February 8, 2022 • 53 mins
Two drawings on paper allegedly by the artist Richard Diebenkorn become the first of dozens of problematic works sold by the Knoedler Gallery. Also, a mysterious “Mr. X” enters the picture.
Hosted by Alec Baldwin. Art Fraud is brought to you by iHeart Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers are Matt DelPiano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Terner, Alec Baldwin and Michael Shnayerson. We’re produced by Branden Morgan and Zach McNees. Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Lindsay Hoffman is our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Shnayerson.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The art world is an unregulated business billions of dollars.
It is essentially a money laundering business. You're working with
an artificial scarcity of market, and so it's fraud, with
people cutting corners and things happening. It was when Ann Friedman,
(00:24):
then the newly minted director of the Knoedler Gallery, first
met Gafa Rosales had a soho art opening. Larry Reuben
had been pushed out of Knoedler a year earlier in
a coup that ended with Ann Friedman being installed at
the blessing of Michael Hammer. K Nodler's sales were flat,
(00:45):
the clients were leaving in droves, and Ann Friedman needed
new work to help propel the gallery forward. The Knoedler,
always one step behind the times, was hurtling towards the
art world of a new millennium. The galleries long time
assistant him Andrade, had introduced Ann to the soft spoken,
(01:08):
polite woman of Mexican heritage. As fate would have it,
Gfia Rosalez had two works of art on paper she
wanted to sell. About. All that anyone could agree on
was that hime Andrade was a shy Ecuadorian man of
modest height. He was one of eleven children who had
(01:29):
come to New York in the early nineteen sixties and
found a home in a circle of artificionados. He'd made
his way to Larry Ruben's gallery one Street and worked
as the galley's driver. Reuben had then brought him over
to Knoedler as a sort of jack of old trades.
His job was to do pretty much whatever anyone wanted
(01:50):
him to do. As Anne put it in one of
her interviews for Vanity Fair, he would do everything from
changing light fixtures to running errands. But he always wore
a blazer and a tie and went to fancy dinner
parties and escorted well to do women. He was like
a mascot, but I mean that in a respectful way.
He epitomized the spirit of the gallery. Despite a faulty
(02:14):
grasp of English. After half a century, Hymie was perfectly
capable of charming one of those women into buying a
painting from Knodler. Andrade's greatest passion was Latin American art.
As late as two thousand eleven, while the forgery ring
was metastasizing amid criminal investigations, the boyish Andrade gave a
(02:36):
talk about Ecuadorian art and his fifty years of immersion
in it at the mid Manhattan Library. The Knottler, in
a press release for it, would describe Andrott's long time
friend and dealer David Herbert as quote one of the
best American portrait artists. Unquote that was patently untrue. But Herbert,
(02:59):
upon his death, would be cast in another role as
a central figure in the back story of Knoedler's conspiracy
of fakes, possibly aided and embedded by hime Andrade, who
had just become David Herbert's executor. With boxes of documents
rich in art world lore, Anne would never quite come
(03:21):
out and say explicitly that him may have steered her
to the papers that gave rise to a conspiracy ring
of art forgers, but more than one Knodler's staffer would
take umbrage at the way Anne defended him less than
forcefully in Vanity Fair. Was Anne implying that hime Andrade
(03:42):
had introduced her to Glafia Rosales knowing the two works
at issue were fake, or had him done no more
than to introduce his boss to a Mexican woman who
shared his love of Latin American arts. Here again is
writer Michael Schneyerson. Leslie Feeley took a dim review of
Anne and her treatment of Himie. She said Anne treated
(04:05):
Himie more like a gopher than a mascot. Quote. He
was a very kind, dignified man, but Anne would send
him out to get her tampons. Unquote. He had a
poor education the legacy of his childhood in Ecuador. Jimmy
was a gopher. He that's he was. He was going
and he got to know a lot of people in
(04:27):
the art business. He had more aught in his home,
but all South America. That's the Noteler's art handler Joe
Stevens Andrade rented a ground floor apartment in an ornate
but musty rental building at seventeen East seventieth Street, literally
next door to the Noodler. He seemed to like being
(04:47):
on call for whatever needs a rose. I used to
stay there whenever I had openings because I worked so late.
And now I used to go and wife said, man,
I'm gonna come, I'm saying, Heimie's Chris, Jimmy. We'd go
a call out and have you know, you know, at
ten o'clock, ten thirty at night, after we locked up
and tell me about the apartment that he had. There
(05:08):
was stuffed, like this place is three four times bigger
than his apartment. He had a huge and art work everywhere.
Fifty pieces on the wall is big. He had all
this African South American sculptures everywhere, boxes everywhere. You couldn't
put another thing on that counter. That's a pack. He
(05:32):
had closets filled with this stuff. He was like, it
looked like aoid up who did everything. Rosales and Androde
had struck up a friendship based on Latin American artist
sometime in the late es. At some point, Rosals mentioned
she was trying to sell two works on paper by
(05:52):
Richard deepen Corn, the great abstract artist represented for years
by the Knodler Gallery until Larry reuben departure and Anne's
promotion did I may think Ann Friedman might take a
look and tell Glyphira what she thought. This was a
pivotal moment the first time Glypira Rosalee focused on Ann
(06:14):
Friedman as her target for newly minted forgeries. Soon enough,
and Friedman found herself looking at a pair of classic
deepen Corn drawings. Sadly, that great profusion of Ocean Park
paintings and drawings. All those Christmas mornings the staff had
described opening brand new deep In corn work had come
(06:36):
to an end. Deep In Corn had died in and
his daughter Gretchen and son in law Richard Grant, co
heads of the Artists Foundation, had ended the galleries long
association with Deepen Corn. They didn't much like Ann Friedman.
They liked her even less after the coup that put
her in charge. Still, Nodler was widely known as Eben
(07:00):
Corn's main gallery. There would be no more primary works
directly from the artist, but secondary works, those that had
changed hands at least once, were fair game for anyone
who wanted to buy or sell them, and Nodler could
put buyers and sellers together as well or better than
anyone else, given its history with the artist. So when
(07:21):
hera offered to show Anne too Deepen Corns, the Nodler's
director jumped at the chance. Days after Anne's coup in November,
a certain calm had come over the Kndler Gallery. Larry
Reuben had even agreed to stay on as director until
the last day of the year. The old art world
(07:42):
War horse had recovered his spirits somewhat and shrugged off
the coup. Perhaps it was time for him to leave
Ndler after all. Gracefully, he even did Ann Friedman a
favor by agreeing to take a look at the too
Deepened Corn works on paper. Like most of Deep and
Corn's work since the mid nineteen sixties, these were geometrical
(08:04):
abstractions from his Ocean Park series. When Anne asked where
they'd come from, Rosals demurred. Regrettably. She said her client
wanted to remain anonymous. That was hardly unusual for works
brought in by perfect strangers. Unfortunately, neither of the drawings
had identifying marks on their verso verso is what dealers
(08:27):
call the back of an artwork, no record of the
works tracing back to the artists studio. There was no
trace of later buyers and sellers, no auction markings either.
In a word, the drawings had no provenance. That was
a problem. So what is provenance. It's the paper trail
(08:52):
of what we know about an artwork, starting from the
time it was created. It tells us who owned it,
when it was sold, where it was shown, and so forth.
Had Deep and Corn been alive, the issue of provenance
for these works would have been moot after all, the
artist was the best judge of his own work. He
could say in an instant whether these two drawings were
(09:14):
done by his hand or not. When an artist died,
the primary work he left behind in his studio or
home was easy to judge and usually genuine too, so
it wasn't difficult for the artist's family or executor to
authenticate those works and record them for posterity. The challenge
(09:34):
came with secondary works sold after the artist's death, works
bought and sold and bought again, works that sometimes vanished
and then reappeared. Were they real or not? An artist
like Deep and Corn post a special challenge. His Ocean
Park works were all beautiful, but also quite similar. Larry Reuben,
(09:58):
as it turned out, was underwell by the Ocean park
esque drawings, and Freedman showed him quote I told her
I did not think they were good, Reuben later told
Vanity Fair, which was to say, I thought they were fake.
He said the gallery couldn't or certainly shouldn't sell them.
(10:18):
Not long after, Deep and Corn's widow, Phillis, paid a
visit to the Noddler with her daughter Gretchen, and Friedman
had called the drawings to their attention. And the family
were worried about them. When Anne laid them out on
a table at the gallery, Gretchen and Phillis stared at
those drawings for a long time. They looked quite good.
(10:38):
We really, we're pretty impressed. It was clearly a beautiful piece.
I am Gretchen deep and Corn Grant. My father is
Richard Deepon Corn. Despite the exceptional quality of the works,
the family felt they were not authentic. You could see
the hand of the forger in both of them. You
(11:03):
look at someone's work long enough in my entire life.
I'm seventy six years old, so I was alive during
my father's career, and you have a sense of it.
Not perfect, but you do have a pretty good sense.
(11:24):
What I said to and at the time was that
the problem for me was that they didn't have any soul.
