Otto Wacker (1898–1970) was a German art dealer who became infamous for commissioning and selling forgeries of paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He had gained a good reputation in the 1920s after false starts in various other professions. Since the end of World War II, he lived in East Berlin. A study of his life and times has been written by Modris Eksteins.
Wacker's Case
Otto Wacker became an art dealer in 1925. He developed a reputation for reliability in the art field. The fraudulent Van Goghs were probably the work of his brother, the painter and restorer Leonhard Wacker. Otto's father, Hans, was also an artist.
Wacker managed to convince prominent Van Gogh experts Jacob Baart de la Faille, Hendrik P. Bremmer, Julius Meier-Graefe and that the paintings he was selling were genuine and they supplied certificates of authenticity without proof of provenance. These experts accepted his account that a Russian had bought the paintings, transferred them to Switzerland illegally, and had commissioned an illegal agent to sell them. They understood the need for this Russian to remain anonymous in order to prevent reprisals from relatives who still lived in the Soviet Union. Thannhauser, Matthiesen and Goldschmidt galleries bought some of the paintings.
Wacker's paintings were to be exhibited in January 1928 by the firm of Paul Cassirer in Berlin. It was organized to coincide with the publication of de la Faille's standard catalogue of Van Gogh's work. When Wacker delivered the last four paintings, and Walter Feilchenfeldt, the general managers of the exhibition, noticed the differences and recognized them as fakes. The canvases were returned to Wacker. Further investigation revealed 33 suspect paintings, all of them supplied by Wacker. Galleries that had sold his paintings asked their customers to return them. Hugo Perls, an art dealer and lawyer who had bought several paintings, still insisted that they were authentic. In December 1928 the Matthiesen gallery, with the aid of the Federation of German Art and Antique Dealers, sued Wacker.
De la Faille responded to the accusations by publishing a supplement to his catalogue in November 1928, which listed all the paintings supplied by Wacker as fakes.