February 1, 2022 • 40 mins
Ann Freedman finds success in the New York City art world, but not without controversy.
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):
When you go into a gallery, you're going to a museum,
and you look at a painting, you don't know what
the story is behind the painting. It's like seeing somebody
in the street who's an old man. You don't know
all the adventures he's had, and all the marriages he's had,
and all the divorces he's had. My name's Aaron Richard Gollub.
I'm an attorney licensed to practice law in the state
of New York, and my concentration is art world issues.
(00:27):
I had a case years ago involving a portrait of
Paloma Picasso by Picasso, and there were two precisely the
same portraits of Picasso's daughter, one owned by a dealer
in Spain and one owned by a collector in Switzerland.
They were identical. Claude Picasso came over to the gallery
(00:47):
and unpacked the painting that Cogozian was about to show
in a Picasso show, and Claude said, well, the nails
arrusted that attacked the canvas to the stretcher on this painting,
and on the other painting the nails and not rusted.
And that was his basis of saying that one picture
was a counterfeit and the other picture was not. I
don't think that's a basis to determine authenticity. Authenticity can
(01:12):
fall under the general rubric of fraud, but authenticity is
a world in and of itself where painting has been counterfeited.
Somebody has made a painting and claims it's by a
certain artist in that style to the artist, and in
fact that artist never made that painting. Now, if somebody
(01:32):
sells you that painting and claims that that painting is
by a Matisse or it's by Warhole, and it's not,
that's fraud, but it's actually really counterfeit. Is what you're
going to have to prove. People are always fooling everybody
in the art world. It's a place where that game
is played by everybody. And Friedman would never have imagined
(01:55):
growing up to be the most notorious dealer of the
New York art market. She might have been an art professor, perhaps,
but as her career blossomed and she came to see
just how good she was at selling art, being a
dealer suited her quite well. And not just a run
of the mill dealer, to be sure, but one of distinction,
(02:18):
helping artists and collectors she loved. She was born Anne
Louise Fertig in the early nineteen fifties in Scarsdale, a
wealthy bedroom community north of New York City. Her father
was a vice president of a commercial real estate company
called Williams and Company. Perhaps not by chance, Anne would
(02:40):
marry a commercial real estate executive herself, Robert Lawrence Freedman
real Men and told one of her staffers worked in commercial,
not residential real estate. Two people in Ann Friedman's life
would play an instrumental role in inspiring her art career.
(03:00):
The first was her mother, Hilda Fertig, who first brought
Anne to New York City's art museums as a child.
The other was H. W. Jansen, the legendary author of
the History of Art, the standard text for millions of
students around the world. Jansen was a Russian emigre. Through
(03:20):
the nineteen forties, he taught at Washington University in St.
Louis and helped expand the breadth of these schools art collection.
He left a legacy for generations of students to admire,
though not without controversy. Not a single female artist was
described in his epic tone. Ann Friedman would become one
(03:43):
of those captivated new students upon her own arrival at
Washington University in the late nineteen sixties, earning a Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree in the summer of nineteen seventy one.
When Anne graduated, finding gainful employment wasn't easy. New York
was on the verge of a nasty recession. Somehow, Anne
(04:05):
managed to reach Robert Miller, a senior director of the
American Gallery on Street, and talked him into granting her
a job interview. Whatever she said at the meeting, it worked.
Friedman began working as a receptionist at the Emeric and
immersed herself in the color field painters for which it
was known abstract expressionists of a softer school like Maurice
(04:29):
Lewis and Helen Frankenthaler, with their broadwashes of color, as
opposed to the bold, almost brutal strokes of the action
painters like Jackson Pollock and William Dacooning. Here's writer Michael Schneerson,
and starting salary was five thousand dollars a year, or
a hundred dollars a week. It was typical pay for
(04:50):
newcomers in a world where wealthy parents who were expected
to do their part. Eager and perhaps somewhat desperate, and
began overstepping her lowly tasks and started actually selling art.
And she was successful, so much so that her boss
was thunderstruck. As Anne said herself in one of my
interviews with her for Vanity Fair, she said, Andre started
(05:11):
seeing more and more invoices on his desk than he
ever could have imagined. There was a sense of some disbelief,
if not resentment. No one paved the way for me
to sell, but I sought out the opportunity and I
never looked back. Her personal life was bossoming as well.
Anne would marry her fiancee, Robert Friedman, on Christmas Day.
(05:36):
A Long Island Rabbi Jack Stern performed the ceremony at
Manhattan's Regency Hotel. Anne and Robert would have a daughter, Jessica,
and moved to an apartment on East seventy two Street,
where they still live. Despite her early successes, both personally
and professionally, it would be fair to say that Anne
(05:58):
wasn't embraced by her colleagues at the Emeric Gallery. She
glowed with ambition and showed little interest in making new friends.
Rumor had it that one of Anne's colleagues threw a
typewriter at her. Another time, the owner of the gallery,
Andre Emrick, returned to New York from a trip to
(06:19):
London with little gifts for his staffers. Emeric announced that
his gift to Anne was a Rose Royce. Supposedly, she
raced to the window to see if there was a
real one parked on the street. Those were the kinds
of expectations she had, the staffer said. It was, of
course a little toy. She was very ambitious. People at
(06:41):
the gallery hated her. Emrick's widow, Suzanne, said the galleries
registrar once wrote to owner Andrea Emrick about Anne and
how she behaved when he was gone. She was vicious,
the registrar fumed. While Anne was rising at Emeric, another
(07:02):
young ambitious staffer was a step ahead of her at
the Knoedler Gallery. Leslie Feely came to Ndler in nineteen
seventy one with the legendary dealer Larry Rubin, when the
armand hammer era of Ndler ownership began. By this time,
the Knodler was no longer the most venerable gallery in
(07:23):
New York. Those days were long gone. By one the
gallery had slumped to a third rate institution, with artists
like Leroy Neiman, who was most well known for depicting bright,
splashy sports scenes with crowd pleasing speed. The longtime dealer
Richard Fagen famously said that armand Hammer bought a cadaver
(07:45):
when he bought the Knoedler. As Leslie Feely recalled, the
Knoedler had no contemporary art at that point in the
early nineteen seventies. I never thought of I don't think
it was active. Armand Hammer needed a dealer who could
help bring prestige and clients back to Knodler. In Larry Reuben.
