Today we’re telling you the story of the Knoedler art forgery scandal. In November 2011, the world renowned Knoedler art gallery announced it would be permanently closing after 165 years in business. The New York City institution made no real mention of why they were shutting the doors, only referencing vague “business reasons.” But behind the scenes, things were stormy, scandalous, and criminal.
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Knoedler & Co. started life in 1846 as the US branch of the French art dealers Goupil & Cie in New York City. German-born Michel (AKA Michael) Knoedler began working at Goupil & Cie in Paris in 1844 and moved to New York in 1852 to run the New York branch. He purchased the shop in 1857 and changed the name to M. Knoedler & Co. This was so early on in the days of art collecting, that the shop wasn’t even known as an art “gallery” and instead sold frames, art supplies, prints, and engravings. And those last two are what Knoedler was particularly interested in. He had a particular interest in American art and sold engravings of now famous paintings. One was a full-sized engraving of the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze which Knoedler sold at $20 per copy. And that $20 today would be $599 today.
By 1859, the shop moved uptown from it’s Broadway & Duane Street location to Broadway and 10th Street. The gallery became popular with the incredibly wealthy members of American society who had new money burning a hole in their 19th century pockets. Huge names like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and John Jacob Astor became obsessed with buying paintings from Knoedler, especially works by the old masters. And at this time, Knoedler wasn’t just at the heart of the New York art scene, it was the entire New York art scene. In fact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art didn’t open until 1872. And when the museum did open, it acquired paintings from Knoedler, as did the Louvre, and the Tate Gallery.
The gallery continued to top the commercial art world for generations and became known for promoting contemporary art. They sold works by impressionists Degas, Manet, John Singer Sargent, and William Merritt Chase. By the early 1970s the gallery began to struggle and was sold to industrialist and collector Armand Hammer for just $2.5 million. After this sale, the gallery mostly focused on contemporary art. Artists like Frank Stella and Richard Diebenkorn became closely involved with the gallery after being brought in by Director Lawrence Rubin during the late 1970s. And it was during Rubin’s reign that a young and ambitious assistant began working at the gallery. Her name was Ann Freedman.
Freedman held a BFA in painting from Washington University in St. Louis and started working at Knoedler in 1977. She quickly became known as the gallery’s best salesperson. In a Vanity Fair article about Knoedler’s downfall, one former colleague said: “Once the client was in her office/showroom, there was no getting out [without buying a painting].” Freedman worked her way up to director of Knoedler by 1994. And it was at some point after Freedman became director that Glafira Rosales walked into Knoedler. Her arrival would change Knoeler’s path forever.
Glafira Rosales had been introduced to Freedman by a mutual friend. And Rosales had some art that she wanted to show Freedman. She came into the gallery with a work by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko on paper. And after consulting some experts Freedman was convinced the painting was authentic. But even she had to admit that the story behind the painting’s origin was a bit strange. Rosales said the painting was part of the collection by a man named Mr. X Jr. He wished to remain anonymous, but according to Rosales that man’s Phillipino parents had known Alfonso Ossorio, an Abstract Expressionist painter who was at the centre of the art scene. Ossorio apparently brought Mr X Jr’s parents into artists’ studios where they purchased paintings directly from the artists. These paintings stayed in storage until Mr. X Jr. inherited them and then decided to sell.
So one by one, a few times a year, that’s what Freedman did. Rosales would bring in a painting and hand it over to Knoedler to sell. The two women agreed on a flat-rate price for each painting and once that was met, Knoedler could keep any profit above that amount. This arrangement proved to be incredibly lucrative for the gallery. Despite constantly asking to meet Mr. X Jr, Freedman never got to meet her new favourite collector. Rosales always said: “Not now.”
Freedman would take every new painting that she got from Rosales and put it on display for other art dealers to see at the annual Art Dealers Association of America show at the Park Avenue Armory. She told Vanity Fair that using these moments at the ADAA shows helped convince her that the paintings were legitimate. Freedman insisted that her learned colleagues would have told her if something was wrong with the paintings. For their part, her colleagues told Vanity Fair that they certainly would not have said anything. He said that the paintings from Mr. X Jr’s collection always seemed not quite wrong, often too perfect or too symmetrical. He said: “The pros don’t say anything—they just turn their backs.” And often they would look up the paintings in each artist’s catalog raisonné (a list of an artist’s known, authenticated works) and wouldn’t find any trace of them. Freedman simply took their silence as acceptance.
By 2001, Freedman and Rosales had quite the working relationship. Rosales brought in a Jackson Pollock called Untitled 1949. Freedman found an interested buyer in Jack Levy, Goldman Sachs’s co-chair of mergers and acquisitions. Levy was interested in the Pollock but was worried when Freedman told him it wasn’t listed in the artist’s catalogue raisonné and that the provenance was fuzzy. So Levy struck a deal with Freedman. He would pay $2 million for the painting but it needed to be authenticated and examined by the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR).
After examining the painting, IFAR specialists’ response was the first in a major blow to Knoedler: they could not confirm the painting was done by Pollock. They said: “Despite extensive research, we could not substantiate any of the limited provenance provided.”
