Not funny! A painting Steve Martin bought for $850,000 is fake

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A painting Steve Martin bought in Paris in 2004 for $850,000 has proven to be a fake.

Get Inspector Clouseau on the case!

Hollywood funnyman and art collector Steve Martin has turned up in the middle of an art-forgery scandal in Germany after a painting he bought turned out to be bogus.

German investigators say a 1915 work Martin bought for $850,000 in Paris in 2004 was one of many forgeries created by a gang of German swindlers, Der Spiegel reported.

Martin - who resurrected the role of famed French detective Inspector Clouseau in a 2006 remake of the "Pink Panther" that bombed - tried to sell the painting 15 months later.

He ultimately auctioned off the work - purportedly by German-Dutch modernist painter Heinrich Campendonk - in 2006 at Christie's in London at a loss of nearly $300,000.

Martin is not accused of any wrongdoing. He told The New York Times that he didn't know he had a bogus painting until well after it was sold.

"You always have to guard against it," he said. "The fakers were quite clever in that they gave it a long provenance and they faked labels, and it came out of a collection that mingled legitimate pictures with faked pictures."

"Of course, they're all in jail now," he added.

Investigators busted the gang in 2010.

The expert forgerers are believed to have created dozens of bogus paintings - including Campendonk's "Landschaft mit Pferden," or "Landscape with Horses" that Martin bought.

They flooded European markets with the ersatz paintings and allegedly scooped up nearly $50 million in the scam dating back to 2001, authorities said.

Source: http://feeds.nydailynews.com/~r/nydnrss/gossip/~3/OSOsmBJyuxQ/2011-05-31_steve_martin_caught_in_art_scandal_comedian_unknowingly_bought_fake_painting_in_.html

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