A catalogue that lists and sometimes pictures all of an artist's works, called the catalogue raisonne, is an invaluable reference. Museum libraries have the most complete collections of these guides. -- Buy from reputable dealers who will take back works that are proved fake. One sign of reputability is membership in a trade association with a strict code of conduct, such as the Art Dealers Association of America (575 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10022) or the National Antique & Art Dealers Association of America (15 E. 57th St., New York, N.Y. 10022). To check up on a dealer, write to those trade associations and ask other dealers, auctioneers, museum curators and the Better Business Bureau about them. -- If you are buying prints, expect dealers to give you information that sellers in eight states (Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New York and Oregon) are required by law to provide -- including the artist's name, how the print was made and signed, and its edition size. -- Don't buy art unless you are certain that there is a secondary market for it -- and that recent auction prices are in line with the price you have been quoted. A company called Telepraisal researches auction prices (800-645-6002, 516-747-8700 in New York). Cost: $30 if the search is fruitful, $15 if it isn't. Recent auction prices for prints are listed in Gordon's Print Price Annual (1000 Park Ave., New York, N.Y. 10028; $285), which is available in some large public libraries. -- If you fear you have a fake and need an expert opinion, write to the International Foundation for Art Research (46 E. 70th St., New York, N.Y. 10021) for information about its authentication service. The price depends on the individual piece and the artist's obscurity.