(08:06):
He'd found his man. Starting with the brilliant Frank Stella
and Kenneth Noland. Reuben was proving his value to Nodler
and armand Hammer right away. He also brought in Richard Debencorne,
the great abstract landscape painter. That's why he signed up Larry.
For the artists, Leslie Pheely and Larry came in together.
(08:30):
That's Joe Stevens. Joe was the Nodler's art handler. My
main job was I was the shipping manager and the
head preparative of all the artwork and hanging shows. Leslie
was Larry's partner assistant. She was on a higher level.
She sold artwork. Leslie worked at Nodler for nearly half
(08:52):
a decade until she left abruptly in nineteen seventy seven.
As Leslie said, armand Hammer didn't keep his word with her.
He'd offered up her compensation for artwork sold. She said
yes on a Friday. On Monday, he came back and said,
I'm sorry, I can't give you that deal. With that,
Leslie left to become an independent dealer on her own.
(09:13):
I happened to gallery when Frank Gary built gallery for me.
I mean he was my architect. He's terrivic friend. I think,
a great architect. And it was a very beautiful gallery
on sixty eight in Madison. That was when Anne became
Larry Rubin's right hand, taking Leslie's place. And then Anne
(09:35):
Freedman came in and the changes were happening. She was
the receptionist, very knowledgeable woman, you know, she knew her stuff,
and she had that I always called as a gifted gap.
She was incredible talker. What change did you observe? Well,
she did move up, you know, she went move right up.
(09:57):
She get out, and she wand up to get Aronal office.
Since she started selling art work, often vying for paintings
with her from outside the gallery, Leslie would come to
know Ann friedman style of business all too well. Almost
from the beginning. It sounds like you've got a sense
of this woman not only as abrasive and difficult and unpleasant,
(10:20):
but someone who was, you know, willing to do anything
to make a profit. Absolutely. It was in the fall
of nine seven when Leslie left the Notler, with an
eager and Friedman stepping in to take her place. After
her departure, Leslie's dealings with Larry Reuben on works by
(10:42):
the artist which her Deep in Corn came from outside
the gallery. The work was beautiful, anyone could see that,
but the heat of Deep in Corns market was also
due to the way he worked. He would produce a
dozens of ocean park paintings and drawings, then send them
in one great clump to Knoedler dealer. Larry Reuben would
(11:05):
earmark new paintings for his favorite clients, many of them
dealers themselves. Leslie Feely was lucky enough to be on
that list. To Anne's intense irritation, there was nothing she
could do to keep Larry from allocating a Deep and
Corn to Leslie when one of those batches of new
work came in. I think I bought a deepon Corn
(11:26):
in every Deep in Corn show. I was still friendly
with Larry, which was good, and I was friendly with
the Deep and Corns, and I loved his work, and
it was so exciting for me to buy one. One
staffer at Knoedler said that opening those Deep and Corn
shipments was like opening presents on Christmas morning. The paintings
(11:47):
would be all lined up. These were the days when
an ocean park crossed maybe eighteen to twenty dollars. Larry
would let Ann Friedman have first pick. The staffer later
said to Lar why let Anne have first choice? Because
Ruben said, with a laugh, I know she'll pick the
worst one. Would she be buying Deep in Corns as well? Well?
(12:11):
She must have. I don't think she had a particularly
good relationship with the artist, or the wife or the children.
Who were you know who ended up managing these days
soon enough, to the shock of the gallery staff, and
acquired the title of the head of Contemporary Art sales.
(12:33):
She felt she'd paid her dues as the front receptionist
and demanded a position of greater distinction. The title was
quite a leap, perhaps, but her sales skills were being noticed.
She was known as the rainmaker. That's artist Michael David.
Michael came to Knoedler as a client of the gallery
in a collector introduced my work to end and then
(12:59):
and Larry came to the studio. There was this desire
to find young artists at that point, and I think
that Larry liked me, not so much for the work
at that point, but because of the way I spoke,
in the speed of my speaking reminds him of Frank Stella.
I know that there was a hierarchy of floors. You
go past that red velvet rope and then there'll be
one floor, and then it would be Ann's office in
(13:21):
Larry's office, and Larry would focus more on the higher
end blue chip and Ann would do more of the
volume selling. That was my impression. Joe Stevens remembers what
it was like handling art for private meetings with Ann's
clients at not Learn. She had a huge supply of
(13:41):
artwork in her office was always painted and taken care of,
and you know, she had six French windows overlooking seventy Street.
He had a big, huge office. You know, she had
a couch in front of it, sat down with the clients.
Very convenient and well done. You know. It was always
very clean and immaculate. And we used to come up
(14:03):
and you know, you have the two people have to
pull out one of these big motherwells, you know, so
you know, put it right back and pull out at
all this It was kind of really cool to do
that because I'm listening to how what they're paying for
these things, and I'm going, you know, it was an
incredible mansive money that these people paid for him. Here's
(14:25):
artist Michael David again. There was also a thing that
you know, there was always you know, we don't sell work.
We place work, and you know we'll always take the
work back. Was it true? Could you decide you didn't
like a stella and bring it back and get your
money back. I don't think that you get your money back.
I think they would make efforts to sell it for you. Interestingly,
(14:48):
in my Vanity Fair story, Michael David had described Anne
rather more sharply. He said she wasn't someone you wanted
to play poker with. Or someone you wanted to cross.
He's a complicated person. She was great at what she did.
I never saw evidence of her being unethical. She had
an edge, she took no prisoners, and she could be vindictive.
(15:08):
I think for her it was always about making it rain.
I think that was how she defined herself. That may
have been a fatal flaw that led her not to
be as mindful as she should have been. But at
some point after the Vanity Fair story appeared, Anne had
taken Michael David to lunch more than once and conveyed
how hurt she had been to be called vindictive, and
(15:30):
so David's portrait of her had softened over the years.
For k Nodler's artists, like Michael David, art was never
anything less than a business. But how did the money
change hands between the buyer, the seller, and the artist.
That's after the break. The financial arrangement between Ndler and
(15:59):
its artists seemed simple enough on the surface, everything was
on paper before computers. Recalled one staffer, if the price
for a painting just sold was say one hundred thousand dollars,
then the standards split on painting sold was fifty fifty
fifty percent for the artist and fifty percent for the gallery.
