Suntory Museum in Osaka said Wednesday it will withdraw three oil paintings attributed to Marc Chagall from an upcoming exhibition due to concerns over their authenticity.
The paintings in question attributed to the Russian-born Jewish artist are "Portrait of a Woman" (1908), "Family" (1911-1912) and "Fiddler" (1917), all from the collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Russia.
Suntory Museum was to display the paintings in an exhibition titled "The Springtime of Russian Avant-Garde from the Collection of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art" from Sept. 25 to Nov. 3.
Suntory Museum decided to remove the pictures from the exhibition after the Chagall Committee, a Paris-based organization that holds the copyrights for the artist's work, raised questions about the authenticity of the paintings Monday and asked the museum to refrain from putting them on display, it said.
The Moscow Museum of Modern Art maintains that scholarly research has shown that the paintings are authentic, it said.
The paintings were displayed at an exhibition held earlier in Tokyo.