Were masterpieces worth £100m really found under a pensioner’s bed?

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.

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 $85m (£63m) in 2018.

But during a house move in 2023, three unknown Malevich paintings were discovered under the mattress of Israeli pensioner Eva Levando, according to Yaniv Cohen, a Bucharest-based Israeli businessman and owner of the works.

The pensioner is the grandmother of Mr 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 Mr Cohen’s dental clinic.

Yet the art world remains sceptical. 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.

Eva Levando inherited the paintings from her father, an accountant in Odesa in Soviet Ukraine. He allegedly bought one of them and received the other two as payment for his services. The absence of records to support this story is explained by Stalin-era repression of modernist art, Mr Cohen told the BBC.

Ms Levando emigrated to Israel in 1990, taking the works with her, according to Mr Cohen.

“There is no evidence of Malevich’s works circulating in the Russian or Ukrainian art markets of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Malevich’s own records mention no private sales after 1917,” said Konstantin Akinsha.

But to bolster his claim, Yaniv Cohen presented certificates from Kyiv art historian Dmytro Horbachov describing the works as “first-class examples” of Malevich’s style. He makes this conclusion by analysing the style and technique of the paintings. But Dmytro Horbachov has previously authenticated disputed works, including one painting reportedly removed from Vienna’s Albertina Museum after doubts over its authenticity.

The art historian claims to be a consultant to Sotheby’s and Christie’s. But he “does not work, and never has, for Sotheby’s as a consultant”, a spokesperson told the BBC. Christie’s also denies any formal association.

Dmytro Horbachov did not respond to an interview request.

Yaniv Cohen says technical analysis supports his claim.

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.

Previously, reports from these two laboratories accompanied two paintings proven to be forgeries in a BBC documentary, The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection. When presented with our findings, Erhard Jägers told the BBC that technical analysis could not prove authenticity of a painting.

The French laboratory said the reports it produces “are not proof of authenticity” and that it has never issued an authenticity certificate for Malevich works.

Yaniv Cohen insists he has no interest in selling the paintings, despite Dmytro Horbachov, who thinks the paintings are authentic, estimating they could be worth $160m-190m (£118-140m).

However, emails seen by the BBC indicated they were offered as collateral for a loan. The businessman denied connection to this offer, saying he had no plans to monetise the paintings and that he was financially secure thanks to cryptocurrency investments.

Unhappy with the BBC’s questions, Mr Cohen threatened to “make [BBC journalists] disappear” and claimed he could hack their communications.

After Konstantin Akinsha questioned the paintings’ provenance, Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) distanced itself from the paintings.

In a statement, MNAC called the exhibition “a curatorial experiment” and added that it did not have “expertise in authenticating these particular works”.

The museum said it relied on the documents provided by Mr Cohen and that the inclusion of his paintings in its exhibition “should not be interpreted as institutional validation of their authorship or authenticity”.

Konstantin Akinsha said publicly known cases of disputed works by Malevich and other artists of the period were only “the tip of the iceberg,” adding that “thousands of questionable works continue to circulate today”.

The market for Russian and Ukrainian modernist art was full of works that “are obviously problematic”, Reto Barmettler, a consultant on Russian paintings with Sotheby’s, told the BBC.

“Good avant-garde paintings don’t come out of nowhere – they are of obvious quality, come with documented provenance and, ideally, an exhibition history,” he explained.

He did not comment on the three works owned by Yaniv Cohen.