They didn't seem to breathe. I just couldn't relate to it,
even though it was clearly a beautiful piece, and reactions
(11:45):
surprised them. She didn't even thank them for calling attention
to what might be fake Deepen corns. Neither did she
suggest she would hand them back to their owner, whoever
they might be. The whole question of what the nobler
might do with them was simply not addressed. Of course,
she didn't say to in Freedman, I think they're fake,
(12:08):
because you know, in the art world you cannot call
something a fake because if you do so, you might
be sued for defamation of property. So people are very careful.
Just Seli Reggaeteo is a reporter currently with the Center
for Investigative Reporting. She pursued the note of story for
several years and came up with a few scoops, starting
(12:29):
with the story of Dr Bernard Krueger. They might say
this doesn't look right, but you don't quite say this
is fake. So it's quite interesting that I talked to
both Russian Demonquirn as she was seeing this this pieces
as they were about to be sold, and then I
also talked to Bernard Krueger, who was looking at the
pieces from the buyer's perspective. And in both instances, you
(12:52):
see there were several things strange about this. You know,
where they were coming from, how they looked, how much
they were being offered. All of those things adopts to
you know, there's something strange happening here. Here's Francis Beatty again.
I do remember going to a Deep and Corn show
(13:14):
of Deep and Corn works on paper and someone saying
to me, you have to be super careful because you
want to make sure that you're not buying one of
the things that the family has disavowed. And the idea
that you would show something, let alone sell it, that
(13:37):
the family of the artist has disavowed, is absolutely shocking.
I mean, you have a responsibility to your client, and
if something has a cloud over it, the cloud is
never going to disperse. Since the drawings were secondary market works,
(14:00):
the family couldn't keep Ann Friedman from doing what she
wanted with them, which was, of course, to sell them,
as Larry Reuben later told Vanity Fair, and Friedman could
justify selling those two drawings because the artist's wife had
not called them fake, nor had Larry Reuben. I wasn't
one sure they weren't real, Reuben explained later. And you
(14:24):
can get into a lot of trouble by declaring something
as fake when you don't have the hard evidence. And
since I was leaving, I said to Anne, fine, you
handle it, and she did. Despite the doubts expressed by
the family, and Friedman sold the Deep and Corn drawings
to the perfect buyer. More art fraud in a minute.
(14:52):
Not long after the Deep and Corn Family's disconcerting visit
to Knoedler, a doctor named Bernard Krueger received a phone
called he never expected to get. Krueger was a collector,
perhaps not a great collector, but an eager one, especially
in regard to which your deep in Corn's work. He
liked to think he had an inside track. He was,
(15:15):
after all, and Friedman's doctor. He told me he loved
Devon Coorn's work for many years, and at the time
he was alive in the nineties, and even before that,
I think he started buying the first diven Corns in
the eighties. He had to go through Knodler because at
the time Richard Devon Corn was alive and Knodler represented him.
(15:38):
And what Ben Krueger told me is that every time
he wanted to buy a piece, it was not easy.
You would think you have money, you want to buy
a piece of art, You walk in and say, I
want this, But that's not how it works in the
art world. You know, there is no like free market,
or you know, they sell for whoever they want to sell,
(15:59):
and they might give up price to me and a
different price to you. And the way that Bernard described
to me is that Ann Friedman was quite difficult and
quite protective, and she would say to him, no, you
cannot buy this one. If you want, you can buy
this other one. He said to me, I would need
to beg to buy, and sometimes she would let me buy,
(16:21):
and sometimes she wouldn't. And I asked him why why
would she do that? And he said, well, that was
her way of having power and having control. Despite having
an inside track as Hans doctor, Bernard Krueger was having
a difficult time purchasing a work from the artist he
most coveted. Surprisingly, all of that would change after Deep
(16:43):
and Corn passed away in early and all of a sudden,
Bernard Krueger gets a call from Knoedler saying, we have
the two different corns for you to see. You know,
they just came in. I think you would like it.
I was a ready, like, wait a minute, don't you
think that was change? For years you've been begging to
(17:05):
buy a dipping corn. All of a sudden they're calling
you and offer you a dipping corn. And he said no.
I thought I was great. I thought I was finally
getting a good deal on a dipping corn, because he
bought one of them and that was one of the fakes.
If I remember the numbers right. He told me the
last deep and Corn he had bought for like a
(17:26):
hundred twenty five hundred thirty five thousand, and that one
he bought for eighty thou dollars. So again he was thrilled.
He's like, all of a sudden, I'd been offered a
deep and corn, and it's cheaper than the last one
I bought. Nadler did well by those two Deepen Corn sales,
earning forty five thousand dollars on each. When word of
(17:49):
the sale reached the Deep and Corn family, they were shocked,
As the late artist's daughter Gretchen said, we thought, being
the naive people we were and being honest, we basically
thought she would simply return them and that would be that. Instead,
she wrote a letter to my mother and to me
(18:10):
that we had come to the gallery and authenticated these works,
and therefore she had sold them, and we were very distressed.
I wanted to write to Anne and tell her that
this was not okay, and that we had not authenticated them.
She can sell whatever she wants, but she can't say
(18:32):
that we authenticated it. And my mother was very shy
about being in an antagonistic position with anybody, and she
really didn't want me to write on behalf of myself
or on behalf of her, and so that was dropped. Later,
(18:57):
Dr Krueger would say he had sold the work and
had no idea where they were. Perhaps, But over the
next fifteen years, the Deepened Corns would routinely hear of
fake Deepen Corn works on paper popping up in the market.
Each new appearance meant that some new owner was trying
to unload his Deepen Corns, either with or without the
(19:20):
knowledge that they were fake. When the works once again vanished,
the implication was just as clear. Some new owner had
been duped or worse, set out to con his own
next prospective buyer. In the years to come, stories like
(19:40):
that would find their way to the Deepen Corn Foundation
on a regular basis. Eventually, the family counted some two
d and fifty deep in Corn images around the world,
submitted for authentication or just out of curiosity. They ranged
from the occasional top drawer forgery to when art students
homage for class credit left in a garage to be
(20:03):
celebrated briefly as the real McCoy. Times were tough in
the art market of and few galleries were feeling it
as much as Noler, which had little to live on
after Larry Reuben's departure other than its reputation and venerability.
I mean, she wasn't making much money at I mean
(20:27):
business wasn't good, and so she needs something was needed,
something really special. Money was needed. Still, Anne seemed to
harbor lingering concerns about those works. Perhaps she was eager
to prove their authenticity to herself and to pave the
way for more paintings from Glafira Rosales. Surely Coalfia could
(20:49):
share with Anna telling detail or two details to assure
her the works had some shred of provenance. Gently, but firmly,
Glyphia declined to say anything about where the deep and
corn drawings had come from. She would only say she
was representing a man she called Mr X Junior, whose
(21:13):
parents had passed on to their son more paintings by
some of the best known artists of the post war period.
Soon enough, Anne was calling him Mr X Junior too,
and referring to his parents as Mr. And Mrs X.
It sounded a bit silly, but maybe a fan played
ball Glyphia might introduce Anne to Mr X Juniorphia did
(21:37):
say that Mr X Junior had more works to sell
if they could be placed discreetly. These were works that
had been long stored by Mr X hermetically sealed. Even
Glafira had said the paintings had been in storage for
so long that critics and collectors would be thrilled to
see these lost masterpieces finally unwrapped. I have never, and
(22:03):
I actually don't have any colleagues who I know, who
have regularly managed to obtain from a private person a
picture for let's say two hundred thousand dollars that then
they could sell for eight hundred thousand dollars. I mean,
(22:23):
it just simply doesn't happen. If somebody came to me
and said, I want to sell you this Cliford Still,
and I know that the Cliford Stills fair market price
would be a million, and they say to me, well,
(22:47):
I'm going to sell it to you for two hundred thousand,
I would think immediately that it was hot. What other conclusion.
It's the same in any business. I think if you're
a diamond merchant, somebody comes to you with the diamond,
and they're selling it to you for of its real value.
(23:09):
You would assume that there was something wrong with it.
You say no, thank you. And if you bought a
painting by mistake, letting your passions get the better of you,
what would you do when you came to your senses.
These things once in a while happened to dealers. You
just you make a mistake, but the minute you do,
(23:32):
you recognize it, you give the money back. You know you,
you take it, and you learn from it. Otherwise you
lose your reputation completely and utterly. So that's one of
the really key things. It wasn't long before fa Rosalez
was back in the Nler, this time with a painting
(23:55):
by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko under her arm. It was
a beautiful work, has Anne described it later, with dark
orbs against a pale pink peach backdrop, and like the
Deepen Corns, it had no provenance other than the link
to Mr and Mrs X. I think that they were
(24:16):
the consortium, not just Cliff ear Right. They created paintings
that were actually quite smart because they were very highly valued.
I'm Maria Condakova, I'm an author journalist and psychologist, the
author most recently of the Biggest Bluff and also most
relevant to this, the confidence game. I mean, let's be honest,
(24:39):
Abstract expressionism is not necessarily the most technically advanced paintings.
Now I'm not saying that Rothco is not technically advanced.