As such, Levy returned the painting to Knoedler and got a refund for the whole $2 million.
After this incident, Rosales started to change her story. IFAR had issues with Rosales’s claims that Mr. X Sr would have gotten these paintings through Alfonso Ossorio. Though Ossorio had passed away in 1990, his partner, Ted Dragon, was still alive. And when questioned by IFAR, Dragon insisted that he would have known about any back-door dealings by Ossorio.
So to skirt this issue, Rosales “remembered” some more info about the paintings’ acquisitions. Turns out, Mr. X Sr was actually gay and closeted. And Rosales remembered that she had gotten the major player wrong. It wasn’t Ossorio who had introduced Mr. X to artists, it was a gallery assistant named David Herbert, who ran in the same gay art-world circles as Ossorio and Dragon.
So the new story goes: Mr. X Sr was married with children and began a gay affair with David Herbert. Herbert then brought Mr. X to artists’ studios where he bought a bunch of paintings under the table. But when the relationship ended Mr. X left the gay art-scene behind and returned to his family (who were apparently in Switzerland) with all his new paintings. Supposedly Mr. X Sr couldn’t sell the paintings while Herbert was still alive because Herbert would have gotten angry and outed Mr. X as the original buyer. And this of course would both out Mr. X as gay as well as expose him to legal issues regarding taxes, export duties, undeclared assets and all that fun stuff. So the paintings stayed hidden, even after Mr. X died. It wasn’t until David Herbert died in 1995 that Mr. X Jr started seeking buyers for the artwork.
Art world figures who knew Herbert during the 50s find this story a bit incredible in every sense of the word. While Herbert certainly did work at some very influential galleries, those galleries always kept detailed records of their inventory. And many believe that even if artists sold their works for cash at their studios, they’d still keep a record that the painting existed to begin with. But these paintings that Rosales was bringing into Knoedler had no records at all.
And, apparently, Freedman was not bothered by the lack of records and the changing stories that Rosales presented. She didn’t really know anything at all about Glafira Rosales. So despite Freedman’s lack of curiosity, we’ll fill you in on the details about Rosales and what brought her to Knoedler with a stack of undiscovered masterpieces.
Glarifa Rosales and her boyfriend José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz each had some experience in the art world, but neither were major players. Rosales worked for many years as an art dealer in Great Neck, Long Island. Bergantiños had a commercial space on West 19th Street in Manhattan called King Fine Arts where he sold art supplies and materials. The shop also occasionally operated as a gallery. Bergañtinos also worked as an art dealer dating back to 1990 when he sold a Basquiat painting at Christie’s auction house. But he also earned a negative reputation when he put in a winning bid on a 19th-century Spanish painting with Christie’s but never picked it up or paid for it. In response Christie’s sued him.
Still despite all this, Freedman wasn’t worried. She said she felt no need to investigate the people bringing her these paintings. Instead, she was more interested in getting the paintings verified (though based on her efforts, seems like she wasn’t all that interested in that either.)
After the debacle with the Pollock and IFAR, you’d think Freedman would be more cautious, but that didn’t happen. Rosales had brought in seven paintings supposedly by Richard Diebenkorn. The paintings were supposedly part of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series. The late artist’s son-in-law, Richard Grant, was aware of these suspicious paintings as early as 1995. And Diebenkorn’s wife and daughter met with Freedman at Knoedler to tell her there were no records of any of the paintings. Despite all this, Freedman sold them. She even sold one to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Grant contacted Freedman first about the painting but she wasn’t interested in his concerns. He then contacted the Kemper to tell them they could have a fake hanging on their wall. The painting was “quietly retired” and Freedman sent another Ocean Park painting with clear provenance to the museum, this one was from her own personal collection.
And about that personal collection. Freedman and her husband Robert bought three paintings from Rosales for their personal collection. They purchased a painting by Robert Motherwell, one by Pollock and one by Rothko. And she paid way way below market value. The most striking example of this is the $20,000 she paid for the Motherwell painting at a time when a similar Motherwell painting sold for $1 million.
And then, in 2007, Freedman sold a silvery Jackson Pollock, known as Untitled 1950, to Pierre Lagrange, a London-based hedge-fund manager. Lagrange paid $17 million for the painting. Lagrange bought the painting through New York art dealer, Jaime Frankfurt. Frankfurt told Vanity Fair that Freedman insisted the Pollock was being added to the artist’s catalogue raisonné. Freedman, of course, denied this. But she did give Frankfurt and Lagrange a list of 12 art scholars who she said had “viewed” the painting, who could supposedly vouch for its authenticity.
This was a bold move because the 12 people on that list had never examined the painting, nevermind declared it authentic. They may have seen it in passing while visiting Knoedler, but were never asked to examine it. Many had no idea that their name had been on the list until they got a call from the FBI.
Things just kept falling apart from there. In 2009, the FBI had issued a series of subpoenas to Freedman and others involved in the sales of these paintings from what had become known as the “David Herbert” collection. And on October 16th of 2009, Freedman was forced out of the gallery.