But at Nidler there was a category called report to Artists.
(16:25):
Instead of being recorded as a sale for one hundred
thousand dollars, the report to artist would show the sale as, say,
ninety six thousand dollars. When the fifty fifty split was made,
the artist got fifty percent of ninety six thousand dollars,
not of one hundred thousand dollars. It wasn't a big
reduction for the artist. In fact, it was so small
(16:49):
that most of the artists were probably perfectly happy pocketing
their fifty percent of the report to artists that they
failed to question the galleries accounting methods. The staffer, a
new arrival at the time, questioned one or two people
about the practice. To her, it seemed unsavory, a red flag,
(17:09):
as she put it, but she felt if she pushed
too far, she'd put her job in jeopardy. Donald Sultan,
one of the Knodler galleries younger artists at the time,
confirmed that Anne kept two separate sets of books. Sultan
said she told people she sold an artwork for X,
(17:30):
but she actually sold it for X plus y. Either
she or the gallery kept the difference Another delicate matter
at Knodler was the upstairs presence of an accountant, Dr.
Maury Leebovitz, who ran a much larger operation. He oversaw
not just the Kndler, but also the very commercial Hammer
(17:52):
Gallery situated on Park Avenue, just above Street, which the
Hammer family had bought some time before. He was a
shadowy figure. The staffers seventh Maury You were not allowed
to even mention his presence because they didn't want anyone
to know the two galleries were run together. Why because
(18:12):
while the Noodlers sold art of impeccable quality to wealthy collectors,
the Hammer Gallery over on Park Avenue sold tacky artists
like Leroy Nieman with his highly commercial sports scenes to
Larry Reuben and the rest of Knoedler, Nieman was an embarrassment.
In spite of this, Nieman was the biggest earner for
(18:34):
the two galleries combined, and his profits helped prop up
the galleries bottom line. There was nothing illegal about this,
It was just a way of disguising the galleries finances.
The k Nodler would disguise its finances later on too,
in a much different and very illegal way. By the
(18:56):
nineteen eighties, Anne had become a fixture at Knodler, selling
far more than anyone else at the gallery, and thus
accruing more power as she did. One former staffer recalls
Anne saying, I could have sold catalogs, but I chose
to sell art. Perhaps she was being facetious, but to
the staffer that sort of rang true. When I used
(19:20):
to go to the Nolar Gallery, which I did every
trip to New York, to see Larry, perhaps to buy
something or you know, just have Blanche whatever. Ann Friedman's
office was not an office. It was a desk in
the showroom where they had their paintings in racks. She
would be right there. That's John Burgruin, who San Francisco
(19:42):
Gallery remains a bastion of the art business more than
half a century since he opened it on Grant Avenue.
And Friedman was always, as far as I'm concerned, controversial person.
You know, I don't. I often wondered how Larry dealt
with her on a day to day basis. What was
striking about her presence, the fact that the fact that
(20:04):
she was even there in a way, but what was
her style? Well, she was aggressive. Another former staffer took
a slightly softer view, She was demanding, but not totally unfair.
She was like that type in the Devil Wears product
that was Ann. You never felt close to her. The
staffer added, there's an almost masculine quality, hard to read.
(20:25):
She was tough and a lot of people ended up
not liking her. The note was a long time manager
and art handler, Joe Stevens once stopped at her desk
in the late nineteen eighties after hours. When she was gone,
his eyes widened. There was Anne's latest paycheck. I was
juned and she was already made seventies thousand dollars. It
(20:51):
was June and she had already made three seventy five
for the year. So far, so far. That's a lot
of money in the late eighties. That's what I found
that these were the go go years in the contemporary
art market. Dealers like Leo Castelli and Mary Boone were
selling big, bold canvases of artists like Julian Schnabel and
(21:14):
Eric Fischel, along with David Sally and Ross Bleckner. Abstract
art was out along with minimalist art. Figurative art was
back in with a vengeance. The Kndler wasn't quite at
the heart of all this once again it was selling
(21:36):
the art, no longer quite of its day under Larry Reuben. However,
it did well enough when Larry was the head of
the gallery. We weren't in trouble for money. It was
it was a name armand Hammer died in leaving his
grandson Michael as chairman of Ndler as well as head
(21:59):
of the tacky Hammer Gallery on Park Avenue. Michael Hammer
was an elusive figure, known mostly for his born again
evangelical zeal, his deep affinity for tanning machines, and later
for his two dozen or so vintage automobiles. But he
was smart enough to let Larry Reuben keep running the
(22:20):
Noteler gallery, and though the whole art market suffered a
major recession in the early nineteen nineties with the galleries
closing right and left, Knoler survived due in combination to
the revenues from the Hammer Gallery and blue chip artists
who stayed loyal to Larry Reuben. What Michael Hammer failed
(22:40):
to sense, however, was that Anne was no longer a
docile salesperson for Knoler. She felt she was the one
keeping the gallery afloat. The major sales were hers, and
yet the gallery wasn't giving her the credit she felt
she deserved. The more underappreciated she felt, the more resentment
(23:01):
she radiated. It was about that time in the early nineties,
said Larry Reuben started planning his exit. I didn't understand
him leaving the gallery, but he missed Europe. He had
a house in the south of France, and then he
had the house in Italy. He wanted a semi retire.
Joe Stevens recalls Larry's departure. I knew something was wrong now.
(23:29):
I didn't know if it was because the galery was
taken over by Michael. I couldn't figure it out. Reuben
wanted a life of European travel, yet he still wanted
to retain control of the gallery. He would manage to
do just that by bringing in a successor, one who
(23:51):
reported directly to him. This was an expert in multiples
named Donald Staff. Multiple does mean any art made in
more than one copy. Usually it's a numbered and signed edition.
Lithographs are multiples, for example, so we're engravings, which were
part of the origins of Noeler Back in the eighteen forties.
(24:12):
Donald Staff had done multiples for the great pop artist
Roy Lichtenstein, and the two had grown close. It was
a good chance that Staff might get Lichtenstein to join
the Notlar gallery. Larry Reuben thought he had talked Michael
Hammer into adopting this plan. Larry would direct the gallery
from Italy, where he had a country home, and Larry
and Donald Staff would run it together, and Friedman would
(24:36):
be the hard driving salesperson. I'm sure at that point
she was saying, I'm making all the sales. He's not
doing anything. You don't need him, You'll do just as
many sales, which was probably true in a sense. No, no,
but she had no connections to get Liechtenstein or Ralschenberg.
