New Delhi, May 27 -- When Wolfgang Beltracchi was finally apprehended in 2010, he had been fooling the art world for nearly four decades. The secret of his success was not in creating perfect replicas of existing works of art, but in convincing buyers that what they were purchasing was real.

Beltracchi was, first and foremost, a storyteller. Even before he painted the first stroke, he concocted elaborate narratives about the work he was about to create. He focused on artists with gaps in their catalogue to ensure that what he sold was all the more plausible and created artificially aged photographs to corroborate their provenance.

As a result, he could create (and sell) works of famous artists that he convinced his buyers were real. The...