Tony Tetro

Anthony Gene Tetro (born 1950), known as Tony Tetro, is an art forger known for his perfectionism in copies of artwork produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Tetro never received formal art lessons, but learned from books, by painting and experimentation. Over three decades, Tetro forged works by Rembrandt, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí and Norman Rockwell and others. Tetro's paintings and lithographs, known for their perfectionism, were sold by art dealers and auction houses as legitimate works and hang in museums, galleries around the world. He was caught after Hiro Yamagata found a forgery of his own work for sale in a gallery.

In 1991, Gary Helton, an investigator for a California district attorney, described Tetro as "one of the two major [art] forgers in the United States." a house painter. As a young girl, Tetro's mother once watched Amelia Earhart land her plane in their family's pasture. His first trouble from his art came while at parochial school in Fulton, where he drew a picture of one of the nuns as a Vargas girl, but with a "pruney face" and wearing a habit. He learned about paper and canvas and experimented to find ways of producing craquelure, a characteristic of old paintings. One gallery owner in Venice, California called Tetro "a brilliant mind" and a "genius". Police found 250 forgeries during a search of Tetro's home in April 1989 and he was accused of conspiring with art dealer Mark Henry Sawicki to defraud four other art dealers by selling them forgeries. Gary Helton, an investigator for the district attorney's office, called Tetro "one of the two major [art] forgers in the United States."

Tetro sought to portray himself not as an art forger, but as an "emulator" who copied works, but did not intend to sell them as originals. In order to convict, jurors had to be convinced of Tetro's intent to commit fraud. Part of his sentence included 200 hours of community service in which he was ordered to paint a mural on a public building. On December 17, 1991, he was featured in an episode of Nova, called "The Fine Art of Faking It".

In 2024 Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the World’s Greatest Art Forger by Tony Tetro and Giampiero Ambrosi won the Listen Award from the American Library Association.

Present Tetro currently produces copies and pastiches for private clients. He continues to use the techniques he used in producing forgeries, but is required by a court order to sign all of his works.

The publicity stunt caused controversy. Although Art Series Hotel chief executive Will Deague claimed the Warhol Foundation had endorsed the competition as long as there was no use of any images on advertising material, the Foundation has been quoted as "being appalled to learn that a hotel would think it wise to commission forgeries in an attempt to market its services." Associate Professor Robyn Sloggett, director of the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation at the University of Melbourne and an art authentication expert, withdrew from a panel to promote the competition, which included Tetro, art dealer John Buckley and writer Linda Jaivin, when she learnt about the commissioned fakes.

In November 2019, it was reported that four of the seventeen paintings that were loaned to Dumfries House by James Stunt were not works by Picasso, Dalí, Monet, and Chagall, but in fact were fakes that had been painted by Tetro. The paintings were later removed from display.

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