(24:57):
The other guy had better connections. Donald aft it. Yeah, yeah,
And so even though Notally didn't yet have Rauschenberg or
there was a hope of it, whereas there was no
hope if if Anne was the head of the gallery
she didn't know any of these artists. I mean, what
what sort of self delusion you've called it? The news
(25:23):
of Larry's retirement and Staff's imminent arrival in the fall
of infuriated Anne. Later she said she just wanted to
know what Don sass Roll would be That seemed to
cause a problems and put it dryly to me, she
wanted more than that. She wanted to know why she
shouldn't be made director of the gallery after seventeen years,
when she was the one who sold the art and
(25:45):
shored up the company's bottom line. Like a heat seeking
missile and shot into Michael Hammer's office on a mid
November day in and took him on directly. She could
do everything Reuben and Saff could do, she pointed out
to Hammer. She could cultivate new artists, organized their shows,
(26:08):
and run the business. At the same time. She would
sell a lot more art than Reuben or Staff put together.
Why not let her run the gallery with Michael Hammer's help,
of course, and send the old men packing. And must
have been persuasive because Michael Hammer changed his mind on
the spot and gave her the job. He did that
(26:31):
even though sav had just been formerly hired as co
director and was sent a letter detailing the terms of
his employment. According to Staff's lawyer, the letter was signed
by Staff and sent back to Knodler to be countersigned.
It was sitting in an inbox at the Knoedler when
Hammer changed his mind and seized it. Staff's lawyers accused
(26:54):
Hammer of preaching an oral agreement, but the charge went nowhere.
There would be no more talk of Staff and rubenous
co directors. There would be just one director and Friedman.
We'll be back in a minute. Ann's new title seemed
(27:17):
to assure her great success, but Leslie Feeley since the
story would turn out badly, if only because of Anne's temperament.
She was not a people person. She would try to
you know, sway people gush over people, but a lot
of people didn't go for her. One collecting couple who
(27:38):
resisted her charms was the mayer Hoffs. Wonderful, fabulous collect
According to one person in Baltimore, they would have nothing
to do with Anne. A lot of people had that reaction,
like me, Yeah, whether collectors or dealers, anything so interesting
that she should alienated them all and yet still get
(27:59):
this job. So thanks to Michael Hammer, I guess right.
So the amazing thing to me about this story at
this point is that you know, Anne gets her wish,
and be careful what you wish for, because now there's
no one to guide her and to keep her from
making truly calamitous decisions. Making a calamitous. I don't I
(28:26):
think she wanted to make more money, so she didn't
care how she did it. I mean, don't you think
it was in her blood? She wasn't making enough money
to carry the gallery, and now that she had gotten
this job and this power and pushed aside any chance
(28:46):
of these other artists coming in, also having artists leave
because of her deep and colorin gone. Wow, when did
that happen? I think Rodway, I think she was pushed
out of Stephen Corn right away because they never liked her.
(29:08):
Joe Stevens got an earful of Larry Reuben's fury that
Stevens drove Larry across town that day. We're coming back
from Frank Stella's studio and you got a call. It
might have been a treasury. He spoke to me. He goes,
dad fucking and now he's boiling. He wants to kill him.
(29:31):
He says, what the are you fucking fitting me? And
he just rent and raved. So he says, I says, Larry,
what's going on? He says that bitch, and but he
didn't get into it. He just says that you'll you'll
hear about it soon enough. So I had said to him,
(29:52):
Mrs Larry, do I have to get another job? He says,
I don't know, Joe, he is things are happening right now.
I don't know. He didn't specify it, like say, if
you get along with an you'll be around for a while,
you know. But he was absolutely furious, and within a
(30:15):
month he was gone and had seized power in the
last ticking moments she had while that letter from Donald
sav lay in Michael Hammer's inbox. With that move, she
changed the course of her life and ultimately the Knodler
(30:37):
Galleries too, But it came with a drawback. The problem
was that the art market of the early to mid
was terrible like all her rivals, and needed top quality
art to sell. It wasn't so easy to find, especially
for a dealer who lacked a lifetime of friendships with
(30:59):
famous artists. Anne's predicament was actually worse than it seemed.
Her harsh personality and the swiftness with which she had
grabbed her prize had alienated many of the galleries living artists,
along with the estates that represented deceased ones. The Adolph
(31:19):
Gottlieb Foundation was alarmed, so was the David Smith Foundation.
The Robert Motherwell Foundation and the Richard Deepencorn Foundation. Upon
Anne's coup, they all left the gallery. Joe Stevens recalls
Anne's rise to leadership with mixed feelings. She became an
(31:40):
officer of the company. You know, she became like a
vice president. So she changed. Now she had authority to me,
she just became bitchy because she knew who she was.
She sold a lot of all work. She was a
big time salesperson. I had really good working with her
the very beginning, and then she became the borce. She
(32:04):
never really said nothing much to me in the beginning
because she knew. I knew my job I do. I
took care of everything. I took care of everything that
had to be taken care of. I was the top
sergeant in that place, and it's in physical I took
care of the building everything. If a window cracked, I
had have it fixed, the air conditioning. I did it all.
But my main job was I was the shipping manager
(32:27):
and the head preparative of all the artwork. I don't
care if you the precedent the company, I deserve respect.
I take care of this whole gallery from the minute
it opens to the minute it closes, and I handled
all the artwork, every bit of it. In that capacity,
(32:52):
there was a lot that Joe would see as the
gallery began to sink and money became an issue. Even
as an began wielding her new power, as noted as Director,
sales were plummeting, and aggressive and ruthless tactics had pushed
away the gallery's best clients and the staff were turning
against her, and Friedman was now totally on her own
(33:16):
to decide which artists to promote and sell. Her standards
became the galleries standards. Her eagerness to close these deals
conveyed a clear message, sell, sell, sell, no matter what.