He is. He could paint anything. But for someone who's not,
you know, incredibly technically advanced painters, probably easier to create
a Rothco than a rum round one. That I think
(25:01):
you said in your book, it's very important for the
con artists not to move too quickly. That was the
whole part of the what I think you call the
long con. Something that con artists, the good con artists
have in abundance is patients. Some cons take decades to
play out all the way. So you really need to
(25:22):
be able to see the long game and not just
be in it for you know, the immediate profit. You
need to be able to see how does this play
out over time? And one thing that you have to
hand to life Era is you know, she didn't just
do her homework on and she did her homework on
the art mark and how that world works and what
(25:42):
people expect if you walk in right away with twenty
roth Goes and a few Pollocks in there, someone's gonna say, Okay,
hold on one second, we're gonna do some very heavy
duty analysis on this, but one at a time. Lost treasures,
you know, we really don't want to part with them,
but we're we're selling them piecemeal. That's much more compelling
(26:06):
and invites less scrutiny. And she's also building the market
for herself because now, even though there was originally no provenance,
now a lot of these pieces are in collections and
some end up making it two shows and to museums,
and so that creates the provenance that this is the
(26:27):
collection of Mr. X. And some of these have already
been validated by some of the leading galleries and museums
and collectors in the world. I think that if someone
brought me a Rothco who I didn't know and who
had no kind of bona fidees in the art world,
(26:50):
I would be very suspicious. Where did this person get it?
And it was stolen? I mean, you don't just go
oneer around with Rothko's right, and did show the painting
to Christopher Rothko, son of the late artist, who professed
(27:10):
to find it beautiful That was enough for Anne. She
bought the painting for one dollars from Rosalis. She sold
it to the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery for three thousand dollars
for a gross profit of one hundred nine Later, when
she heard about the sale, Francis Beatty found Anne's strategy underwhelming.
(27:35):
If she showed it to Christopher Rothko, I would say
that would be a good first step. But that doesn't
tell you where it came from. That doesn't tell you
that the person has good title to it. You know
that you would have to investigate. A few people knew
(27:56):
that Nodler was starting to deal in works without any provenance.
The circle had been confined to Glypha and any confederates
she might have, as well as the staffers at the gallery,
who could gossip but hardly take on their imperious boss.
Leslie Feely recalled seeing one of the Rothcoes brought in
by Gpa. I just walked in and saw this great
(28:19):
red painting, presuming to be a Rothco. I just couldn't
even look at it because it was so garish and
so not by Rothko, and they were selling it for
at the time million dollars. It was not that large
(28:40):
and it was clearly a fake. None of these paintings
had any provenance, at least of the kind that the
art market expected, Nor were any in the catalog resume
of Mark Rothko or the soon to be completed catalog
resume for the late Richard Diebencorn. How could it an
organization and not check the provenance. That's what you're supposed
(29:04):
to do for an art fairy, supposed to check the
provenance on any painting, particularly a Rothco. And there it was.
Nobody took it out, just sitting there. But just to
play devil's advocate here, many paintings must meet the market
with no provenance because the artist has just finished them,
or or maybe he put them aside and got bored
(29:26):
with his painting. In the old days, you had to
ask Jeane thaw On Francis O'Connor to write an attestation.
I mean recently, there are lots of states that don't
want to write authenticity, which is very problematic. And so
what you do is you get people in, you sit
(29:48):
them down and you say, I'm worried about this. You know,
this is a picture which has been offered to me.
I think it looks beautiful, but it has I have
no proven it's on it, and I really need to
know what you think about it. You ask a couple
of people, and you do your due diligence because you're
(30:12):
on the line for it. One of the most important
aspects of provenance is in an artwork by a great
established artist be readily found, and that artists catalog resume.
A catalog resume is done by scholars or a family
in which they try to write down every single picture
(30:38):
that to date has been attributed to this artist and
that they think is legitimate. And typical catalog resume is
like the Pollock catalog resume. It says where the work
comes from in scrupulous detail. Sometimes it says whether it's
been repainted, whether it was in a fire. I mean,
(31:01):
you try to get as much information as you possibly can.
You try to document every single picture by that artist.
You also have to be sure that you're passing something
that's legitimate or is considered legitimate by the authorities. Of course,
(31:25):
it does sometimes happen that a painting lacks any provenance.
It's rare, but it happens. So what do you do?
Start calling in the experts and hopefully get them to
look at the actual work, Invite them to a gallery opening,
Steer them to your newly acquired Barnett Newman A Rothko.
Is there anything wrong with doing what she did? As
far as that goes, one could argue that Anne and
(31:48):
asking the depon Corn family to look at those two
works on paper was acting quite properly. No, there's nothing
wrong with doing that. I mean, you want to know
what distinguished scholars and what people who are regarded to
have what we call the art business a good eye,
(32:08):
in other words, they have, you have some reason to
believe that you would risk your reputation on their say so.
I guess one important nuance of this is that if
you want to get that expert's opinion, you are upfront
(32:29):
about asking him, rather than sort of inveigling him to
come into your office after hours while everyone's downstairs having
a glass of wine, and you show this picture and
the expert says, oh, that's a nice picture, how beautiful.
That is not the same thing as authentication, which is
(32:49):
sort of the ultimate stamp of approval. This is just
an expert, perhaps caught a bit away from office hours,
and saying that looks like a nice painting. It's not roof.
Could there ever be a situation where you've got enough
signatures from experts that people would say, yes, that's real.
I mean, now we all know you have it forensically tested.
(33:11):
I mean, if you have such a picture that has
no provenance and you are very suspicious about you get
it on consignment from whoever it is, and you have
it tested, you have to get a complete consensus. You
have to have every single person who could question such
(33:33):
a thing in line. And then of course you have
the whole issue. Can you pass good title to this picture?
Which is I think just as problematic and far more frightening.
You are passing good title and guaranteeing the authenticity and
(33:55):
the title. That's what the uniform code said, as you
were doing if you write an invoice. The staffers learned
to keep their distance when Rosaliss name was mentioned. Whenever
something about the Rosales works was discussed. One staffer said
(34:18):
that was a closed door meeting for Anne. That was
unusual at all. Other times the door to Anne's second
floor office was open. Sign new House would step over
a rope and come on in. A staffer recalls of
the publishing mogul, so the door was only closed for
certain sensitive meetings. It was around this time that Anne
(34:44):
and Glepa held a staff meeting to discuss how many
paintings remained in the mysterious collection. Rosales identified approximately eight
works that were still available. There is another still a
Gottlieb too, decoon ngs a motherwell a new whom in
one or two Caldlers. That's attorney Emily rice Baum. Over
(35:05):
a decade later, at trial, attorneys Gregory Claric, Aaron Crowle,
and Emily would present evidence of handwritten notes of this
infamous meeting. The lawyers noted something peculiar about cafe as
purported inventory, and then Anne asks is there a pollock?
And lo and behold it all says I'll go check, yeah,
(35:26):
let me check. She was not on her list. You
would think if she had a Jackson Pollock, she would
come in and say she had a Jackson Pollock. And
then it's you know, two years later, having gone to none,
she suddenly has five. Did someone did discover a missing
pollock in their attic? Once every decade or so, does
(35:48):
something like that pop up? A Rothcoe that roughly traded
with his dentist for some dental work? Does that pop up. Sure,
you know there's one here and there's one there, But
are there three? Are there? Fo I from the same source,
are there eight? Are there twelve? Or there twenty? Are
there forty one? Literally? Never, Despite her initial estimate of
(36:11):
having eight paintings in the collection, Gafa would manage to
deliver over thirty more works to Knodler, including five supposed
Jackson Pollock's, surprisingly and treated Kndler's own artists just as
harshly as she treated the galleries assistance and just trashed
her own artists, every single one of them. Knodler artist
(36:34):
Donald Sultan later said she would never answer phone calls.
She was completely disinterested in the artist she had. She
kind of ignored everyone who was there. All her dealings
were secretive, Sultan said. According to Sultan, and was out
of her depth. After Larry Reuben's departure, Sultan said it
(36:54):
was as if the director of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art was like Philippe de Montebelle, deciding that he's going
to turn the thing over to the secretary. According to
one staffer who worked closely with her, Anne was not
above dramatizing a story to sell a painting. There was
this painting by Helen Frankenthaler. We had hung onto it
(37:16):
for a couple of years, recalls a staffer. A museum
director came into Anne's office and had the painting out,
and the museum director said, where did that come from?
The staffer went on to say there had been a
woman killed in a hit and run. This was in
the news. She had been an art collector and said,
I can't really tell you, but there was a recent
(37:38):
tragedy you might have read about in the news, very
sad story. The staffers said, in fact, we had bought
the painting at auction in or whatever. An art net
search would have shown it hadn't come from this woman's collection.
But Anne just lie to this director why we probably
got it on the cheap and Anne was marking it up.