In 2010 Pierre Lagrange tried to sell his new Pollock at Sotheby’s auction house. But Sotheby’s didn’t want it. He and Frankfurt frantically called Freedman asking about the updated catalogue rasionné. Freedman had no answers. And then Lagrange had the painting forensically tested. The results were amazing: the painting contained a yellow pigment that was invented in 1970. Which really is remarkable because Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956.
In 2011, Freedman offered to meet Lagrange for a drink while he was in New York. At the meeting, Lagrange demanded his money back. Freedman wanted to negotiate. She offered to find another buyer for the painting. Which Largane balked at. He told her he wasn’t interested in simply off-loading a fake painting onto another unsuspecting buyer. Instead he gave her an ultimatum, refund his money or he would sue Knoedler and Freedman.
In response, Knoedler simply shut its doors forever. Of course, supposedly not at all related to the lawsuit and ever-looming scandal. Definitely just closed up shop after 165 years for “business reasons”. Knoedler did agree to refund Lagrange’s money. But there was a problem: Knoedler only owned a half stake in the painting. And the owner of the other half had no interest in returning his half of the likely immense profit he made on the deal. With Knoedler’s closing, the details of the scandal began to spill out into the press.
And with these revelations, other customers began to realise their paintings might be fake. Eleanore and Domenico De Sole visited Knoedler in 2004 and purchased a Rothko painting for $8.3 million. They saw the news that Knoedler had sold fakes and were immediately concerned about the authenticity of their Rothko. They had the painting forensically tested by analyst James Martin. Martin’s report came back saying that the Rothko was fake. They approached Knoedler and asked for their money back, and when Knoedler refused, the De Soles filed a $25 million lawsuit against the gallery and everyone involved.
The De Sole lawsuit was just one of many that popped up over the years. The De Sole suit was the only one to make it to trial in Manhattan’s Southern District Court in early 2016. The trial included dramatic testimony from a number of experts and emotional testimony from the De Soles themselves. But just as Michael Hammer and Ann Freedman were about to take the stand, the trial was sent to recess. The lawsuit was ultimately settled out of court. Ann Freedman now owns and runs FreedmanArt, another gallery in New York City.
Glafira Rosales admitted in 2013 that all of the works she brought into Knoedler were fake. She pled guilty to various charges including conspiracy, tax evasion and wire fraud. Because, oh by the way, when money changed hands for all these fake paintings Freedman paid Rosales in a combination of wire transfers, checks, and cash transactions coming in conveniently under the $10,000 limit for federal bank reporting. She reportedly cooperated with federal investigators. Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz and his brother Jesus were arrested in Spain in 2014. They had left the US in hopes of avoiding extradition. Jesus was extradited but the Spanish courts determined that Jose was not fit for extradition due to health concerns.
But what about the missing piece of this story? How did Rosales come up with all these fake masterpieces? Did she have a ring of forgers at her disposal, each specialising in an abstract expresionist’s style? Turns out, she had just one.
All of the Knoedler forgeries were painted by the same man. The now 80-year-old Chinese-born, retired math professor, Pie-Shen Qian. And they were all painted in a garage in Queens. Qian had been a successful artist in his native China, but after moving to the US in 1981 he struggled to find a foothold in the art world. Qian used to paint outside on street corners in Manhattan which is where he was discovered in the late 80s by Jose Carlos Bergañtinos. Bergañtinos saw Qian’s talent as a useful tool, and commissioned him to copy countless artists’ styles and their signatures. Qian would paint with the supplies given to him by Bergañtinos including old canvases bought at flea markets or newer ones stained with tea and old paints.
Qian, for his part, has maintained innocence, or rather ignorance. He told the media that he never knew his copies were being sold as the real thing, he simply thought he was taking part in a longstanding Chinese art tradition of meticulously copying masterpieces to be sold as copies. He said his paintings were being sold to people who knew they were fake but liked how they looked and wanted to hang them in their homes.
For his work that fooled Freedman and high class art collectors, Qian was paid a couple hundred dollars per piece. But then he saw one of his works at a high end Manhattan art show being sold for a considerably higher markup and asked Bergañtinos for more money. By the end of the scandal’s operation, Qian was being paid roughly $7,000 per painting. Which seems like a lot, but to put it into perspective, Qian produced around 60 paintings for Bergañtinos and Rosales which ultimately sold for around $80 million.
Shortly before the scandal broke, Qian was questioned by the FBI but swore he didn’t know Rosales. And then he disappeared. In 2014 he showed up again in China. And that’s likely where he’ll stay, because China won’t be keen on extraditing him.
And that is the story of the Knoedler Forgery scandal.
FURTHER READING:
The Knoedler Gallery Forgery Scandals and Shuttering—Who’s to Blame?
The Big Fake: Behind the Scenes of Knoedler Gallery’s Downfall
Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art – Netflix
Authenticity of Trove of Pollocks and Rothkos Goes to Court
From Afar, a Fugitive in the Knoedler Art Fraud Gives His Defense
Artist at centre of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China
Pei-Shen Qian’s Paintings Examined
Knoedler Forger Claims Innocence
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