Three previously unknown oil paintings attributed to avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich are on show at a public museum in Bucharest. If proven authentic, they could be worth over £100 million, but a top scholar says the story behind their origin is problematic.
Now the museum exhibiting them is refusing to say whether the works are genuine, according to BBC.
Ukraine-born Kazimir Malevich is considered one of the most influential 20th-Century artists. On the art market, his paintings are worth more than any other Ukrainian or Russian artist, with one work selling for a record $85 million (£63 million) in 2018.
But during a house move in 2023, three unknown Malevich paintings were discovered under the mattress of pensioner Eva Levando, according to Yaniv Cohen, a Bucharest-based businessman and owner of the works.
The pensioner is the grandmother of Cohen's wife, and she had given him the works.
The paintings are titled Suprematist Composition with Green and Black Rectangle (1918), Cubofuturist Composition (1912–13), and Suprematist Composition with Red Square and Green Triangle (1915–16), and they are being exhibited at Romania's National Museum of Contemporary Art until the end of August. The show is sponsored by Cohen's dental clinic.
Yet the art world remains skeptical. Konstantin Akinsha, a Ukrainian-American scholar, told the BBC that the records proving their history and tracing them to Malevich's studio were incomplete.
“The three works now exhibited in Bucharest were not documented, photographed, or shown during the artist's lifetime,” said the art historian and curator, who co-authored the American Association of Museums guide to provenance research.
The BBC reviewed reports on all three works produced by the Institut d'Art Conservation et Couleur in Paris, and by the German laboratory of Elisabeth Jägers and Erhard Jägers.
While dating pigments and other elements to Malevich's lifetime, the reports stop short of claiming the works were painted by the artist.