(38:00):
On another occasion, Anne took in a double paneled Milton
Avery painting, which was to say that there was a
painting on each side of the wood. Instead of showing
it that way to the Averies, Anne reportedly had a
conservator split the painting down the middle and get two
salable works instead of one, a considerably greater profit to
(38:21):
her and the gallery. I asked Francis if this was
typical in any way for a gallery director. Never in
a million years. I mean, I you know, you hear
these stories about people doing them in the kind of
olden days, but no one would imagine doing that in
(38:46):
my era. It's a kind of vandalization of an object
that you certainly can't do without enormous thought, and I
would think, consultation with lots of other people. We'll be
(39:12):
right back. Sometimes Anne seemed drawn by the sheer challenge
of a newly arrived work. Someone might come off the
street with a calder and a story, recalls one staffer,
it was my father's and he passed away. I'm trying
to sell it. Inevitably, the owner didn't want to wait
(39:35):
long enough to put the calder up for auction. The
provenance sounded sketchy, but Anne went upstairs where the finances
were done, and ended up buying it for cash. The
staffer said, I was thinking, either there's something wrong, or
you're taking this painting and we'll sell it for two
or three times the amount. I was. Seeing this for
(39:56):
the first time. It was an indication to me. Over
the next year or two, other deep in corn works
on paper came in from Glyphra Rosales. Like the first ones,
they were ocean park abstracts, but they were different in
one sense. According to Rosales, they came from the the
(40:16):
Honda Gallery in Madrid, indicated by the seemingly well worn
label on the back of each one. The Deep in
Corn families doubts about those first two drawings seemed to
have worried and Friedman to she had written a letter
to Rosalie asking for at least some provenance on the
newly surfaced the Honda Gallery ocean parks. Leslie Feeley recalls
(40:42):
and searches for provenance. She would be in touch with
people who used to work at the National Gallery, like
a Carmen. I mean, she tried to find names that
would fool people, and she lied and lied and made
up these fake provenances. I believe from the beginning she
(41:03):
knew these were fixed, they had no provenances. She made
up provenances every day. The Honda Gallery works troubled the
deep and Corn family as well. We began looking up
the Handy Gallery and it all seemed very strange because
all the work that they had handled. You can't talk
(41:24):
to anybody, they're all dead. But the works that they
did handle when they were in existence, were very, very
different from the work that my father did, things like
Picasso and some of the earlier abstract people. I just
remember thinking, Wow, that just seems odd. Apparently Rosalis had
(41:48):
made some calls and came up with provenance for the
Honda Gallery. Deepen corns. The key figure was a Spanish
restaurant owner named Cesario Fontanella. Supposedly, he told Rosalez that
he had owned a restaurant called Taverna says Are on
Fleming Street, near Madrid's Castellana Plaza from the late nineteen
(42:09):
seventies until nineteen eighty five. The Taverna Cesar had been
a hangout for artists. Everyone from Francis Bacon to Andy
Warhol had frequented the place, or so Rosalez heard. Nearby
was the Jande Gallery, said Clario Fontenella, where many of
those artists had shown. Fernando Vijande would often bring them
(42:31):
over to the Taverna Cesar. Deep and Corn had been
one of the regulars, and in a time honored artistic tradition,
had often paid off his bar bills with art or
traded his own art. The nimble says our Fontenelle had
procured his deepon Corns that way, and kept them for
all those intervening years, he said, and was selling them
(42:51):
only now after deepin Corne's death. It was a fine story,
except that Rodrigo Vijande, the late gallery owner's son, found
it preposterous. First, he had never heard of the Tavernas Caesar.
He would have known it well if his father patronized it.
He would have known which artists hung out there, too,
(43:12):
because Rodrico had helped run the gallery with his father
and knew its artists upon his father's death. In the
most off key detail of Caesar Fontendles's story was the
Tavernas address. Even if it had existed, it wouldn't have
been a hangout for artists from the the Honda Gallery
(43:35):
because it's supposed address on Fleming Street was two or
three miles from the gallery. Both galleries that my father
owned in Madrid were right where he lived, in front
of his house on Nunez de Balboa in the center
of Madrid, Rodrico explained moreover, of the Hondai didn't drive, that,
(43:56):
declared his son Rodrigo, was why he lived some fifty
yards from his galleries at first, and Freeman may have
believed the the Honda Gallery story. Certainly she wanted to
believe it. If it was true, it might validate the
half dozen other such ocean parks that Rosalis was bringing
(44:17):
in one by one. With their now distinctive the Honda
Gallery labels had cast a glow of authenticity over all
the ocean park, Deepen Corns and over Glafira Rosalee herself.
But a label isn't provenance. It's just a label. If
the label had been part of a paper trail of ownership,
(44:39):
the result would have been picture perfect provenance. In this case,
the trail petered out as soon as it began. What
was it fair to say that every time you saw
a deep in Corn ocean park that had a label
on back, that it was almost certainly fake. I think
(45:02):
one could say that, Yes, she swears that she didn't know,
which seems hard to believe. That's k Noodler artist Michael
David Again, should she have known? Yeah? And is this
business fraud with people cutting corners with fraud? Absolutely? And
(45:28):
Friedman had her Deepened Corns with the Honda Gallery labels,
but she pressed Rosalees for more proof of the works
provenance If she wasn't going to uncover an actual paper trail,
she could do the next best thing. She could find
experts on the painters whose works were coming in from
Mr x Jr. Already she had done that with Chris Rothko,
(45:51):
the late artist's son. Since then another Rothko expert, David
and Pam, had praised it too, and would do her
part seeking out more art world academics who might inspect
the paintings as they came in and find that they
were true. But couldn't Lafa do something to fill in
(46:12):
the story of the ex family and arranged for Anne
to meet Mr x Jr. At last, not yet, Rosavas
deflected soon, she felt soon. But then came the most
astonishing accident, one that seemed to prove beyond doubt that
Mr X and his paintings were real after all. In
(46:36):
their conversations, Lafra and Anne often talked about art of
the post war period. Lafia knew a lot enough to
impress Anne, and the two women share their favorite artists,
one of whom was Clifford. Still in most cases, Glafira
would go through Mr X's collection searching for a painting
(46:58):
by one of the artists and had spoken of with
great admiration. Miraculously Glafira would find one. Glafira Rosales told
investigators that the galleries would often ask her for specific
things without asking many questions where it came from. So
(47:18):
think about this. You are a gallery and you are
buying painting after painting from this woman from Mexico who
sess was representing a famous collector. So then, as a
gallery owner, I turned to her and say, so do
you think he might happen to have some mother will?
And then a few weeks later she comes with a
(47:39):
mother will. I mean, what is really the likelihood that
this would happen, And would then ask her to send
an image of the work if they'd met with her approval,
and would ask to bring the painting in. A standard
routine was followed. The painting was put in the trunk
of Mr X Junior's car and transported to a photographer's studio.
(48:04):
Pictures were duly taken and the painting was then put
back in the trunk of the car. The plan, as usual,
was to send the transparencies once they came back from
the studio to Ann at the Knoedler and would then
decide if the painting met with her approval. Only then
would the painting be sent to the gallery. Rosalis soon
(48:25):
called Freedman with terrible news while the driver was bringing
Mr X's Clifford Still painting from the photographer's studio. She
said there had been an accident. The car had a
rear engine and the engine had caught fire. The painting
was nearly destroyed, all but a fragment. When she got
(48:46):
over her shock and told Rosalee to bring her the fragment,
the painting was indeed badly burned. It would have been
two and a half feet by three feet, Freedman said later. Indeed,
nearly all of the paintings Rosalis would bring were of
medium scale. To Anne, it made absolute sense that the
(49:06):
painting had been stored in the trunk, and was fascinated
with the fragment, and more so with the transparency that
accompanied it. The transparency, after all, showed the whole painting
before it was consumed by fire. On the drive back
to Mr X Junior's house, you could see the whole thing,
(49:27):
and with a fragment you can analyze the front and
back differently. You can do a touch and feel about it.
And later said later in telling that story and would
beam with triumph. Quote would a con artist burn the
painting and then save a fragment so it could be
forensically examined if the painting wasn't real, wouldn't that make
(49:48):
it obvious? Unquote? Everything checked out and declared, including that
in one of the pigments that Clifford still used in
many paintings, there's an oxidation that had proof positive the
pigment proved the painting was real, or so felt Anne
as for the burned fragment and kept it as proof
(50:10):
that the first Clifford still Mr. X Junior had sold
her had been real as well. One staff are recalled
that the fragment was kept in a flat white portfolio.
You could see the burn marks on the edges. It
was an friedman's own shroud of Turin conveniently, Mr x Jr.
(50:34):
Managed to find another Clifford still in storage and sent
it along and in turn took it to the annual
Art Dealers Association of America show at the New York Armory.
Bill Ruben came by in a wheelchair and said of
the famous director of the Museum of Modern Art and
brother of the Nler's former director, Larry Reuben whom Anne
(50:58):
had dispatched from the Notler. According to Freedman, Bill Reuben
looked hard at the Clifford still and said, yes, that's
a cliff painting. I turned it around for him and
he confirmed that it was a Clifford Still painting. Bill
Ruben had been duped by the Rosava's ring too. In reality,
(51:20):
none of the details in as story of the burned
Clifford Still painting were true. Now we know no fire
really happened, right did it did? Happened? Actually, Carlos was
preparing the pieces and he was treating them with her
dryers and following them in coal and hot temperatures, so
(51:42):
that one got burned because he forgot to turn the
hair dryer of, and of course it went in flames.
And now Anne is waiting for the piece. And what
is this planation I'm going to give Carlos Tom It
will tell them this. I want people to know that
I have never talked to nobody. I have never been
(52:04):
interviewed about my life or about this case except for
the government of course. More from Glafira Rosale's herself next
time on art fraud. You have the cool, clear eyes
of a seeker of wisdom and truth. Yet there's that
(52:28):
bob turned chin and the grin of impetuous youth. Believe
you hard, Believeving you. Art Fraud is brought to you
(52:50):
by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers
are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself, and
Michael Ayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer. How a writer is Michael Schneyerson. I
(53:15):
believe you and my faith and my fallow my
The art world is an unregulated business billions of dollars.
