Konstantin Akinsha, a top curator and art historian of Russian and Ukrainian art, said he believes 14 artworks attributed to Russian and Ukrainian modernists in the collection of the Palazzo de Nordis, a museum in the northern Italian town of Cividale del Friuli, are not authentic.

In a Substack post published in late September, Akinsha analyzed the De Martiis Collection, a cache of 64 modern and contemporary works donated to the palazzo in 2015 by the late local collector Giancarlo De Martiis. The collection includes works by significant Italian modernist artists, including Mario Sironi, Afro Basaldella, and Giuseppe Santomaso, as well as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Boudin, and Graham Sutherland. But it is 14 works attributed to several Russian and Ukrainian modernist painters that have drawn Akinsha’s scrutiny.

In a recent interview with ARTnews, Akinsha—who has previously covered fakes and forgeries in the Russian art market for this publication—said that the attributions and provenances listed for those works “raise serious suspicions.” In both the interview and his Substack post, Akinsha noted that the collection’s online catalogue lists Jean Chauvelin in the provenance of many of the works. Chauvelin, who died in January, was a French art dealer and self-proclaimed Russian art expert