Written by: Sara Radovic
Edited by: Keerthana Rao
"Art fraud is flourishing because art experts are increasingly unwilling to express authentication opinions due to the specter of expensive litigation."
- Justine Mitsuko Bonner
Michael Knoedler, a representative of the French engraving firm, Goupil & Cie, arrived in the States in 1846 to open an art dealership in New York City. Operating long before most art museums – notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Knoedler & Company successfully acquired a collection of valuable artworks and antiques that drew the attention of distinguished clients, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Walter P. Chrysler Jr., and William Rockefeller, thus establishing a rather prestigious and exceptional reputation. One could then imagine the shock art devotees – and members of New York society – must have felt when the gallery suddenly shut down in 2011, after one hundred sixty-five years of service, briefly announced to be “effective [on that] day…made after careful consideration over the course of an extended period of time,” as recorded verbatim by Patricia Cohen (2011) in the New York Times. The gallery’s statement did not provide any reasons for such a “business decision,” but the mere number of days after the closure would reveal the astonishing number of lawsuits filed against Knoedler & Co., as well as its gallery director, Ann Freedman, who had, in fact, quietly resigned from the position about two years prior, amid circulating rumors questioning the authenticity of artworks provided by the gallery.
Freedman was hired by Lawrence Rubin, one of Knoedler’s greatest directors, when she was just twenty-nine years old. She had, up to that time, worked as a receptionist for a rival art gallery, but she swiftly proved to be valuable to Knoedler, indisputable by the way it began to prosper following the brink of bankruptcy [resulting from the purchase of a townhouse at 19 East 70th Street and a lack of displayed contemporary art pieces that would have attracted customers]. M. H. Miller (2016) describes Freedman as a “natural salesperson,” and it would have been difficult not to discern such an identity in her, for she was enthusiastic about art, persuading clients and patrons to purchase specific pieces. She quickly earned the presidency position at Knoedler & Co., becoming its director in 1994.
Her employment at the gallery, however, commenced the demise it would succumb to for the remainder of its service due to an unanticipated visit from Glafira Rosales, an unknown art dealer from Long Island. Miller publishes a most shocking revelation: an $80 million art forgery ring had been conducted between 1994 and 2008 through Knoedler & Co. by Rosales and Freedman, allegedly with the help of Rosales’s boyfriend, Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, Diaz’s brother Jesus, and Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese immigrant who resided in Queens and created the actual forgeries. The gallery was issued a grand jury subpoena in 2009, but information regarding Rosales’s involvement in the duplicitous operation were not publicized until a few days after the closure.
Rosales often told Freedman contradictory stories of the paintings she brought to the gallery that, she claimed, were by some of the most admirable contemporary artists, particularly by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. Jennifer Smith (2016) reports that Rosales “had access to a trove of modern masterworks acquired by an anonymous collector dubbed ‘Mr. X,’ who had lived in Mexico and whose son and heir wished to sell the works discreetly.” Freedman insisted she knew nothing of the inauthenticity of the paintings Rosales gave to her, but such an assertion could not be plausible. Eileen Kinsella quotes Nicholas Gravante Jr. of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, Freedman’s attorney, in a 2012 article in ARTnews, adamantly referring to the “contemporaneous evidence” that served as proof of Freedman’s thorough investigation of Rosales’s supply of paintings, including consultations with experts who confirmed their authenticity. Said contemporaneous evidence, however, would have included forensic analyses disproving the authenticity of these works, so one can only wonder whether Freedman did undergo these investigations. Or was she instead successful in deceiving the most brilliant and astute of connoisseurs in the United States and Europe?
De Sole v. Knoedler Gallery, LLC is [perhaps] the most prolific case regarding Knoedler & Co., for it was the only one to reach a trial. Domenico De Sole, a former Gucci executive and chairman at Sotheby’s, and his wife, Eleanore, visited the gallery during a trip to Manhattan in November 2004, in pursuit of any works by abstract expressionist, Sean Scully, whom Knoedler had represented throughout his artistic career. They met with Freedman herself, who stated there were no Scully works available but that she had an authentic Rothko in her office momentarily. The couple chose to take the Untitled, 1956 piece, purchasing it for $8.3 million. As De Sole would testify twelve years later, he and Eleanore had “’no reason to believe someone was lying’ to them. After all, they were dealing with Knoedler – ‘the most trusted, oldest, most important gallery’” (Miller). The gallery’s illustrious reputation, unfortunately, proved to be the very element for manipulating purposes that would lead to the paradoxically impressive success of the art forgery ring that operated for fourteen years.
The publication of a second article by Cohen in the NYT about a month after Knoedler’s closing convinced De Sole of the possibility that his own Rothko piece was counterfeit. Cohen wrote of the London collector, Pierre Lagrange, who sued Knoedler and Freedman for selling a forged Untitled 1950 for an astounding seventeen million dollars, alleging it to have been painted by Pollock himself. A forensic analysis revealed that two of the paints used in the work had not been invented until after the artist’s death. De Sole subsequently filed a lawsuit in March 2012, asserting, as Kinsella records, that he was not given any documentation “establishing [the painting’s] provenance before arriving at Knoedler.” Kinsella (2019) also discloses forensic investigations conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice, revealing Untitled, 1956, as well as most of the works purportedly gifted to Knoedler by “Mr. X,” to have been created by Qian, subjecting them to “artificial aging techniques, including staining canvases with tea bags to make them appear older.” Most of the paints on these canvases had not been “commercially available at the time the artworks were supposedly created.”
Officials at Knoedler “’were insistent that this was not the case and that it was authentic’,” De Sole argued when he presented the findings of the report to them. He suggested they return his $8.3 million in exchange for the painting, professing that they could “’sell this authentic Rothko for more than twice as much, $18 million, or whatever, and [they] can make a huge profit.’” Their refusal to do so only substantiated that “’the Rothko was definitely a fake’” and that “’they knew for sure that it was a fake.’” The lawsuit resulted in a hastily organized settlement of $25 million bequeathed to the De Sole couple by Knoedler & Co. in February 2016.
In a subsequent 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal, Smith proclaims that the De Sole trial “cast a sometimes harsh light on the way business is conducted in the art world,” because “[b]uyers spend millions on works by a handful of in-demand artists, and deals are often shrouded in secrecy.” Miller himself attests the art market to be “notoriously opaque” as it is the “largest unregulated industry in the world, besides guns and drugs.” It is, unfortunately, too easy to deceive any involved individuals. Art business itself is not a mere retail exchange; deals may be conducted by any manner in any location – and the buyer will not always investigate the artwork for proof of its authenticity. An article for the New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law by law school alumni, Katie Dixon and Zachary Schufro (2021), claims that forgeries and counterfeit art are only too common in the market, which only results in the advocation for the verification of the authenticity on all artworks.
Barbara Pollack (2016) references Meridith Savona, an FBI Special Agent who has been investigating art crimes for the FBI’s New York office major-crimes unit since 2010, deciphering differences between the art world and the Mafia. She declares the art world to be changing for the better, as the likelihood of “handshake deals” and inimical confidentiality in the sale of paintings decreases. Despite the prevalence of forgers and counterfeit pieces, particularly in the Western art market, which may be attributed to the extension of artist patronage and accessible art “beyond the royal classes” to “middle class connoisseurs,” as duly noted by Dixon and Schufro, and the unmasking of forgery rings and large-scale scandals as the one Knoedler & Co. surrendered to, transparency in the art market is anticipated by art historians and experts – as well as Savona – to only enhance.
[The views expressed in this article are those of the author and the author alone; they do not necessarily represent the views of all members of the first RULR Editorial Board and Rutgers University.]
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