HN: French court tests authenticity of Chagall work in ČR

Prague, Feb 5 (CTK) - A court in Paris is examining the authenticity of Winter Night, a Marc Chagall painting that has been in Prague for over 50 years but has been unknown until recently, daily Hospodarske noviny writes Friday, adding that French experts say the work is a fake and must be destroyed.

The experts say an identical painting was sold at a London auction in the 1990s.

The Czech police want to gather the two works in order to compare them and enable experts to determine which one is the genuine original.

Chagall painted Winter Night in the late 1920s. It was bought by Czech painter Vladimir Sychra and kept by Sychra's widow after his death in the 1960s.

In 1987, historian of art Jan Dvorak and Czech emigrant Milan Haidenreich tried to persuade Ms Sychrova to sell the painting. She refused to, but enabled them to take photos of it, Hospodarske noviny writes.

Dvorak today says he photographed the painting but Heidenreich took the negative away from him.

According to Emil Celeda, a former detective, Heidenreich had a copy made according to the photographs in Germany.

Celeda says it is not clear whether Heidenreich exchanged the copy for the original in Sychrova's home or whether he kept the copy. In any case he brought the painting to Paris in 1991 and gained a certificate of its authenticity from a local association of experts.

Shortly afterwards he put the painting up for auction where it was sold for an equivalent to 20 million of [then Czechoslovak] crowns.

Celeda said forgeries in the case of paintings such as Winter Night are extremely hard to uncover as the paints are diluted with water and their age thus cannot be determined.

Ms Sychrova died meanwhile and the painting went to her heirs. After learning about the Chagall auctioned in London, they had the Prague work examined by experts, who confirmed its authenticity, Hospodarske noviny writes.

A Czech collector bought the painting from the heirs and had it examined by experts in Paris in 2003. They said it was a fake, as old as the original.

The French then seized the Prague painting and said it must be destroyed. Its Czech owner, however, did not give his consent to this and the case ended up at a Paris court.

The owner has lodged a criminal complaint in the Czech Republic in a hope that the Czech police will prove his painting's authenticity.

The Czech police are trying to detect the other painting's whereabouts. The French judges are waiting for the outcome of the Czech investigations, the paper writes.