Introduction

Over the past twenty years, paintings from a private collection of Russian and Ukrainian modern art have been sold to museums and private collectors around the world. Paintings were sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Zaks collection, as it’s known. It was said to include over 200 oil paintings of some of the most treasured Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde artists, including those by El Lissitzky, Exter, Goncharova and Popova, putting it among the largest in the world. This has caught the eye of three art detectives and the BBC’s Grigor Atanesian follows them, along with forensic experts, to discover more about the collection, what’s been happening and if the paintings are real or worthless fakes.