Knoedler and the Cost of Not Asking

The supply made no commercial sense, and that was the evidence

Knoedler traded in New York from the 1840s. The founding date is given variously as 1846 and 1848, with Michel Knoedler taking full ownership in 1857, and the gallery is routinely described as having run for 165 years. It closed abruptly at the end of November 2011, days before the forgery allegations became public.

From 1994 the Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales supplied the gallery with previously unrecorded paintings attributed to the central figures of Abstract Expressionism: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Sam Francis. Federal prosecutors later stated that Rosales sold more than sixty forged works to two New York galleries, Knoedler and Julian Weissman Fine Art, which together sold them for about 80 million US dollars. Accounts of how many passed through Knoedler specifically range from about forty upward, and the exact division between the two galleries is not settled in the public record.

Before any laboratory was involved, the pattern was already anomalous in three ways at once. A single unknown source was producing museum-grade works by the most heavily documented American artists of the century. None of them appeared in the relevant catalogues or exhibition records. And they were being sold to the gallery at prices far below what the gallery then obtained.

That last point is the one a specialist should hold onto. A seller who consistently accepts a fraction of market value is telling you something about the goods. The Knoedler record shows nobody in a position to act treated it as information.

The arithmetic was louder than the science

The figures put before the jury in the De Sole trial in 2016 are the clearest account of the business. The forensic accountant Roger Seifert testified that the Rosales works sold for approximately 70 million dollars and generated about 32.7 million dollars in net income for the gallery; that Knoedler's profits on those works exceeded 100 per cent and in places ran above 700 per cent; and that without the Rosales sales the gallery would have lost 3.2 million dollars over the period from 1994 to 2011. He also testified that the gallery's president, Ann Freedman, earned 10.4 million dollars in profit sharing from those transactions.

Individual transactions show the same shape. A work sold to Domenico and Eleanore De Sole in 2004 as a Rothko had been acquired from Rosales for 950,000 dollars and was sold for 8.3 million. A picture sold in 2001 as a Pollock to Jack Levy had been bought for 750,000 dollars and sold for 2 million. Other claims in the litigation concerned a Pollock sold to Pierre Lagrange for a figure reported at 15.3 million and elsewhere at 17 million, and a de Kooning sold to John Howard. Where two figures are reported for the same sale, neither has been reconciled here, and buyers' premiums and commissions are not consistently distinguished in the press accounts.

The point is not that a high margin is improper. It is that a margin of that size, repeated, on works from a single undocumented source, describes a supply that is either extraordinarily lucky or not what it claims to be. That inference required no equipment.

The story changed, and the change was the tell

The provenance offered for the Rosales works was an anonymous collector, referred to as Mr X, said to be part of a Mexican couple who had bought directly from the artists on the advice of Alfonso Ossorio, a painter and collector genuinely close to Pollock. The narrative had the two properties a forged provenance needs: it explained why nothing was documented, and it attached a real name to the explanation.

In 2003 the International Foundation for Art Research examined a work sold as a Pollock and reported concerns about the materials, concluding that it could not support the picture's addition to the artist's body of work. After that report the account of the collector's adviser changed: Ossorio was replaced by David Herbert, an art world figure who had died in 1995. Knoedler searched its own archive and found nothing connecting Herbert to the paintings.

Between December 2007 and January 2008 the Dedalus Foundation, which administers the Motherwell catalogue, informed Freedman that seven works presented as Motherwells were likely forgeries; forensic testing in March 2008 confirmed it. A work Freedman had bought in 2000 and hung in her own apartment carried a signature in which Pollock's surname was misspelled.

A provenance that alters after a negative finding is not a provenance that has been corrected. It is a narrative being maintained. That is a diligence signal available to any buyer who asks for the ownership history twice, at an interval, in writing.

Science arrived last and was decisive

The De Soles commissioned the conservation scientist James Martin, then of Orion Analytical, in late 2010. Martin examined their picture and fifteen further Rosales works. He testified that he had already told Freedman and Knoedler to proceed with caution in 2008, when his analysis of two purported Motherwells showed they had not been made in the 1950s as claimed, and that he had concluded the Rosales works were deliberate fakes.

The general finding across the group was anachronism: pigments and other materials that were not commercially available when the paintings were supposed to have been made. This is the same class of evidence that ended van Meegeren and Beltracchi, and it has the same character. It cannot confirm an attribution. It can destroy one absolutely.

The United States Department of Justice investigation established that the works were painted by Pei-Shen Qian, an artist living in Queens, at the direction of Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, Rosales's long-term partner. Qian was indicted and is believed to have left for China; he has never been tried, and the allegations against him have not been tested. Bergantinos Diaz left for Spain before his indictment, and extradition efforts were unsuccessful.

Rosales pleaded guilty in September 2013 to conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and tax offences. On 31 January 2017 Judge Katharine Polk Failla sentenced her to time served, being 82 days already spent in custody, together with nine months of home detention and three years of supervised release. On 5 July 2017 she was ordered to pay 81 million dollars in restitution to victims of the scheme.

What ten lawsuits settled, and what they did not

Knoedler received a grand jury subpoena in September 2009. Freedman resigned in October 2009. The gallery closed at the end of November 2011. Ten civil actions followed against the gallery, its parent 8-31 Holdings, its owner Michael Hammer and Freedman.

The De Sole action reached trial in New York in early 2016 and did not finish. Freedman settled with the plaintiffs on 7 February 2016; the gallery and its holding company settled days later, on terms not disclosed. The last of the ten, brought by the Martin Hilti Family Trust over a work sold in 2002 as a Rothko for 5.5 million dollars, resolved in 2019, with Freedman settling in July and the remaining defendants in August.

This matters for how the affair is described. Every civil claim ended in a private settlement. No court entered a finding of liability against Ann Freedman, she was never criminally charged, and she has consistently maintained that she believed the paintings to be genuine. Glafira Rosales is the only person convicted in the matter. Statements about anyone else's state of knowledge are, in law, unresolved.

The one thing the litigation did establish, in open testimony, is what a list of names is worth. Freedman had given the De Soles a document naming scholars including David Anfam, E. A. Carmean, Irving Sandler and Christopher Rothko, in a form that implied endorsement. Christopher Rothko testified that he had never authenticated his father's work and had not authorised the use of his name. David Anfam denied giving permission for his name to appear in sales material. That is the transferable lesson: a roster of specialists who have seen a picture is not a set of opinions about it, and the only way to know what an expert thinks is to obtain the statement from the expert.