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Art galleries-ts and other art industry representatives have called for the creation of a national regulatory authority to crack down on counterfeit artworks in the market.
"In view of recent concerns regarding the trafficking of allegedly fake works by members of the art fraternity, it is high time a regulatory body was created for the regulation of the art industry," Ashish Anand, Director, Delhi Art Gallery said in a statement.
The statement comes in wake of a controversy surrounding an auction by Bangalore-based auction house Bid & Hammer, which has put up for sale a total of 86 works ranging between 8th century to the 20th century.
It comprises a large number of works by the Bengal art school, including from the estate of Nandlal Bose as well as works by M F Husain, Hemendranath Mazumdar, Jamini Roy, S H Raza, F N Souza and Tyeb Mehta.
The sale is part of events marking 100 years of enterprise of the Dadha group, which backs the auction house.
Art experts say the industry lacks regulatory bodies similar to SEBI, the Competition Tribunal, the Press Council, the Medical Council, and others, which "allow the pursuit of fair business practices that monitor the interests of the consumer within a framework that is just and fair."
Some art experts have alleged that the some of the art works in the auction are fake.
Experts at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, which possess the largest repository of works by Rabindranath Tagore have said that none of the three Tagore works, put up in the auction, are original.
"The original book cover of three dancing women was done in black and white by Tagore and is in the archives of Rabindra Bhawan in the university now. So how can anyone auction it? They are calling it 'Nritya' but Tagore never gave any name to it," Susobhan Adhikary, museum curator of Visva Bharati, told PTI.
He alleges that that someone must have taken a print of the original and coloured it with orange.
The drawing in pen and ink is part of a catalogue of Tagore paintings called 'Chitrabali', published to celebrate 150th birth anniversary of the bard.
"The other two are also fake," says Adhikary who has been researching, restoring and archiving Tagore's paintings for the last 25 years.
Eminent Tagore scholar and author R Sivakumar also agreed that there is doubt over authenticity of the artworks.
"They seem to be copies of the original. It needs to be scrutinised properly. Stylistically, none of them looks like Tagore works," said the professor who also teaches at the university.
