Brigido Lara

Who is Brigido Lara?

Brigido Lara is a Mexican artist and ex-forger of pre-Columbian antiques. He says he created maybe 40,000 pieces of forged pre-Columbian pottery.

Brigido Lara began to create forgeries in the 1950s and 1960s. He created many items in the style of the Mayans, Aztecs and especially the lesser-known Totonacs – in fact to such an extent that the majority of purported Totonac artifacts may actually be his work. He worked in a museum, where he was acquainted with both original artifacts and potential customers.

Lara sold his work as genuine Mexican antiquities; buyers did not ask many questions since they were buying contraband — taking antiquities out of Mexico is illegal. Some of the works were sold to the Morton D. May collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dated AD 400–700 and attributed to the Remojadas culture in Veracruz. In 1971, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History presented a large exhibition entitled "Ancient Art of Veracruz" – Lara later recognized many of the exhibits as his work.

In July 1974 Mexican police arrested a group of what looked like antique smugglers – Brigido Lara with them. An antiquities expert declared Lara's forgeries genuine.