Otto Wacker

Who was Otto Wacker?

Otto Wacker was a German art dealer who became infamous for commissioning and selling forgeries of paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

Otto Wacker became an art dealer in 1925 after various false starts in other professions. 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.

Wacker managed to convince prominent Van Gogh experts Jacob Baart de la Faille, Hendrik P. Bremmer, Julius Meier-Graefe and Hans Rosenhagen that the paintings he was selling were genuine. The experts accepted his tall tale that a Russian had bought the paintings, transferred them to Switzerland illegally, and had commissioned an illegal agent to sell them. Experts understood the need for this Russian to remain anonymous in order to prevent reprisals from relatives who still lived in Soviet Union and supplied certificates of authenticity without proof of provenance. Thannhauser, Matthiesen and Goldschmidt galleries bought some of the paintings.

Wacker's paintings were to be exhibited in January 1928 in Cassirer Exhibition 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, Grete Ring and Walter Feilchenfeldt, the general managers of the exhibition, noticed the differences and recognized them as fakes. The canvases were returned to Wacker.