True Copy

BERLIN fuses worlds and realities on stage in this fiercely praised play. One man struggles to hold his own amid a web of lies - or are they variations on the truth?

On May the 6th 1994 the gendarmes break into Geert Jan Jansen’s French country estate, where they find more than 1600 works by the likes of Picasso, Dali, Appel, Matisse and Hockney. Striking detail: most of them have actually been painted by the Dutchman. For more than twenty years, Jansen has managed to fool the art world, so convincingly so that Picasso and Appel themselves unwittingly provided certificates of authenticity for his creations. ‘I do not deceive, I relieve,’ he says about himself. ‘I reckon I’ve relieved them of a heap of work.’

A spelling mistake eventually lays bare Geert Jan Jansen’s illicit activity. The German police arrests him. To this day, museums worldwide are exhibiting works by Geert Jan which nobody would single out as forgeries. 

One of True Copy’s storylines briefly became a worldwide news story in November 2018 when a stolen Picasso suddenly resurfaced in a Romanian forest. Later it became clear that the drawing was a fake and was hidden in Romania by BERLIN. New York Times reported on the events.

In True Copy, BERLIN shows the internal cogwheels that keep this complex man ticking, as a manual for laying bare – amongst other things – the hypocrisy inside the art world. What does authenticity really mean?