This guy, I think his name was Bud Larkin. He
used to be a directive of like Bewitched. He bought
(33:37):
this Pollock. Now, if you remember, Michael, do you go
back when Cartier was sending out empty packages so people
don't have to pay taxes? Absolutely, Okay, here's the scam
that Joe is referring to. Cardier, the world famous jewelry brand,
was helping its customers evade sales tax. At the time,
(33:58):
those taxes in New York's city were eight point to
five out of state buyers were exempt from those taxes.
So the scam was when a customer came in and
purchased an expensive item, cartier would ship an empty box
to a bogus address and the customer would walk out
of the store with their merchandise. And it worked for
(34:19):
a while. Time Magazine reported in April that at least
two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in taxes went unpaid
on a hundred and twenty five sales over three years.
Similar scams at the time were estimated to have cost
New York State and local governments more than a hundred
million and tax revenue annually. Well, this guy here had
(34:43):
to go and delivered his painting to Kauai, Hawaii. Hid
I jumped on a plane in North flew Non stopped
to Honold, got in another plane and flew Kauai and delivered.
It took me seventeen hours, seven million dollars US. You
know why, because she saved dollars in taxes by me delivering.
(35:07):
It was your sense that that was common place at Noler. No.
I did it once, and I said I'll never do
it again. In the aftermath of Larry Ruben's departure, the
changes at Ndler were profound with the gallery still struggling
through tough times, and became more demanding and sharp tongued,
(35:31):
even imperious. Even Michael Hammer, the galley's owner, seemed to
defer to Enne more often than not and was always
screaming at everybody. One staffer recalled, always screaming for himI Andratti,
her assistant. If she didn't have the right pen, she
would call to himaid to get her more. As personal
(35:51):
assistance came and went in dizzying succession. If you unwrapped
her sandwich, she wouldn't eat it, says one former assist.
If you answered the phone in the wrong way, she
would pounce on you. One woman was fired after three
days for having too strong an Eastern European accent, a
staff are recalled. Another lasted two weeks for being too
(36:15):
young and inexperienced, So the next assistant they hired was
older in her forties. She was fired after a few
months because Anne seemed threatened by her. One staffer recalled
that she and her colleagues kept a list of all
the assistants who came and went during the years she
was there. As she said, if you made it past
(36:37):
the hazing rituals. You became part of this dysfunctional family.
The most memorable of that long line of the demoralized
was a fragile Southerner straight out of a Tennessee Williams play,
and would call her five or six times a day.
One staff are recalled, they would be crying and screaming,
(37:04):
and Friedman's Nodler Gallery was in free fall. Help would
come not long after Anne's ascension at a Soho art
gallery opening, surprisingly in the form of a demure Mexican
art dealer in her mid forties named La Rosalis. Anne
(37:25):
had never met Rosalee, and upon learning that she had
something to do with a gallery and Great Neck Long Island,
she might have given the woman a pain to smile
and moved on. But Rosalves had sailed up to Anne
on the arm of the Nodler's own him Andrade, and
so Anne was intrigued. From such a casual meeting, the
(37:47):
whole art market would be seismically altered, leaving the Knodler
itself devastated and ultimately doomed, depending on who you asked him.
And Ratty was either a long trusted employee of the gallery,
harmless and endearing or an agent provocateur who saw a
(38:08):
way to put Ann Friedman together with hero Rosalee, ensuring
that all three of them would profit from their endeavors.
Oh please, that's not a connection. I mean, that's just
trying to push the guilt onto this poor, uneducated sweet man.
It has nothing to do with I mean, Anne would
say that, of course, But I take your point. I
(38:30):
mean it sounds like she was just just naming someone
else besides her. Okay, he introduced her. So what she
made the judgment? She That's right, She just nothing else.
I mean it was totally her call. Next time on
(38:52):
art Fraud, she swears that she didn't know, which seems
hard to believe. Should she have known? Yeah, I believe
from the beginning she knew these were fakes. They had
no provenances. She made up provenances. Every Day, Art Fraud
(39:13):
is brought to you by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio.
Our executive producers are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself,
and Michael Shnayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer, our writer is Michael Schneerson. I can
(40:01):
can't be anything in add
When you go into a gallery, you're going to a museum,
and you look at a painting, you don't know what
the story is behind the painting. It's like seeing somebody
in the street who's an old man. You don't know
all the adventures he's had, and all the marriages he's had,
and all the divorces he's had. My name's Aaron Richard Gollub.
I'm an attorney licensed to practice law in the state
of New York, and my concentration is art world issues.
(00:27):
I had a case years ago involving a portrait of
Paloma Picasso by Picasso, and there were two precisely the
same portraits of Picasso's daughter, one owned by a dealer
in Spain and one owned by a collector in Switzerland.
They were identical. Claude Picasso came over to the gallery
(00:47):
and unpacked the painting that Cogozian was about to show
in a Picasso show, and Claude said, well, the nails
arrusted that attacked the canvas to the stretcher on this painting,
and on the other painting the nails and not rusted.
And that was his basis of saying that one picture
was a counterfeit and the other picture was not. I
don't think that's a basis to determine authenticity. Authenticity can
(01:12):
fall under the general rubric of fraud, but authenticity is
a world in and of itself where painting has been counterfeited.
Somebody has made a painting and claims it's by a
certain artist in that style to the artist, and in
fact that artist never made that painting. Now, if somebody
(01:32):
sells you that painting and claims that that painting is
by a Matisse or it's by Warhole, and it's not,
that's fraud, but it's actually really counterfeit. Is what you're
going to have to prove. People are always fooling everybody
in the art world. It's a place where that game
is played by everybody. And Friedman would never have imagined
(01:55):
growing up to be the most notorious dealer of the
New York art market. She might have been an art professor, perhaps,
but as her career blossomed and she came to see
just how good she was at selling art, being a
dealer suited her quite well. And not just a run
of the mill dealer, to be sure, but one of distinction,
(02:18):
helping artists and collectors she loved. She was born Anne
Louise Fertig in the early nineteen fifties in Scarsdale, a
wealthy bedroom community north of New York City. Her father
was a vice president of a commercial real estate company
called Williams and Company. Perhaps not by chance, Anne would
(02:40):
marry a commercial real estate executive herself, Robert Lawrence Freedman
real Men and told one of her staffers worked in commercial,
not residential real estate. Two people in Ann Friedman's life
would play an instrumental role in inspiring her art career.
(03:00):
The first was her mother, Hilda Fertig, who first brought
Anne to New York City's art museums as a child.
