1,500 Prints in Art Fraud Probe Called Authentic : Appraisal: However, sources say the numbers, supplied by the Beverly Hills gallery, may be misleading. The police inquiry is continuing.

More than 1,500 of the expensive prints that art-forgery investigators seized in a raid of an Upstairs Gallery store in Beverly Hills have been deemed authentic by experts hired by the art chain, an attorney for the gallery said Wednesday.

But Los Angeles police and district attorney’s officials said their investigation into possible criminal art fraud by the gallery continues.

“We feel that we have a criminal investigation and that there have been numerous forgeries found” among the prints seized by federal and local authorities in a raid of the Rodeo Drive gallery last September, Police Detective William Martin said. “Nobody has been charged, but it is still under investigation.”

Police and district attorney’s officials declined to comment on the gallery’s figures, which show that 1,506 of the 1,648 confiscated works were judged to be authentic by nationally renowned art experts Howard Russeck, Martin Gordon and Bernard Ewell.

However, sources close to the probe warned that the gallery’s numbers could be misleading, because the 1,506 works that the gallery said were authentic actually are copies of a handful of prints.

Most of the remaining 142 artworks, the sources said, may be forgeries.

“If one were holding 1,500 images, 1,400 of which were the same image, by the same artist and found to be legitimate,” said one source, who asked not to be identified, “that--contrasted with an additional 100 prints of different images, by different artists and a high percentage of which were fake--would mean (the gallery’s figures) were misleading. The gallery should give a breakdown by artist. That would be more accurate.”

Upstairs Gallery lawyer E. Timothy Applegate declined to say which of the confiscated prints--which investigators charged had been falsely credited to the late Salvador Dali, Marc Chagall and Joan Miro--were judged to be fakes.

“The investigators gave the raw figures. So did we,” Applegate said. “I think that releasing the breakdown (by artists) would be misleading.”

Applegate said he expects the authentic works to be returned to the Upstairs Gallery soon.

The gallery hired Russeck, Ewell and Gordon to examine the prints shortly after the raid, Applegate said.

“We hired them at considerable cost to us,” the attorney said. “We selected them not only for their stature but for their acceptability to the authorities.”

Applegate said Gordon and Ewell are frequent witnesses in federal cases involving the authenticity of Dali and Chagall works. Russeck is regarded as a leading appraiser of Miro. None of the art appraisers returned telephone calls from The Times on Wednesday.

“Our business and our reputation suffered” after the raid, Applegate said. “It is our hope that (the results of the examination) further improve our reputation. I think in the long run, this may be positive. There was a problem; we were not aware of it. We did the right thing.”

The gallery has been beset by other problems in the last several months.

In October, prosecutors leveled a five-count grand theft charge against Lee Sonnier, the former manager of the gallery, accusing him of failing to deliver four pieces of art sold for about $872,000. Court documents allege that Sonnier and Manhattan Beach art broker Frank de Marigny, who was arrested in September, “conspired to sell and distribute fraudulent artworks.”