Van Gogh or No, Disputed Sketches Going on Tour : Art: Museums call them obvious fakes. But owner says he has authentication from the Paris police lab.

Even though they were rejected as fakes by the art Establishment, six drawings of well-known Arles landmarks are on display this month as authentic works of Vincent van Gogh.

Slightly yellowed by time, the charcoal and black chalk drawings depicting familiar landmarks in Arles surfaced three years ago in an antique shop outside that southern city and were bought for a song.

“They were on the floor, fanned out because the frame was too small,” recalled Francesco Plateroti, the Italian collector who purchased the drawings for 400 francs (about $80). “The signature, Vincent, wasn’t visible.”

Plateroti believes the drawings once decorated van Gogh’s room and surmises they vanished after the artist went into the hospital. He died in 1890.

“The drawings probably were put into a drawer, and forgotten when his room was cleaned out,” Plateroti said.

The art world thinks otherwise.

“Obvious fakes,” sniffed the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam when the story broke in 1992. For the Orsay Museum of 19th Century Art in Paris, the drawings were “childish.”

That did not deter Plateroti, who gave up his business dealings in real estate and tourism to work full time on proving that the drawings are the real McCoy.

He plunged himself into Van Gogh’s correspondence with brother Theo, and discovered dozens of references to the drawings--and to the faces of artists such as Gauguin and Petrach, which he camouflaged behind the bucolic scenes.

X-rays of “Le Chateau de Tarascon” and “Le Pont de Gleizes” reveal outlines of Van Gogh’s self-portraits worked into the drawings. Today, however, they are practically invisible to the naked eye.

Despite the skepticism and armed with a certificate of authenticity handed down by the Paris police laboratory, Plateroti plans to take his drawings on a worldwide, moneymaking tour.

He said he does not know how much the drawings are worth because they are not for sale. But he charges $10,000 for a two-week show.

“I have a police expertise authenticating the drawings,” he said. “Now it’s up to somebody else to prove they’re fakes. Perhaps we should ask the museums why they’re not interested in my research.”

The Van Gogh Museum told the Associated Press that it had not changed its position.

“We think that the drawings are not real, but Mr. Plateroti can do what he wants with them,” spokeswoman Rianne Norbart said in a telephone interview.

“Our experts were not convinced by his theories, but we are very interested in these drawings. We see fakes every day, and it’s important for our experts to see what’s going on out there,” Norbart said.

Police experts analyzed the paper on which the drawings were executed and the art materials used. They also scrutinized the subject matter and themes, the use of perspective and the artist’s technique.

The report concludes that there was “no anachronism between the materials, technique and subjects and their attribution to Vincent van Gogh.

“In fact, an ensemble of elements of this sort cannot be the result of chance and leads us to authenticate these drawings as by the hand of Vincent van Gogh,” the report says.

A spokeswoman for the Orsay Museum declined to comment.

Previously on display in Geneva and Cassis, the drawings--real or fake--opened at the Galerie Nesle, a Left Bank exhibition hall, on Sept. 16 and will run through Nov. 24.