It is essentially a money laundering business. You're working with
an artificial scarcity of market, and so it's fraud, with
people cutting corners and things happening. It was when Ann Friedman,
(00:24):
then the newly minted director of the Knoedler Gallery, first
met Gafa Rosales had a soho art opening. Larry Reuben
had been pushed out of Knoedler a year earlier in
a coup that ended with Ann Friedman being installed at
the blessing of Michael Hammer. K Nodler's sales were flat,
(00:45):
the clients were leaving in droves, and Ann Friedman needed
new work to help propel the gallery forward. The Knoedler,
always one step behind the times, was hurtling towards the
art world of a new millennium. The galleries long time
assistant him Andrade, had introduced Ann to the soft spoken,
(01:08):
polite woman of Mexican heritage. As fate would have it,
Gfia Rosalez had two works of art on paper she
wanted to sell. About. All that anyone could agree on
was that hime Andrade was a shy Ecuadorian man of
modest height. He was one of eleven children who had
(01:29):
come to New York in the early nineteen sixties and
found a home in a circle of artificionados. He'd made
his way to Larry Ruben's gallery one Street and worked
as the galley's driver. Reuben had then brought him over
to Knoedler as a sort of jack of old trades.
His job was to do pretty much whatever anyone wanted
(01:50):
him to do. As Anne put it in one of
her interviews for Vanity Fair, he would do everything from
changing light fixtures to running errands. But he always wore
a blazer and a tie and went to fancy dinner
parties and escorted well to do women. He was like
a mascot, but I mean that in a respectful way.
He epitomized the spirit of the gallery. Despite a faulty
(02:14):
grasp of English. After half a century, Hymie was perfectly
capable of charming one of those women into buying a
painting from Knodler. Andrade's greatest passion was Latin American art.
As late as two thousand eleven, while the forgery ring
was metastasizing amid criminal investigations, the boyish Andrade gave a
(02:36):
talk about Ecuadorian art and his fifty years of immersion
in it at the mid Manhattan Library. The Knottler, in
a press release for it, would describe Andrott's long time
friend and dealer David Herbert as quote one of the
best American portrait artists. Unquote that was patently untrue. But Herbert,
(02:59):
upon his death, would be cast in another role as
a central figure in the back story of Knoedler's conspiracy
of fakes, possibly aided and embedded by hime Andrade, who
had just become David Herbert's executor. With boxes of documents
rich in art world lore, Anne would never quite come
(03:21):
out and say explicitly that him may have steered her
to the papers that gave rise to a conspiracy ring
of art forgers, but more than one Knodler's staffer would
take umbrage at the way Anne defended him less than
forcefully in Vanity Fair. Was Anne implying that hime Andrade
(03:42):
had introduced her to Glafia Rosales knowing the two works
at issue were fake, or had him done no more
than to introduce his boss to a Mexican woman who
shared his love of Latin American arts. Here again is
writer Michael Schneyerson. Leslie Feeley took a dim review of
Anne and her treatment of Himie. She said Anne treated
(04:05):
Himie more like a gopher than a mascot. Quote. He
was a very kind, dignified man, but Anne would send
him out to get her tampons. Unquote. He had a
poor education the legacy of his childhood in Ecuador. Jimmy
was a gopher. He that's he was. He was going
and he got to know a lot of people in
(04:27):
the art business. He had more aught in his home,
but all South America. That's the Noteler's art handler Joe
Stevens Andrade rented a ground floor apartment in an ornate
but musty rental building at seventeen East seventieth Street, literally
next door to the Noodler. He seemed to like being
(04:47):
on call for whatever needs a rose. I used to
stay there whenever I had openings because I worked so late.
And now I used to go and wife said, man,
I'm gonna come, I'm saying, Heimie's Chris, Jimmy. We'd go
a call out and have you know, you know, at
ten o'clock, ten thirty at night, after we locked up
and tell me about the apartment that he had. There
(05:08):
was stuffed, like this place is three four times bigger
than his apartment. He had a huge and art work everywhere.
Fifty pieces on the wall is big. He had all
this African South American sculptures everywhere, boxes everywhere. You couldn't
put another thing on that counter. That's a pack. He
(05:32):
had closets filled with this stuff. He was like, it
looked like aoid up who did everything. Rosales and Androde
had struck up a friendship based on Latin American artist
sometime in the late es. At some point, Rosals mentioned
she was trying to sell two works on paper by
(05:52):
Richard deepen Corn, the great abstract artist represented for years
by the Knodler Gallery until Larry reuben departure and Anne's
promotion did I may think Ann Friedman might take a
look and tell Glyphira what she thought. This was a
pivotal moment the first time Glypira Rosalee focused on Ann
(06:14):
Friedman as her target for newly minted forgeries. Soon enough,
and Friedman found herself looking at a pair of classic
deepen Corn drawings. Sadly, that great profusion of Ocean Park
paintings and drawings. All those Christmas mornings the staff had
described opening brand new deep In corn work had come
(06:36):
to an end. Deep In Corn had died in and
his daughter Gretchen and son in law Richard Grant, co
heads of the Artists Foundation, had ended the galleries long
association with Deepen Corn. They didn't much like Ann Friedman.
They liked her even less after the coup that put
her in charge. Still, Nodler was widely known as Eben
(07:00):
Corn's main gallery. There would be no more primary works
directly from the artist, but secondary works, those that had
changed hands at least once, were fair game for anyone
who wanted to buy or sell them, and Nodler could
put buyers and sellers together as well or better than
anyone else, given its history with the artist. So when
(07:21):
hera offered to show Anne too Deepen Corns, the Nodler's
director jumped at the chance. Days after Anne's coup in November,
a certain calm had come over the Kndler Gallery. Larry
Reuben had even agreed to stay on as director until
the last day of the year. The old art world
(07:42):
War horse had recovered his spirits somewhat and shrugged off
the coup. Perhaps it was time for him to leave
Ndler after all. Gracefully, he even did Ann Friedman a
favor by agreeing to take a look at the too
Deepened Corn works on paper. Like most of Deep and
Corn's work since the mid nineteen sixties, these were geometrical
(08:04):
abstractions from his Ocean Park series. When Anne asked where
they'd come from, Rosals demurred. Regrettably. She said her client
wanted to remain anonymous. That was hardly unusual for works
brought in by perfect strangers. Unfortunately, neither of the drawings
had identifying marks on their verso verso is what dealers
(08:27):
call the back of an artwork, no record of the
works tracing back to the artists studio. There was no
trace of later buyers and sellers, no auction markings either.
In a word, the drawings had no provenance. That was
a problem. So what is provenance. It's the paper trail
(08:52):
of what we know about an artwork, starting from the
time it was created. It tells us who owned it,
when it was sold, where it was shown, and so forth.
Had Deep and Corn been alive, the issue of provenance
for these works would have been moot after all, the
artist was the best judge of his own work. He
could say in an instant whether these two drawings were
(09:14):
done by his hand or not. When an artist died,
the primary work he left behind in his studio or
home was easy to judge and usually genuine too, so
it wasn't difficult for the artist's family or executor to
authenticate those works and record them for posterity. The challenge
(09:34):
came with secondary works sold after the artist's death, works
bought and sold and bought again, works that sometimes vanished
and then reappeared. Were they real or not? An artist
like Deep and Corn post a special challenge. His Ocean
Park works were all beautiful, but also quite similar. Larry Reuben,
(09:58):
as it turned out, was underwell by the Ocean park
esque drawings, and Freedman showed him quote I told her
I did not think they were good, Reuben later told
Vanity Fair, which was to say, I thought they were fake.
He said the gallery couldn't or certainly shouldn't sell them.
(10:18):
Not long after, Deep and Corn's widow, Phillis, paid a
visit to the Noddler with her daughter Gretchen, and Friedman
had called the drawings to their attention. And the family
were worried about them. When Anne laid them out on
a table at the gallery, Gretchen and Phillis stared at
those drawings for a long time. They looked quite good.
(10:38):
We really, we're pretty impressed. It was clearly a beautiful piece.
I am Gretchen deep and Corn Grant. My father is
Richard Deepon Corn. Despite the exceptional quality of the works,
the family felt they were not authentic. You could see
the hand of the forger in both of them. You
(11:03):
look at someone's work long enough in my entire life.
I'm seventy six years old, so I was alive during
my father's career, and you have a sense of it.
Not perfect, but you do have a pretty good sense.
(11:24):
What I said to and at the time was that
the problem for me was that they didn't have any soul.
They didn't seem to breathe. I just couldn't relate to it,
even though it was clearly a beautiful piece, and reactions
(11:45):
surprised them. She didn't even thank them for calling attention
to what might be fake Deepen corns. Neither did she
suggest she would hand them back to their owner, whoever
they might be. The whole question of what the nobler
might do with them was simply not addressed. Of course,
she didn't say to in Freedman, I think they're fake,
(12:08):
because you know, in the art world you cannot call
something a fake because if you do so, you might
be sued for defamation of property. So people are very careful.
