Additional fakes land on the Spanish market

The curator and head of the department of Cuban Painting of the Museum of Fine Arts of Havana, Ramón Vázquez Díaz, challenged the authenticity of various paintings put up for auction by the Ansorena auction house 18 December last in defiance of Mr Vázquez Díaz and other specialists’ opinions. It seems that the opinion of Spanish restorers carried more weight with Ansorena, among them the person responsible for the restoration of the works in question. The owners did not want the exact provenance of these paintings to be revealed, and the catalogue only had a profile of the supposed artists, which could have come from any specialist textbook and, most importantly, in no way proved the authenticity of the works. This has taken place at the same time as the Spanish police have broken up a network importing contraband and fake art from Cuba and Latin America, which has resulted in several arrests.