The other was H. W. Jansen, the legendary author of
the History of Art, the standard text for millions of
students around the world. Jansen was a Russian emigre. Through
(03:20):
the nineteen forties, he taught at Washington University in St.
Louis and helped expand the breadth of these schools art collection.
He left a legacy for generations of students to admire,
though not without controversy. Not a single female artist was
described in his epic tone. Ann Friedman would become one
(03:43):
of those captivated new students upon her own arrival at
Washington University in the late nineteen sixties, earning a Bachelor
of Fine Arts degree in the summer of nineteen seventy one.
When Anne graduated, finding gainful employment wasn't easy. New York
was on the verge of a nasty recession. Somehow, Anne
(04:05):
managed to reach Robert Miller, a senior director of the
American Gallery on Street, and talked him into granting her
a job interview. Whatever she said at the meeting, it worked.
Friedman began working as a receptionist at the Emeric and
immersed herself in the color field painters for which it
was known abstract expressionists of a softer school like Maurice
(04:29):
Lewis and Helen Frankenthaler, with their broadwashes of color, as
opposed to the bold, almost brutal strokes of the action
painters like Jackson Pollock and William Dacooning. Here's writer Michael Schneerson,
and starting salary was five thousand dollars a year, or
a hundred dollars a week. It was typical pay for
(04:50):
newcomers in a world where wealthy parents who were expected
to do their part. Eager and perhaps somewhat desperate, and
began overstepping her lowly tasks and started actually selling art.
And she was successful, so much so that her boss
was thunderstruck. As Anne said herself in one of my
interviews with her for Vanity Fair, she said, Andre started
(05:11):
seeing more and more invoices on his desk than he
ever could have imagined. There was a sense of some disbelief,
if not resentment. No one paved the way for me
to sell, but I sought out the opportunity and I
never looked back. Her personal life was bossoming as well.
Anne would marry her fiancee, Robert Friedman, on Christmas Day.
(05:36):
A Long Island Rabbi Jack Stern performed the ceremony at
Manhattan's Regency Hotel. Anne and Robert would have a daughter, Jessica,
and moved to an apartment on East seventy two Street,
where they still live. Despite her early successes, both personally
and professionally, it would be fair to say that Anne
(05:58):
wasn't embraced by her colleagues at the Emeric Gallery. She
glowed with ambition and showed little interest in making new friends.
Rumor had it that one of Anne's colleagues threw a
typewriter at her. Another time, the owner of the gallery,
Andre Emrick, returned to New York from a trip to
(06:19):
London with little gifts for his staffers. Emeric announced that
his gift to Anne was a Rose Royce. Supposedly, she
raced to the window to see if there was a
real one parked on the street. Those were the kinds
of expectations she had, the staffer said. It was, of
course a little toy. She was very ambitious. People at
(06:41):
the gallery hated her. Emrick's widow, Suzanne, said the galleries
registrar once wrote to owner Andrea Emrick about Anne and
how she behaved when he was gone. She was vicious,
the registrar fumed. While Anne was rising at Emeric, another
(07:02):
young ambitious staffer was a step ahead of her at
the Knoedler Gallery. Leslie Feely came to Ndler in nineteen
seventy one with the legendary dealer Larry Rubin, when the
armand hammer era of Ndler ownership began. By this time,
the Knodler was no longer the most venerable gallery in
(07:23):
New York. Those days were long gone. By one the
gallery had slumped to a third rate institution, with artists
like Leroy Neiman, who was most well known for depicting bright,
splashy sports scenes with crowd pleasing speed. The longtime dealer
Richard Fagen famously said that armand Hammer bought a cadaver
(07:45):
when he bought the Knoedler. As Leslie Feely recalled, the
Knoedler had no contemporary art at that point in the
early nineteen seventies. I never thought of I don't think
it was active. Armand Hammer needed a dealer who could
help bring prestige and clients back to Knodler. In Larry Reuben.
(08:06):
He'd found his man. Starting with the brilliant Frank Stella
and Kenneth Noland. Reuben was proving his value to Nodler
and armand Hammer right away. He also brought in Richard Debencorne,
the great abstract landscape painter. That's why he signed up Larry.
For the artists, Leslie Pheely and Larry came in together.
(08:30):
That's Joe Stevens. Joe was the Nodler's art handler. My
main job was I was the shipping manager and the
head preparative of all the artwork and hanging shows. Leslie
was Larry's partner assistant. She was on a higher level.
She sold artwork. Leslie worked at Nodler for nearly half
(08:52):
a decade until she left abruptly in nineteen seventy seven.
As Leslie said, armand Hammer didn't keep his word with her.
He'd offered up her compensation for artwork sold. She said
yes on a Friday. On Monday, he came back and said,
I'm sorry, I can't give you that deal. With that,
Leslie left to become an independent dealer on her own.
(09:13):
I happened to gallery when Frank Gary built gallery for me.
I mean he was my architect. He's terrivic friend. I think,
a great architect. And it was a very beautiful gallery
on sixty eight in Madison. That was when Anne became
Larry Rubin's right hand, taking Leslie's place. And then Anne
(09:35):
Freedman came in and the changes were happening. She was
the receptionist, very knowledgeable woman, you know, she knew her stuff,
and she had that I always called as a gifted gap.
She was incredible talker. What change did you observe? Well,
she did move up, you know, she went move right up.
(09:57):
She get out, and she wand up to get Aronal office.
Since she started selling art work, often vying for paintings
with her from outside the gallery, Leslie would come to
know Ann friedman style of business all too well. Almost
from the beginning. It sounds like you've got a sense
of this woman not only as abrasive and difficult and unpleasant,
(10:20):
but someone who was, you know, willing to do anything
to make a profit. Absolutely. It was in the fall
of nine seven when Leslie left the Notler, with an
eager and Friedman stepping in to take her place. After
her departure, Leslie's dealings with Larry Reuben on works by
(10:42):
the artist which her Deep in Corn came from outside
the gallery. The work was beautiful, anyone could see that,
but the heat of Deep in Corns market was also
due to the way he worked. He would produce a
dozens of ocean park paintings and drawings, then send them
in one great clump to Knoedler dealer. Larry Reuben would
(11:05):
earmark new paintings for his favorite clients, many of them
dealers themselves. Leslie Feely was lucky enough to be on
that list. To Anne's intense irritation, there was nothing she
could do to keep Larry from allocating a Deep and
Corn to Leslie when one of those batches of new
work came in. I think I bought a deepon Corn
(11:26):
in every Deep in Corn show. I was still friendly
with Larry, which was good, and I was friendly with
the Deep and Corns, and I loved his work, and
it was so exciting for me to buy one. One
staffer at Knoedler said that opening those Deep and Corn
shipments was like opening presents on Christmas morning. The paintings
(11:47):
would be all lined up. These were the days when
an ocean park crossed maybe eighteen to twenty dollars. Larry
would let Ann Friedman have first pick. The staffer later
said to Lar why let Anne have first choice? Because
Ruben said, with a laugh, I know she'll pick the
worst one. Would she be buying Deep in Corns as well? Well?