Just Seli Reggaeteo is a reporter currently with the Center
for Investigative Reporting. She pursued the note of story for
several years and came up with a few scoops, starting
(12:29):
with the story of Dr Bernard Krueger. They might say
this doesn't look right, but you don't quite say this
is fake. So it's quite interesting that I talked to
both Russian Demonquirn as she was seeing this this pieces
as they were about to be sold, and then I
also talked to Bernard Krueger, who was looking at the
pieces from the buyer's perspective. And in both instances, you
(12:52):
see there were several things strange about this. You know,
where they were coming from, how they looked, how much
they were being offered. All of those things adopts to
you know, there's something strange happening here. Here's Francis Beatty again.
I do remember going to a Deep and Corn show
(13:14):
of Deep and Corn works on paper and someone saying
to me, you have to be super careful because you
want to make sure that you're not buying one of
the things that the family has disavowed. And the idea
that you would show something, let alone sell it, that
(13:37):
the family of the artist has disavowed, is absolutely shocking.
I mean, you have a responsibility to your client, and
if something has a cloud over it, the cloud is
never going to disperse. Since the drawings were secondary market works,
(14:00):
the family couldn't keep Ann Friedman from doing what she
wanted with them, which was, of course, to sell them,
as Larry Reuben later told Vanity Fair, and Friedman could
justify selling those two drawings because the artist's wife had
not called them fake, nor had Larry Reuben. I wasn't
one sure they weren't real, Reuben explained later. And you
(14:24):
can get into a lot of trouble by declaring something
as fake when you don't have the hard evidence. And
since I was leaving, I said to Anne, fine, you
handle it, and she did. Despite the doubts expressed by
the family, and Friedman sold the Deep and Corn drawings
to the perfect buyer. More art fraud in a minute.
(14:52):
Not long after the Deep and Corn Family's disconcerting visit
to Knoedler, a doctor named Bernard Krueger received a phone
called he never expected to get. Krueger was a collector,
perhaps not a great collector, but an eager one, especially
in regard to which your deep in Corn's work. He
liked to think he had an inside track. He was,
(15:15):
after all, and Friedman's doctor. He told me he loved
Devon Coorn's work for many years, and at the time
he was alive in the nineties, and even before that,
I think he started buying the first diven Corns in
the eighties. He had to go through Knodler because at
the time Richard Devon Corn was alive and Knodler represented him.
(15:38):
And what Ben Krueger told me is that every time
he wanted to buy a piece, it was not easy.
You would think you have money, you want to buy
a piece of art, You walk in and say, I
want this, But that's not how it works in the
art world. You know, there is no like free market,
or you know, they sell for whoever they want to sell,
(15:59):
and they might give up price to me and a
different price to you. And the way that Bernard described
to me is that Ann Friedman was quite difficult and
quite protective, and she would say to him, no, you
cannot buy this one. If you want, you can buy
this other one. He said to me, I would need
to beg to buy, and sometimes she would let me buy,
(16:21):
and sometimes she wouldn't. And I asked him why why
would she do that? And he said, well, that was
her way of having power and having control. Despite having
an inside track as Hans doctor, Bernard Krueger was having
a difficult time purchasing a work from the artist he
most coveted. Surprisingly, all of that would change after Deep
(16:43):
and Corn passed away in early and all of a sudden,
Bernard Krueger gets a call from Knoedler saying, we have
the two different corns for you to see. You know,
they just came in. I think you would like it.
I was a ready, like, wait a minute, don't you
think that was change? For years you've been begging to
(17:05):
buy a dipping corn. All of a sudden they're calling
you and offer you a dipping corn. And he said no.
I thought I was great. I thought I was finally
getting a good deal on a dipping corn, because he
bought one of them and that was one of the fakes.
If I remember the numbers right. He told me the
last deep and Corn he had bought for like a
(17:26):
hundred twenty five hundred thirty five thousand, and that one
he bought for eighty thou dollars. So again he was thrilled.
He's like, all of a sudden, I'd been offered a
deep and corn, and it's cheaper than the last one
I bought. Nadler did well by those two Deepen Corn sales,
earning forty five thousand dollars on each. When word of
(17:49):
the sale reached the Deep and Corn family, they were shocked,
As the late artist's daughter Gretchen said, we thought, being
the naive people we were and being honest, we basically
thought she would simply return them and that would be that. Instead,
she wrote a letter to my mother and to me
(18:10):
that we had come to the gallery and authenticated these works,
and therefore she had sold them, and we were very distressed.
I wanted to write to Anne and tell her that
this was not okay, and that we had not authenticated them.
She can sell whatever she wants, but she can't say
(18:32):
that we authenticated it. And my mother was very shy
about being in an antagonistic position with anybody, and she
really didn't want me to write on behalf of myself
or on behalf of her, and so that was dropped. Later,
(18:57):
Dr Krueger would say he had sold the work and
had no idea where they were. Perhaps, But over the
next fifteen years, the Deepened Corns would routinely hear of
fake Deepen Corn works on paper popping up in the market.
Each new appearance meant that some new owner was trying
to unload his Deepen Corns, either with or without the
(19:20):
knowledge that they were fake. When the works once again vanished,
the implication was just as clear. Some new owner had
been duped or worse, set out to con his own
next prospective buyer. In the years to come, stories like
(19:40):
that would find their way to the Deepen Corn Foundation
on a regular basis. Eventually, the family counted some two
d and fifty deep in Corn images around the world,
submitted for authentication or just out of curiosity. They ranged
from the occasional top drawer forgery to when art students
homage for class credit left in a garage to be
(20:03):
celebrated briefly as the real McCoy. Times were tough in
the art market of and few galleries were feeling it
as much as Noler, which had little to live on
after Larry Reuben's departure other than its reputation and venerability.
I mean, she wasn't making much money at I mean
(20:27):
business wasn't good, and so she needs something was needed,
something really special. Money was needed. Still, Anne seemed to
harbor lingering concerns about those works. Perhaps she was eager
to prove their authenticity to herself and to pave the
way for more paintings from Glafira Rosales. Surely Coalfia could
(20:49):
share with Anna telling detail or two details to assure
her the works had some shred of provenance. Gently, but firmly,
Glyphia declined to say anything about where the deep and
corn drawings had come from. She would only say she
was representing a man she called Mr X Junior, whose
(21:13):
parents had passed on to their son more paintings by
some of the best known artists of the post war period.
Soon enough, Anne was calling him Mr X Junior too,
and referring to his parents as Mr. And Mrs X.
It sounded a bit silly, but maybe a fan played
ball Glyphia might introduce Anne to Mr X Juniorphia did
(21:37):
say that Mr X Junior had more works to sell
if they could be placed discreetly. These were works that
had been long stored by Mr X hermetically sealed. Even
Glafira had said the paintings had been in storage for
so long that critics and collectors would be thrilled to
see these lost masterpieces finally unwrapped. I have never, and
(22:03):
I actually don't have any colleagues who I know, who
have regularly managed to obtain from a private person a
picture for let's say two hundred thousand dollars that then
they could sell for eight hundred thousand dollars. I mean,
(22:23):
it just simply doesn't happen. If somebody came to me
and said, I want to sell you this Cliford Still,
and I know that the Cliford Stills fair market price
would be a million, and they say to me, well,
(22:47):
I'm going to sell it to you for two hundred thousand,
I would think immediately that it was hot. What other conclusion.
It's the same in any business. I think if you're
a diamond merchant, somebody comes to you with the diamond,
and they're selling it to you for of its real value.
(23:09):
You would assume that there was something wrong with it.
You say no, thank you. And if you bought a
painting by mistake, letting your passions get the better of you,
what would you do when you came to your senses.
These things once in a while happened to dealers. You
just you make a mistake, but the minute you do,
(23:32):
you recognize it, you give the money back. You know you,
you take it, and you learn from it. Otherwise you
lose your reputation completely and utterly. So that's one of
the really key things. It wasn't long before fa Rosalez
was back in the Nler, this time with a painting
(23:55):
by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko under her arm. It was
a beautiful work, has Anne described it later, with dark
orbs against a pale pink peach backdrop, and like the
Deepen Corns, it had no provenance other than the link
to Mr and Mrs X. I think that they were
(24:16):
the consortium, not just Cliff ear Right. They created paintings
that were actually quite smart because they were very highly valued.
I'm Maria Condakova, I'm an author journalist and psychologist, the
author most recently of the Biggest Bluff and also most
relevant to this, the confidence game. I mean, let's be honest,
(24:39):
Abstract expressionism is not necessarily the most technically advanced paintings.
Now I'm not saying that Rothco is not technically advanced.
