JOIN USA twisted tale of greed
How does an 80-million dollar art fraud looks like? Currently being aired on a popular streaming platform, ‘Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art’ is a documentary on one of the biggest art scams in the US. Directed by Barry Avrich, it traces a carefully crafted fraud and unfolds a story of greed, duplicity and forgery.
Beginning with the sales of the beautiful and supposedly original paintings by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, this is a fascinating saga of crime in the art market. It offers a linear narrative of the events, up till the inevitable lawsuits and investigations.
The story revolves around Ann Freedman, director at Knoedler Gallery, the oldest art gallery in New York, which has sold art for no less than 165 years. Glafira Rosales, an art dealer acting on behalf of an anonymous collector Mr X, offers the director seemingly never-seen-before exquisite paintings by renowned expressionists. She spins a plausible story around the artwork and the painting itself ‘appears’ to be an original Rothko with two painted squares in his inimitable style.
Knoedler Gallery, which lies at the epicentre of this crime story, then becomes an unwitting partner in selling fake art to its wealthy clients. Over a period of 14 years, more than 60 artworks (costing over $80 million) are sold to its unsuspecting billionaire clients, who are exceedingly displeased when they find out that the paintings are fakes.
What stands out is that experts corroborate the artworks, even when the provenance remains murky throughout. It is only when one of the authenticators discovers that the pigment yellow used in one of the paintings attributed to Pollock, was manufactured and commercially available only after the death of the artist, that doubts regarding the authenticity of the artwork is raised. This becomes the start of the investigations into the sales made over the years, and eventually, lawsuits are filed by the collectors.
Later on, the paintings are traced to a Chinese math professor, an immigrant artist named Pei-Shen Qian, who flees the country when the investigations begin. Interestingly, he claims innocence, despite signing each work painstakingly in the original artist’s style.
The fraud eventually leads to the closure of Knoedler Gallery in 2011, while Ann Freedman, you may find this difficult to believe, continues to be in the art business and runs an art gallery of her own!
The entire story borders on the incredulous — with so many advances in authentication techniques, how did the forgeries remain undetected for such a long period? It is surprising that qualitative opinions were sought rather than quantitative analyses. With no paper trails and red flags all along, how could one be so gullible? Rosale’s boyfriend was apparently ageing the canvases after Qian finished painting; how was that not uncovered? All lawsuits were eventually amicably settled. There is much that boggles the mind, but given the complexity of the art world, and the amount of money involved, there are more questions than answers here.
The author is a Bangalore-based art consultant, curator and writer. She blogs at Art Scene India and can be reached on artsceneinfo@gmail.com
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