(12:11):
She must have. I don't think she had a particularly
good relationship with the artist, or the wife or the children.
Who were you know who ended up managing these days
soon enough, to the shock of the gallery staff, and
acquired the title of the head of Contemporary Art sales.
(12:33):
She felt she'd paid her dues as the front receptionist
and demanded a position of greater distinction. The title was
quite a leap, perhaps, but her sales skills were being noticed.
She was known as the rainmaker. That's artist Michael David.
Michael came to Knoedler as a client of the gallery
in a collector introduced my work to end and then
(12:59):
and Larry came to the studio. There was this desire
to find young artists at that point, and I think
that Larry liked me, not so much for the work
at that point, but because of the way I spoke,
in the speed of my speaking reminds him of Frank Stella.
I know that there was a hierarchy of floors. You
go past that red velvet rope and then there'll be
one floor, and then it would be Ann's office in
(13:21):
Larry's office, and Larry would focus more on the higher
end blue chip and Ann would do more of the
volume selling. That was my impression. Joe Stevens remembers what
it was like handling art for private meetings with Ann's
clients at not Learn. She had a huge supply of
(13:41):
artwork in her office was always painted and taken care of,
and you know, she had six French windows overlooking seventy Street.
He had a big, huge office. You know, she had
a couch in front of it, sat down with the clients.
Very convenient and well done. You know. It was always
very clean and immaculate. And we used to come up
(14:03):
and you know, you have the two people have to
pull out one of these big motherwells, you know, so
you know, put it right back and pull out at
all this It was kind of really cool to do
that because I'm listening to how what they're paying for
these things, and I'm going, you know, it was an
incredible mansive money that these people paid for him. Here's
(14:25):
artist Michael David again. There was also a thing that
you know, there was always you know, we don't sell work.
We place work, and you know we'll always take the
work back. Was it true? Could you decide you didn't
like a stella and bring it back and get your
money back. I don't think that you get your money back.
I think they would make efforts to sell it for you. Interestingly,
(14:48):
in my Vanity Fair story, Michael David had described Anne
rather more sharply. He said she wasn't someone you wanted
to play poker with. Or someone you wanted to cross.
He's a complicated person. She was great at what she did.
I never saw evidence of her being unethical. She had
an edge, she took no prisoners, and she could be vindictive.
(15:08):
I think for her it was always about making it rain.
I think that was how she defined herself. That may
have been a fatal flaw that led her not to
be as mindful as she should have been. But at
some point after the Vanity Fair story appeared, Anne had
taken Michael David to lunch more than once and conveyed
how hurt she had been to be called vindictive, and
(15:30):
so David's portrait of her had softened over the years.
For k Nodler's artists, like Michael David, art was never
anything less than a business. But how did the money
change hands between the buyer, the seller, and the artist.
That's after the break. The financial arrangement between Ndler and
(15:59):
its artists seemed simple enough on the surface, everything was
on paper before computers. Recalled one staffer, if the price
for a painting just sold was say one hundred thousand dollars,
then the standards split on painting sold was fifty fifty
fifty percent for the artist and fifty percent for the gallery.
But at Nidler there was a category called report to Artists.
(16:25):
Instead of being recorded as a sale for one hundred
thousand dollars, the report to artist would show the sale as, say,
ninety six thousand dollars. When the fifty fifty split was made,
the artist got fifty percent of ninety six thousand dollars,
not of one hundred thousand dollars. It wasn't a big
reduction for the artist. In fact, it was so small
(16:49):
that most of the artists were probably perfectly happy pocketing
their fifty percent of the report to artists that they
failed to question the galleries accounting methods. The staffer, a
new arrival at the time, questioned one or two people
about the practice. To her, it seemed unsavory, a red flag,
(17:09):
as she put it, but she felt if she pushed
too far, she'd put her job in jeopardy. Donald Sultan,
one of the Knodler galleries younger artists at the time,
confirmed that Anne kept two separate sets of books. Sultan
said she told people she sold an artwork for X,
(17:30):
but she actually sold it for X plus y. Either
she or the gallery kept the difference Another delicate matter
at Knodler was the upstairs presence of an accountant, Dr.
Maury Leebovitz, who ran a much larger operation. He oversaw
not just the Kndler, but also the very commercial Hammer
(17:52):
Gallery situated on Park Avenue, just above Street, which the
Hammer family had bought some time before. He was a
shadowy figure. The staffers seventh Maury You were not allowed
to even mention his presence because they didn't want anyone
to know the two galleries were run together. Why because
(18:12):
while the Noodlers sold art of impeccable quality to wealthy collectors,
the Hammer Gallery over on Park Avenue sold tacky artists
like Leroy Nieman with his highly commercial sports scenes to
Larry Reuben and the rest of Knoedler, Nieman was an embarrassment.
In spite of this, Nieman was the biggest earner for
(18:34):
the two galleries combined, and his profits helped prop up
the galleries bottom line. There was nothing illegal about this,
It was just a way of disguising the galleries finances.
The k Nodler would disguise its finances later on too,
in a much different and very illegal way. By the
(18:56):
nineteen eighties, Anne had become a fixture at Knodler, selling
far more than anyone else at the gallery, and thus
accruing more power as she did. One former staffer recalls
Anne saying, I could have sold catalogs, but I chose
to sell art. Perhaps she was being facetious, but to
the staffer that sort of rang true. When I used
(19:20):
to go to the Nolar Gallery, which I did every
trip to New York, to see Larry, perhaps to buy
something or you know, just have Blanche whatever. Ann Friedman's
office was not an office. It was a desk in
the showroom where they had their paintings in racks. She
would be right there. That's John Burgruin, who San Francisco
(19:42):
Gallery remains a bastion of the art business more than
half a century since he opened it on Grant Avenue.
