iin November 2011, the arthouse Knoedler & Company – a pillar of the Upper East Side and one of the most trusted and elite stores of modern art – closed in the middle of a show. The venerable gallery, founded in 1846, had survived the Civil War, two global conflicts, bankruptcy, the expansion of the American art market, purchase by actor’s great-grandfather Armie Hammer, and 9/11. But in the end, it mysteriously stopped operations with little more than an email announcement.
The closure sent shockwaves through the find of art, a notoriously insular and opaque world, but in the days and months that followed, an onion purple leak revealed the extent of the damage: 15 years Knoedler had bought and sold at least 40 fraudulent paintings – a staggering $ 60 million in forged work attributed to such modern American masters as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. It was, according to Driven to Abstraction, a new documentary about the scandal, “the greatest forgery hoax ever of modern American art.”
The scandal was all too confusing given the status of the abusive gallery – when you worked with Knoedler and his eighth president, Ann Freedman, “you did not look at a painting and wondered if it was a fake,” Daria Price, the director of the film, told the Guardian. ‘You just assumed, if it was a Knoedler, that it wasn’t [fake]. That was the atmosphere. Driven to Abstraction explains, mostly through interviews with journalists, art observers, verification experts and lawyers, how such a respected gallery could go wrong so far, and so long.
At the heart of a scandal was a remarkable homespun, given the status and valid anonymity of the visual arts world, arrangement to pass on forgeries as lost works of masters of abstract expressionism, especially run by a Long Island woman named Glacier Rosales. As an employee of Freedman since taking over gallery president Knoedler in 1994, Rosales was virtually unknown to the rest of the art dealers; it’s unclear how she won Freedman’s trust, but through a series of ever-shifting, flimsy stories, Rosales Freedman convinces of the existence of a mysterious, anonymous client – Mr. X and his son, Mr. X Jr., who ‘ t no one was real. The Xs were supposed to sell a trove of hereditary treasures without documented origins – they were gifts, clients were told lies, among other things – which Rosales “discovered” over the course of 15 years from 1994 onwards.
In fact, the works in Queens were painted by a Chinese immigrant and supernatural imitator named Pei-Shen Qian, with the supposed help of Rosales’ friend, José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, and his brother Jesus, using artificial graying techniques such as sticking the cloth with tea bags to make it older. (Qian, who did not participate in the film, apparently made just $ 5,000 per painting, claiming that he did not know his paintings were sold as real works by famous artists, and fled to China; the Bergantiños brothers Díaz fled to Spain; Rosales pleaded guilty to several charges, including tax evasion and wire fraud, in 2013).
The scheme outlined in Driven to Abstraction, which plays in rhythm with the 2016 federal racketeering procedure for $ 25m in damages against Knoedler imposed by a disgruntled former client, is surprisingly extensive and breezy. Forged paintings can be seen for years in gallery and private homes; basic questions about paper traces, origins and simple errors (why was a signature misspelled “Pollok”? How were some paintings made with materials not available at the time they were supposed to be made?) were unanswered or ignored. The slow drip of counterfeits, it was discovered, amounted to a staggering $ 60m – and that’s just the famous works.
The fraud was pursued in part by the fixation of the fine art world with anonymity and a tendency for discretion; Price referred to an old saying that after drugs and guns the art trade is the most unregulated in the world. “This is not an accidental lack of transparency; this is the way they like it, ‘Price said. “Collectors want to be anonymous, buyers want to be anonymous, prices are anonymous … it all creates a world where this can happen.”
That mystery, and the embarrassment of the whole affair, made finding people directly involved in the case ready to speak on camera difficult. “The art world is so scared of itself,” Price said. ‘I always knew it was going to be a difficult film to make, because of the whole secret that the hoax could go on for so long was systemic. I knew I was going to run into people who just wouldn’t talk. ”
Yet, she said, it was surprising how people even expressed themselves tangentially related to the matter hesitating about speaking. “Just because they were traders, or had to do with art fairs, just because it was such a dirty thing, there would be people who said ‘I like you make a movie, but I can not be in it, ” said Price.
It’s not that anyone has ever seen the paintings, because several of the forged paintings appear on Armory art shows, “and it’s not that no one was ever suspected,” Price added. It is that the true extent of the fraud has been passed on for years under the guise of a lack of investigation. “If all the dealers and all the experts were all talking to each other and sharing their feelings, maybe it would have been different,” Price said. “But you’re not talking about it.”
Freedman, who also did not collaborate on the film, gave in to the last moment for the authenticity of the works; later, she claimed in an interview with New York Magazine that she was the “central victim” of Rosales, although it remains unclear how much of the fraud she knew about, and when. For the shuttered Knoedler & Company, the shame caused by the scandal was long and costly; it took eight years for the 10th and final counterfeiting case against the gallery to settle in August 2019, the final chapter in the hoax saga.
Although Driven to Abstraction adheres strictly to the dark world of art in the US, Price sees lessons in film outside the niche market of abstract expressionist paintings; the counterfeiting scheme proves what can happen, she said, in worlds based on anonymity, where passion and prestige can override doubt or even common sense fluently – “the less one has the right to tell everything, the more vulnerable it is to abuse. “
Driven to Abstraction is not “coming up with one last truth that unfolds neatly, but a way of telling how this evolved, how that can happen,” she said. “It’s not just about art – it’s about telling great stories, and why it works.”
