'Driven to Abstraction': How a decades-long forgery scandal shut the doors of New York's oldest art gallery
Art forgery is perhaps one of the most interesting scandals that can come from the art world. While art collectors propagate themselves to be connoisseurs of the most famous artists whose works cost millions of dollars, forgers are able to replicate styles of these artists thereby raising the question of whether these collectors actually know what they claim to do so.
Perhaps one of the biggest art forgery scandals to break out over the last few years is that of the Knoedler Gallery which dominated headlines a decade ago when it was revealed that many paintings that were actually forgeries were sold from the gallery between two decades.
The Knoedler Art Gallery was one of the oldest in the United States and the oldest art gallery in New York. This gallery survived the Civil War, two World Wars, the Depression of the 1930s, the Great Recession of the 2000s and remained open on 9/11 as a symbol of resistance and resilience. However, in 2011, the gallery shuttered its doors, simply stating that it was closing permanently for business reasons rather than the lawsuits that had cropped up over forgery scandals.
Between 1994 and 2009, the business had sold millions of dollars worth of purported Abstract Expressionist masterpieces by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell.
While the person at the root of the forgery scandal was Ann Freedman, she had repeatedly claimed that she was a victim too. Freedman was hired by Michael A Hammer, the grandson of Armand Hammer who bought the gallery in 1971. If that name seems familiar, it is because 'Call Me by Your Name' actor Armie Hammer is named after Armand Hammer who was his great-grandfather. Michael considered Freedman to be his protege and the latter brought in an obscure Long Island gallerist named Glafira Rosales who represented a collection of undiscovered Abstract Expressionist works belonging to an anonymous "Mr X". Rosales was willing to sell the pieces to Knoedler at below-market prices.
In reality, the paintings obtained by Freedman from Rosales were in fact painted by a Chinese immigrant, Pei-Shen Qian, who could remarkably imitate the sought-after artists' styles. Qian had come to the United States in 1981 and struggled to earn from his own artwork. According to court papers, Qian was discovered selling his art on the streets of Lower Manhattan in the early 1990s by Rosales' boyfriend and business partner, an art dealer named Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, who recruited him to make paintings in the style of celebrated Abstract Expressionists.
Over a period of 15 years between 1994 and 2009, Qian worked out of his apartment in Queens, New York, and recreated at least 63 paintings by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and Richard Diebenkorn. While Rosales paid Qian for each of the paintings only in the thousands, she would sell these fakes to the Knoedler Art Gallery and a former Knoedler employee named Julian Weissman for millions of dollars.
The truth about the forgeries only began to come out after two concurrent cases had the Knoedler Art Gallery at its center. One centered on what was sold as a Robert Motherwell painting by Weissman. In 2007, the Dedalus Foundation — the organization authorized to authenticate Motherwell's artwork— wrote that the painting would be included in its upcoming edition. However, in 2009, it wrote back to say that the painting would not be included. The painting had been tested and found to contain materials not yet patented at the time the painting was purported to have been made.
The other case involved a painting attributed to Jackson Pollock that had been sold by Knoedler to hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange. When Lagrange found that no major auction house would accept the painting for sale, he filed a lawsuit against Knoedler in 2011, following which the gallery promptly closed. Forensic analysis of the piece found that paints used in it were not available until a few years after Pollock's death.
In 2012, the FBI got involved and in 2013, Rosales pleaded guilty to selling over 60 fake works of art to two New York art galleries, conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering, tax evasion and wire fraud. She spent three months in jail and in 2018, she was ordered to pay $81 million to the victims of the Knoedler art-fraud scheme.
Pei-Shen Qian was indicted but avoided prosecution by fleeing to China, where he maintains that he did not know his paintings were sold as being purported to be authentic. 'Driven to Abstraction' will be available on-demand on August 28.