Counterfeiting Museum

The Vienna Counterfeiting Museum is a private museum for art forgeries located on Landstrasse, Löwengasse 28 in Vienna’s third district. It opened in 2005 and is the only museum of its sort in German-speaking Europe.

Works on displays include works by Han van Meegeren, a well-known Vermeer forger, and Tom Keating, a London restorer who bragged of having faked over 2000 works by over a hundred painters and who purposefully put “time bombs” and anachronisms into his images.Work by the forger of the Hitler diaries, Konrad Kujau, is also on show, as are pieces by David Stein, Edgar Mrugalla, Elmyr de Hory, Eric Hebborn, and Lothar Malskat.The museum chronicles the history of the most renowned forgeries, as well as the often tragic ends of their writers.