Disputed Malevich Painting Tied to Disgraced Dealer Itzhak Zarug Presented as Genuine in Private ‘Exhibition’ at Centre Pompidou

A highly disputed painting attributed by some to Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich was presented as genuine this past January at a private event at France’s top modern and contemporary art museum, the Centre Pompidou.

Organized by the Paris-based business network Groupement du Patronat Francophone (GPF), the event was billed in promotional materials as an “exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Paris” celebrating Malevich. No such museum exists, though the Centre Pompidou is generally synonymous with the Musée national d’art moderne, in which it is housed.

A decade ago, the painting, titled Suprematism and supposedly dating to 1915, was embroiled in the investigation of Itzhak Zarug, an Israeli art dealer who was convicted in Germany of selling forgeries in 2018. In a recent email to ARTnews, Germany’s Federal Police (BKA) said that in 2014, after seizing the painting from Zarug, experts with the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, Russia’s top fine arts museum, “laid out several aspects of the painting clearly proving it to be a fake.” The work was subsequently listed on the Art Loss Register (ALR), the world’s largest database of lost and stolen art.

Co2Bit Technologies, a United States tech company that uses AI and blockchain technology to assess environmental impact and finance climate mitigation efforts across the globe is now disputing that assessment. Co2Bit lent Suprematism to the “exhibition” at the Pompidou after purchasing it in early January for a price in the “eight figures,” company chairman Ronald Wilkins told ARTnews.

Co2Bit spent a year on “due diligence” to confirm the painting’s authenticity prior to purchase, according to Wilkins, a process that he said involved hiring five independent experts to authenticate the artwork, before having it appraised in New York “by a separate company,” the name of which he declined to disclose. Neither did Wilkins disclose the names of the experts, instead describing them as two Russians, two US-based experts, and “the go-to authentication guy for the top three museums in the world.” He later added that two of the experts work regularly with Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

In addition, he said, Co2Bit hired several experts from the International Chamber of Russian Modernism (InCoRM), including president Patricia Railing, an art historian on the Russian avant-garde, to “verify the artwork.” Initially, Wilkins said that all the experts hired by Co2Bit certified Suprematism as a bona fide Malevich, addingthat InCoRM was “talking about putting it in” in a new edition of the artist’s catalogue raisonné. (A four-volume catalogue raisonné by the late art historian Andréi Nakov, who was once married to Railing, was published in 2002.)

However, Railing told ARTnews in an email that not only was InCoRM disbanded a decade ago, the organization never “authenticated works,” it only provided “art historical analysis.” She further added that she has never heard of Co2Bit or Wilkins, and they have never hired her either independently or through InCoRM. Railing said she had no knowledge of—nor role in—a new editio to the 2002 catalogue raisonné or a supplement to it. She further stated any reliance on her work to include a new painting in such a project was both “preposterous” and a “travesty of my work.”

When pressed to provide ARTnews with authentication certificates, Wilkins refused and said “scientific authentication” is available to a buyer. When asked about the finer details of InCoRM’s involvement during the last of three phone interviews, Wilkins backtracked.

“I don’t think we solicited InCoRM to authenticate the painting,” he said. “By that point in time we had [verification from] five very renowned and trusted people.”

When ARTnews followed up a final time before publication, Wilkins denied over WhatsApp ever hiring or contacting Railing directly and said Co2Bit did not hire any experts. Instead, he said, “We were told that experts (who were in some way associated with [InCoRM]) had previously been involved in the authentication of numerous works owned by Zarug, including ours.”

Suprematism Comes with a Checkered History

Suprematism’s recent provenance history is perhaps as intriguing as its disputed authorship.

The work was one of 1,778 paintings seized by German authorities in 2014 as part of an investigation into Zarug, who ran a gallery in the German city of Wiesbaden. An investigation and public trial ensued, ending in 2018, when the Wiesbaden Regional Court convicted Zarug and his business partner, German Tunisian national Moez Ben Hazaz, on charges of fraud using fake paintings, and attempted fraud in connection with the forgery of provenance documents. While the two men were cleared of the principal allegation of masterminding a counterfeiting ring, they were sentenced to 32 months and three years in prison, respectively, but were released with time served.

Only three artworks (attributed to Malevich and fellow Russian avant-garde heavyweights El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko) were used as evidence to convict Zarug and Ben Hazaz, and confiscated permanently. (Suprematism was not one of the three works.) While the remaining 1,775 paintings were returned, including Suprematism, the BKA told ARTnews “it cannot be emphasized enough that the handover of the painting to [Zarug] does not imply at all that the works of art were … found to be authentic.” At the time, German law, as the BKA noted, only prohibited the sale of forgeries, not possession of them.

Suprematism was one of 200 paintings that the BKA said it established as fakes through laboratory examination and the expertise of the Tretyakov, the Chagall Committee, the Picasso Museum Münster, and other institutions that specialized in the respective artists. In the Tretyakov’s 2014 assessment that Suprematism was not authentic, according to the BKA, experts said that the composition’s coloration was judged to be “completely different from [Malevich’s] originals” and that the signature on the back “is not from Malevich, it looks like a copy.” In addition, the BKA said it believed all 1,778 artworks originally seized were forgeries “due to the improper storage of the paintings (no special climatic conditions, few security devices, poorly packed)” and “incomprehensible provenances and expertise from dubious art historians.”