He is. He could paint anything. But for someone who's not,
you know, incredibly technically advanced painters, probably easier to create
a Rothco than a rum round one. That I think
(25:01):
you said in your book, it's very important for the
con artists not to move too quickly. That was the
whole part of the what I think you call the
long con. Something that con artists, the good con artists
have in abundance is patients. Some cons take decades to
play out all the way. So you really need to
(25:22):
be able to see the long game and not just
be in it for you know, the immediate profit. You
need to be able to see how does this play
out over time? And one thing that you have to
hand to life Era is you know, she didn't just
do her homework on and she did her homework on
the art mark and how that world works and what
(25:42):
people expect if you walk in right away with twenty
roth Goes and a few Pollocks in there, someone's gonna say, Okay,
hold on one second, we're gonna do some very heavy
duty analysis on this, but one at a time. Lost treasures,
you know, we really don't want to part with them,
but we're we're selling them piecemeal. That's much more compelling
(26:06):
and invites less scrutiny. And she's also building the market
for herself because now, even though there was originally no provenance,
now a lot of these pieces are in collections and
some end up making it two shows and to museums,
and so that creates the provenance that this is the
(26:27):
collection of Mr. X. And some of these have already
been validated by some of the leading galleries and museums
and collectors in the world. I think that if someone
brought me a Rothco who I didn't know and who
had no kind of bona fidees in the art world,
(26:50):
I would be very suspicious. Where did this person get it?
And it was stolen? I mean, you don't just go
oneer around with Rothko's right, and did show the painting
to Christopher Rothko, son of the late artist, who professed
(27:10):
to find it beautiful That was enough for Anne. She
bought the painting for one dollars from Rosalis. She sold
it to the Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery for three thousand dollars
for a gross profit of one hundred nine Later, when
she heard about the sale, Francis Beatty found Anne's strategy underwhelming.
(27:35):
If she showed it to Christopher Rothko, I would say
that would be a good first step. But that doesn't
tell you where it came from. That doesn't tell you
that the person has good title to it. You know
that you would have to investigate. A few people knew
(27:56):
that Nodler was starting to deal in works without any provenance.
The circle had been confined to Glypha and any confederates
she might have, as well as the staffers at the gallery,
who could gossip but hardly take on their imperious boss.
Leslie Feely recalled seeing one of the Rothcoes brought in
by Gpa. I just walked in and saw this great
(28:19):
red painting, presuming to be a Rothco. I just couldn't
even look at it because it was so garish and
so not by Rothko, and they were selling it for
at the time million dollars. It was not that large
(28:40):
and it was clearly a fake. None of these paintings
had any provenance, at least of the kind that the
art market expected, Nor were any in the catalog resume
of Mark Rothko or the soon to be completed catalog
resume for the late Richard Diebencorn. How could it an
organization and not check the provenance. That's what you're supposed
(29:04):
to do for an art fairy, supposed to check the
provenance on any painting, particularly a Rothco. And there it was.
Nobody took it out, just sitting there. But just to
play devil's advocate here, many paintings must meet the market
with no provenance because the artist has just finished them,
or or maybe he put them aside and got bored
(29:26):
with his painting. In the old days, you had to
ask Jeane thaw On Francis O'Connor to write an attestation.
I mean recently, there are lots of states that don't
want to write authenticity, which is very problematic. And so
what you do is you get people in, you sit
(29:48):
them down and you say, I'm worried about this. You know,
this is a picture which has been offered to me.
I think it looks beautiful, but it has I have
no proven it's on it, and I really need to
know what you think about it. You ask a couple
of people, and you do your due diligence because you're
(30:12):
on the line for it. One of the most important
aspects of provenance is in an artwork by a great
established artist be readily found, and that artists catalog resume.
A catalog resume is done by scholars or a family
in which they try to write down every single picture
(30:38):
that to date has been attributed to this artist and
that they think is legitimate. And typical catalog resume is
like the Pollock catalog resume. It says where the work
comes from in scrupulous detail. Sometimes it says whether it's
been repainted, whether it was in a fire. I mean,
(31:01):
you try to get as much information as you possibly can.
You try to document every single picture by that artist.
You also have to be sure that you're passing something
that's legitimate or is considered legitimate by the authorities. Of course,
(31:25):
it does sometimes happen that a painting lacks any provenance.
It's rare, but it happens. So what do you do?
Start calling in the experts and hopefully get them to
look at the actual work, Invite them to a gallery opening,
Steer them to your newly acquired Barnett Newman A Rothko.
Is there anything wrong with doing what she did? As
far as that goes, one could argue that Anne and
(31:48):
asking the depon Corn family to look at those two
works on paper was acting quite properly. No, there's nothing
wrong with doing that. I mean, you want to know
what distinguished scholars and what people who are regarded to
have what we call the art business a good eye,
(32:08):
in other words, they have, you have some reason to
believe that you would risk your reputation on their say so.
I guess one important nuance of this is that if
you want to get that expert's opinion, you are upfront
(32:29):
about asking him, rather than sort of inveigling him to
come into your office after hours while everyone's downstairs having
a glass of wine, and you show this picture and
the expert says, oh, that's a nice picture, how beautiful.
That is not the same thing as authentication, which is
(32:49):
sort of the ultimate stamp of approval. This is just
an expert, perhaps caught a bit away from office hours,
and saying that looks like a nice painting. It's not roof.
Could there ever be a situation where you've got enough
signatures from experts that people would say, yes, that's real.
I mean, now we all know you have it forensically tested.
(33:11):
I mean, if you have such a picture that has
no provenance and you are very suspicious about you get
it on consignment from whoever it is, and you have
it tested, you have to get a complete consensus. You
have to have every single person who could question such
(33:33):
a thing in line. And then of course you have
the whole issue. Can you pass good title to this picture?
Which is I think just as problematic and far more frightening.
You are passing good title and guaranteeing the authenticity and
(33:55):
the title. That's what the uniform code said, as you
were doing if you write an invoice. The staffers learned
to keep their distance when Rosaliss name was mentioned. Whenever
something about the Rosales works was discussed. One staffer said
(34:18):
that was a closed door meeting for Anne. That was
unusual at all. Other times the door to Anne's second
floor office was open. Sign new House would step over
a rope and come on in. A staffer recalls of
the publishing mogul, so the door was only closed for
certain sensitive meetings. It was around this time that Anne
(34:44):
and Glepa held a staff meeting to discuss how many
paintings remained in the mysterious collection. Rosales identified approximately eight
works that were still available. There is another still a
Gottlieb too, decoon ngs a motherwell a new whom in
one or two Caldlers. That's attorney Emily rice Baum. Over
(35:05):
a decade later, at trial, attorneys Gregory Claric, Aaron Crowle,
and Emily would present evidence of handwritten notes of this
infamous meeting. The lawyers noted something peculiar about cafe as
purported inventory, and then Anne asks is there a pollock?
And lo and behold it all says I'll go check, yeah,
(35:26):
let me check. She was not on her list. You
would think if she had a Jackson Pollock, she would
come in and say she had a Jackson Pollock. And
then it's you know, two years later, having gone to none,
she suddenly has five. Did someone did discover a missing
pollock in their attic? Once every decade or so, does
(35:48):
something like that pop up? A Rothcoe that roughly traded
with his dentist for some dental work? Does that pop up. Sure,
you know there's one here and there's one there, But
are there three? Are there? Fo I from the same source,
are there eight? Are there twelve? Or there twenty? Are
there forty one? Literally? Never, Despite her initial estimate of
(36:11):
having eight paintings in the collection, Gafa would manage to
deliver over thirty more works to Knodler, including five supposed
Jackson Pollock's, surprisingly and treated Kndler's own artists just as
harshly as she treated the galleries assistance and just trashed
her own artists, every single one of them. Knodler artist
(36:34):
Donald Sultan later said she would never answer phone calls.
She was completely disinterested in the artist she had. She
kind of ignored everyone who was there. All her dealings
were secretive, Sultan said. According to Sultan, and was out
of her depth. After Larry Reuben's departure, Sultan said it
(36:54):
was as if the director of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art was like Philippe de Montebelle, deciding that he's going
to turn the thing over to the secretary. According to
one staffer who worked closely with her, Anne was not
above dramatizing a story to sell a painting. There was
this painting by Helen Frankenthaler. We had hung onto it
(37:16):
for a couple of years, recalls a staffer. A museum
director came into Anne's office and had the painting out,
and the museum director said, where did that come from?
The staffer went on to say there had been a
woman killed in a hit and run. This was in
the news. She had been an art collector and said,
I can't really tell you, but there was a recent
(37:38):
tragedy you might have read about in the news, very
sad story. The staffers said, in fact, we had bought
the painting at auction in or whatever. An art net
search would have shown it hadn't come from this woman's collection.
But Anne just lie to this director why we probably
got it on the cheap and Anne was marking it up.
