A Fake Hangs Above a Milan Coat Rack and Outsold the Real One Twice
Gustavo Pellegrini's copy of a 1934 stairwell painting has sold for more than the original, two times running. Adaeze Nwosu-Prior reports from the hallway, and from her own old list.
The hallway is 1.2 metres wide and smells of floor wax. Above a coat rack, in an apartment off Via Savona, hangs Lemon Sellers on the Back Stairs, oil on board, 1934, by Marta Veltri. It is not by Marta Veltri.
Gustavo Pellegrini painted it in eleven weeks in a rented garage in Lambrate. It sold in April for 212,000 euros. It sold again in September for 340,000. The real one fetched 190,000 in 2019 and has not been seen in public since.
In 2021 I wrote that forgery was a dead trade. Pigment databases, X-ray, buyers with lawyers. I gave it five years. It was number 4 on a list called Things We Are Done With. Number 3 was the colour orange. Look at the wall behind the coat rack.
Pellegrini was convicted for an earlier copy, and the court was right to be annoyed. The second copy is the one people queue for. The owner lets visitors in on Thursdays and asks them to hold their bags at chest height, because the hallway is narrow and the frame is heavy.
What gets me is the lemon on the third stair. Veltri's has a chip of paint missing, the size of a thumbnail, probably an accident. Pellegrini copied the accident. He copied it with more confidence than she had.
A buyer from Zurich told me this is what he is paying for. Not the painter's hand, he said, but the painter's bad day, done properly. I wrote that down and underlined it twice, which is how I used to mark things I was sure of.
Dead trade. I have moved forgery to the top of my list of things I got wrong. It is a crowded list. It has a coat rack.