All 1,778 painting seized in 2014—including Suprematism and the 199 other works that the BKA allegedly established as fakes—were registered with the ALR in 2018, according to James Ratcliffe, ALR general counsel and director of recovery. Many of those paintings, including Suprematism, have resurfaced on the market since their return to Zarug.

Zarug’s previous counsel did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the determinations of the legal authorities, Wilkins has stood firm on the painting’s supposed authenticity and said Co2Bit’s goal is to sell the work at a profit to provide funds to “some of these very, very needy parts of the world where we try to make a difference.” When asked if a major auction house would take on such a disputed work, he said that he was “fairly confident” they would, but that the preference was for a private sale. The most expensive Malevich sold at auction to date is his Suprematist Composition (1916), which hammered for $85,812,500 at Christie’s New York in 2018.

Jo Vickery, director of Vickery Art Ltd and former international director of Russian art at Sotheby’s, told ARTnews that the major auction houses “check works with the ALR as a routine part of their due diligence” and added that “they will not sell any painting which is listed on the database.”

Wilkins went so far in an interview as to attack the credibility of the Tretyakov, pointing to a 2015 art smuggling investigation into the museum, though it’s not clear what, if anything, ever came of it. When ARTnews presented Wilkins with the BKA’s findings from the 2014 investigation, he seemed to relent.

“I desperately need a copy of that,” Wilkins said. “I’m going to send that off to our board and everybody involved – that’s critical because we were never presented that.”

Painting lent to Grand Salon event at Centre Pompidou ‘as a favor’

At the center of Suprematism’s return to the public eye is the January event at the Centre Pompidou.

That event was held in the Grand Salon, one of six event spaces available for rent at the Pompidou, and organized by GPF as a private event to “promote world peace,” according to the organization’s president Jean-Lou Blachier. When ARTnews asked Blachier about who financed the event, he said that Co2Bit’s Wilkins had, while Wilkins said it was GPF. Later, Blachier said it was a sponsor.

The nature of the event also seems to be in dispute. Blachier said that Wilkins had lent Suprematism merely to decorate the room and “illustrate the necessary need for peace.” As far as GPF was concerned, Blachier added, “It could have been another painting or another sculpture…” Meanwhile, Wilkins said that he lent the painting as a “favor” to Blachier, as GPF had helped facilitate the company’s largest contract, with China.

Press releases published by the New York PR firm Eminence Rise Media both before and after the event, including one published to the GPF website, described the event as an “exhibition” celebrating Malevich, hyped Suprematism as a genuine Malevich, and said it was “at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Paris.” The December release cites the “certification” of Railing and said it would be included in a “supplement” to Nakov’s catalogue raisonné, while a March release went so far as to state that the painting would be on the front cover of the Suprematist Catalog Raisonné to be published in 2025. It further said publication will feature artworks that were “looted and seized in the 1930s by the USSR government from dissident artists linked to Russian suprematism.”

Railing said she had never heard of Eminence Rise Media and that they “have no right whatsoever to quote me and my work – which again is an opinion and in no way a ‘certification.’” She added that she has no knowledge of or connection with the supposed 2025 Raisonné referenced in the press releases.

In that final press release, Eminence Rise Media claimed that Zarug “acquired almost all the works of art sold privately by the Russian government in 1994 and bought back all the works scattered in foreign collections, including a major work by Kazimir Malevich.”

Konstantin Akinsha, the founding director of the Avant-Garde Art Research Project, a UK-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting education about Russian avant-garde art, disputed the idea that the USSR or the Russian government confiscated many works from dissident artists and that nearly all of Malevich’s paintings “remained in the possession of his family.”

Eminence Rise Media declined to disclose to ARTnews who had hired them to publish the press releases and Wilkins denied hiring the PR firm. 

Meanwhile, Angela Lampe, curator of modern art at the Centre Pompidou, told ARTnews that she was not aware that Suprematism had been lauded asa genuine Malevich within the museum complex. The Centre Pompidou, for its part, said in a statement that it had no knowledge the painting was displayed there and that the event “was not an exhibition but a conference, which did not take place in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, but in an independent space privatized by the GPF.”

(In addition to the museum, the Pompidou complex houses screening rooms, a performance theater, a conference room, a public library, and the Kandinsky Library. The public generally uses the term Centre Pompidou to refer to the contemporary art museum in the complex.”)

“No authorization was given in this context to use the image, name, or brand of the Centre Pompidou or its components,” the Centre Pompidou said in a statement, adding that it has since contacted the GPF “to ask them to remove the misleading information published on its site about this event.”

At the time of publication, the aforementioned press release remains on the GPF website.

When ARTnews asked Wilkins directly if the painting had been “exhibited” at the Pompidou in a bid to boost its legitimacy, he refuted the idea. “We are not on trial and don’t need to state our case …” he wrote in a WhatsApp message, and declined to answer further questions.

Akinsha of AARP, meanwhile, said that such a move might be without precedent.

“Sneaking disputed paintings into exhibitions and[catalogues raisonnés to legitimize their provenances is nothing new, but … exhibiting a dubious artwork in a rented room in a major museum] without the institution’s permission might be unprecedented,” Akinsha said.