(38:00):
On another occasion, Anne took in a double paneled Milton
Avery painting, which was to say that there was a
painting on each side of the wood. Instead of showing
it that way to the Averies, Anne reportedly had a
conservator split the painting down the middle and get two
salable works instead of one, a considerably greater profit to
(38:21):
her and the gallery. I asked Francis if this was
typical in any way for a gallery director. Never in
a million years. I mean, I you know, you hear
these stories about people doing them in the kind of
olden days, but no one would imagine doing that in
(38:46):
my era. It's a kind of vandalization of an object
that you certainly can't do without enormous thought, and I
would think, consultation with lots of other people. We'll be
(39:12):
right back. Sometimes Anne seemed drawn by the sheer challenge
of a newly arrived work. Someone might come off the
street with a calder and a story, recalls one staffer,
it was my father's and he passed away. I'm trying
to sell it. Inevitably, the owner didn't want to wait
(39:35):
long enough to put the calder up for auction. The
provenance sounded sketchy, but Anne went upstairs where the finances
were done, and ended up buying it for cash. The
staffer said, I was thinking, either there's something wrong, or
you're taking this painting and we'll sell it for two
or three times the amount. I was. Seeing this for
(39:56):
the first time. It was an indication to me. Over
the next year or two, other deep in corn works
on paper came in from Glyphra Rosales. Like the first ones,
they were ocean park abstracts, but they were different in
one sense. According to Rosales, they came from the the
(40:16):
Honda Gallery in Madrid, indicated by the seemingly well worn
label on the back of each one. The Deep in
Corn families doubts about those first two drawings seemed to
have worried and Friedman to she had written a letter
to Rosalie asking for at least some provenance on the
newly surfaced the Honda Gallery ocean parks. Leslie Feeley recalls
(40:42):
and searches for provenance. She would be in touch with
people who used to work at the National Gallery, like
a Carmen. I mean, she tried to find names that
would fool people, and she lied and lied and made
up these fake provenances. I believe from the beginning she
(41:03):
knew these were fixed, they had no provenances. She made
up provenances every day. The Honda Gallery works troubled the
deep and Corn family as well. We began looking up
the Handy Gallery and it all seemed very strange because
all the work that they had handled. You can't talk
(41:24):
to anybody, they're all dead. But the works that they
did handle when they were in existence, were very, very
different from the work that my father did, things like
Picasso and some of the earlier abstract people. I just
remember thinking, Wow, that just seems odd. Apparently Rosalis had
(41:48):
made some calls and came up with provenance for the
Honda Gallery. Deepen corns. The key figure was a Spanish
restaurant owner named Cesario Fontanella. Supposedly, he told Rosalez that
he had owned a restaurant called Taverna says Are on
Fleming Street, near Madrid's Castellana Plaza from the late nineteen
(42:09):
seventies until nineteen eighty five. The Taverna Cesar had been
a hangout for artists. Everyone from Francis Bacon to Andy
Warhol had frequented the place, or so Rosalez heard. Nearby
was the Jande Gallery, said Clario Fontenella, where many of
those artists had shown. Fernando Vijande would often bring them
(42:31):
over to the Taverna Cesar. Deep and Corn had been
one of the regulars, and in a time honored artistic tradition,
had often paid off his bar bills with art or
traded his own art. The nimble says our Fontenelle had
procured his deepon Corns that way, and kept them for
all those intervening years, he said, and was selling them
(42:51):
only now after deepin Corne's death. It was a fine story,
except that Rodrigo Vijande, the late gallery owner's son, found
it preposterous. First, he had never heard of the Tavernas Caesar.
He would have known it well if his father patronized it.
He would have known which artists hung out there, too,
(43:12):
because Rodrico had helped run the gallery with his father
and knew its artists upon his father's death. In the
most off key detail of Caesar Fontendles's story was the
Tavernas address. Even if it had existed, it wouldn't have
been a hangout for artists from the the Honda Gallery
(43:35):
because it's supposed address on Fleming Street was two or
three miles from the gallery. Both galleries that my father
owned in Madrid were right where he lived, in front
of his house on Nunez de Balboa in the center
of Madrid, Rodrico explained moreover, of the Hondai didn't drive, that,
(43:56):
declared his son Rodrigo, was why he lived some fifty
yards from his galleries at first, and Freeman may have
believed the the Honda Gallery story. Certainly she wanted to
believe it. If it was true, it might validate the
half dozen other such ocean parks that Rosalis was bringing
(44:17):
in one by one. With their now distinctive the Honda
Gallery labels had cast a glow of authenticity over all
the ocean park, Deepen Corns and over Glafira Rosalee herself.
But a label isn't provenance. It's just a label. If
the label had been part of a paper trail of ownership,
(44:39):
the result would have been picture perfect provenance. In this case,
the trail petered out as soon as it began. What
was it fair to say that every time you saw
a deep in Corn ocean park that had a label
on back, that it was almost certainly fake. I think
(45:02):
one could say that, Yes, she swears that she didn't know,
which seems hard to believe. That's k Noodler artist Michael
David Again, should she have known? Yeah? And is this
business fraud with people cutting corners with fraud? Absolutely? And
(45:28):
Friedman had her Deepened Corns with the Honda Gallery labels,
but she pressed Rosalees for more proof of the works
provenance If she wasn't going to uncover an actual paper trail,
she could do the next best thing. She could find
experts on the painters whose works were coming in from
Mr x Jr. Already she had done that with Chris Rothko,
(45:51):
the late artist's son. Since then another Rothko expert, David
and Pam, had praised it too, and would do her
part seeking out more art world academics who might inspect
the paintings as they came in and find that they
were true. But couldn't Lafa do something to fill in
(46:12):
the story of the ex family and arranged for Anne
to meet Mr x Jr. At last, not yet, Rosavas
deflected soon, she felt soon. But then came the most
astonishing accident, one that seemed to prove beyond doubt that
Mr X and his paintings were real after all. In
(46:36):
their conversations, Lafra and Anne often talked about art of
the post war period. Lafia knew a lot enough to
impress Anne, and the two women share their favorite artists,
one of whom was Clifford. Still in most cases, Glafira
would go through Mr X's collection searching for a painting
(46:58):
by one of the artists and had spoken of with
great admiration. Miraculously Glafira would find one. Glafira Rosales told
investigators that the galleries would often ask her for specific
things without asking many questions where it came from. So
(47:18):
think about this. You are a gallery and you are
buying painting after painting from this woman from Mexico who
sess was representing a famous collector. So then, as a
gallery owner, I turned to her and say, so do
you think he might happen to have some mother will?
And then a few weeks later she comes with a
(47:39):
mother will. I mean, what is really the likelihood that
this would happen, And would then ask her to send
an image of the work if they'd met with her approval,
and would ask to bring the painting in. A standard
routine was followed. The painting was put in the trunk
of Mr X Junior's car and transported to a photographer's studio.
(48:04):
Pictures were duly taken and the painting was then put
back in the trunk of the car. The plan, as usual,
was to send the transparencies once they came back from
the studio to Ann at the Knoedler and would then
decide if the painting met with her approval. Only then
would the painting be sent to the gallery. Rosalis soon
(48:25):
called Freedman with terrible news while the driver was bringing
Mr X's Clifford Still painting from the photographer's studio. She
said there had been an accident. The car had a
rear engine and the engine had caught fire. The painting
was nearly destroyed, all but a fragment. When she got
(48:46):
over her shock and told Rosalee to bring her the fragment,
the painting was indeed badly burned. It would have been
two and a half feet by three feet, Freedman said later. Indeed,
nearly all of the paintings Rosalis would bring were of
medium scale. To Anne, it made absolute sense that the
(49:06):
painting had been stored in the trunk, and was fascinated
with the fragment, and more so with the transparency that
accompanied it. The transparency, after all, showed the whole painting
before it was consumed by fire. On the drive back
to Mr X Junior's house, you could see the whole thing,
(49:27):
and with a fragment you can analyze the front and
back differently. You can do a touch and feel about it.
And later said later in telling that story and would
beam with triumph. Quote would a con artist burn the
painting and then save a fragment so it could be
forensically examined if the painting wasn't real, wouldn't that make
(49:48):
it obvious? Unquote? Everything checked out and declared, including that
in one of the pigments that Clifford still used in
many paintings, there's an oxidation that had proof positive the
pigment proved the painting was real, or so felt Anne
as for the burned fragment and kept it as proof
(50:10):
that the first Clifford still Mr. X Junior had sold
her had been real as well. One staff are recalled
that the fragment was kept in a flat white portfolio.
You could see the burn marks on the edges. It
was an friedman's own shroud of Turin conveniently, Mr x Jr.
(50:34):
Managed to find another Clifford still in storage and sent
it along and in turn took it to the annual
Art Dealers Association of America show at the New York Armory.
Bill Ruben came by in a wheelchair and said of
the famous director of the Museum of Modern Art and
brother of the Nler's former director, Larry Reuben whom Anne
(50:58):
had dispatched from the Notler. According to Freedman, Bill Reuben
looked hard at the Clifford still and said, yes, that's
a cliff painting. I turned it around for him and
he confirmed that it was a Clifford Still painting. Bill
Ruben had been duped by the Rosava's ring too. In reality,
(51:20):
none of the details in as story of the burned
Clifford Still painting were true. Now we know no fire
really happened, right did it did? Happened? Actually, Carlos was
preparing the pieces and he was treating them with her
dryers and following them in coal and hot temperatures, so
(51:42):
that one got burned because he forgot to turn the
hair dryer of, and of course it went in flames.
And now Anne is waiting for the piece. And what
is this planation I'm going to give Carlos Tom It
will tell them this. I want people to know that
I have never talked to nobody. I have never been
(52:04):
interviewed about my life or about this case except for
the government of course. More from Glafira Rosale's herself next
time on art fraud. You have the cool, clear eyes
of a seeker of wisdom and truth. Yet there's that
(52:28):
bob turned chin and the grin of impetuous youth. Believe
you hard, Believeving you. Art Fraud is brought to you
(52:50):
by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers
are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself, and
Michael Ayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer. How a writer is Michael Schneyerson. I
(53:15):
believe you and my faith and my fallow my
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