And Friedman was always, as far as I'm concerned, controversial person.
You know, I don't. I often wondered how Larry dealt
with her on a day to day basis. What was
striking about her presence, the fact that the fact that
(20:04):
she was even there in a way, but what was
her style? Well, she was aggressive. Another former staffer took
a slightly softer view, She was demanding, but not totally unfair.
She was like that type in the Devil Wears product
that was Ann. You never felt close to her. The
staffer added, there's an almost masculine quality, hard to read.
(20:25):
She was tough and a lot of people ended up
not liking her. The note was a long time manager
and art handler, Joe Stevens once stopped at her desk
in the late nineteen eighties after hours. When she was gone,
his eyes widened. There was Anne's latest paycheck. I was
juned and she was already made seventies thousand dollars. It
(20:51):
was June and she had already made three seventy five
for the year. So far, so far. That's a lot
of money in the late eighties. That's what I found
that these were the go go years in the contemporary
art market. Dealers like Leo Castelli and Mary Boone were
selling big, bold canvases of artists like Julian Schnabel and
(21:14):
Eric Fischel, along with David Sally and Ross Bleckner. Abstract
art was out along with minimalist art. Figurative art was
back in with a vengeance. The Kndler wasn't quite at
the heart of all this once again it was selling
(21:36):
the art, no longer quite of its day under Larry Reuben. However,
it did well enough when Larry was the head of
the gallery. We weren't in trouble for money. It was
it was a name armand Hammer died in leaving his
grandson Michael as chairman of Ndler as well as head
(21:59):
of the tacky Hammer Gallery on Park Avenue. Michael Hammer
was an elusive figure, known mostly for his born again
evangelical zeal, his deep affinity for tanning machines, and later
for his two dozen or so vintage automobiles. But he
was smart enough to let Larry Reuben keep running the
(22:20):
Noteler gallery, and though the whole art market suffered a
major recession in the early nineteen nineties with the galleries
closing right and left, Knoler survived due in combination to
the revenues from the Hammer Gallery and blue chip artists
who stayed loyal to Larry Reuben. What Michael Hammer failed
(22:40):
to sense, however, was that Anne was no longer a
docile salesperson for Knoler. She felt she was the one
keeping the gallery afloat. The major sales were hers, and
yet the gallery wasn't giving her the credit she felt
she deserved. The more underappreciated she felt, the more resentment
(23:01):
she radiated. It was about that time in the early nineties,
said Larry Reuben started planning his exit. I didn't understand
him leaving the gallery, but he missed Europe. He had
a house in the south of France, and then he
had the house in Italy. He wanted a semi retire.
Joe Stevens recalls Larry's departure. I knew something was wrong now.
(23:29):
I didn't know if it was because the galery was
taken over by Michael. I couldn't figure it out. Reuben
wanted a life of European travel, yet he still wanted
to retain control of the gallery. He would manage to
do just that by bringing in a successor, one who
(23:51):
reported directly to him. This was an expert in multiples
named Donald Staff. Multiple does mean any art made in
more than one copy. Usually it's a numbered and signed edition.
Lithographs are multiples, for example, so we're engravings, which were
part of the origins of Noeler Back in the eighteen forties.
(24:12):
Donald Staff had done multiples for the great pop artist
Roy Lichtenstein, and the two had grown close. It was
a good chance that Staff might get Lichtenstein to join
the Notlar gallery. Larry Reuben thought he had talked Michael
Hammer into adopting this plan. Larry would direct the gallery
from Italy, where he had a country home, and Larry
and Donald Staff would run it together, and Friedman would
(24:36):
be the hard driving salesperson. I'm sure at that point
she was saying, I'm making all the sales. He's not
doing anything. You don't need him, You'll do just as
many sales, which was probably true in a sense. No, no,
but she had no connections to get Liechtenstein or Ralschenberg.
(24:57):
The other guy had better connections. Donald aft it. Yeah, yeah,
And so even though Notally didn't yet have Rauschenberg or
there was a hope of it, whereas there was no
hope if if Anne was the head of the gallery
she didn't know any of these artists. I mean, what
what sort of self delusion you've called it? The news
(25:23):
of Larry's retirement and Staff's imminent arrival in the fall
of infuriated Anne. Later she said she just wanted to
know what Don sass Roll would be That seemed to
cause a problems and put it dryly to me, she
wanted more than that. She wanted to know why she
shouldn't be made director of the gallery after seventeen years,
when she was the one who sold the art and
(25:45):
shored up the company's bottom line. Like a heat seeking
missile and shot into Michael Hammer's office on a mid
November day in and took him on directly. She could
do everything Reuben and Saff could do, she pointed out
to Hammer. She could cultivate new artists, organized their shows,
(26:08):
and run the business. At the same time. She would
sell a lot more art than Reuben or Staff put together.
Why not let her run the gallery with Michael Hammer's help,
of course, and send the old men packing. And must
have been persuasive because Michael Hammer changed his mind on
the spot and gave her the job. He did that
(26:31):
even though sav had just been formerly hired as co
director and was sent a letter detailing the terms of
his employment. According to Staff's lawyer, the letter was signed
by Staff and sent back to Knodler to be countersigned.
It was sitting in an inbox at the Knoedler when
Hammer changed his mind and seized it. Staff's lawyers accused
(26:54):
Hammer of preaching an oral agreement, but the charge went nowhere.
There would be no more talk of Staff and rubenous
co directors. There would be just one director and Friedman.
We'll be back in a minute. Ann's new title seemed
(27:17):
to assure her great success, but Leslie Feeley since the
story would turn out badly, if only because of Anne's temperament.
She was not a people person. She would try to
you know, sway people gush over people, but a lot
of people didn't go for her. One collecting couple who
(27:38):
resisted her charms was the mayer Hoffs. Wonderful, fabulous collect
According to one person in Baltimore, they would have nothing
to do with Anne. A lot of people had that reaction,
like me, Yeah, whether collectors or dealers, anything so interesting
that she should alienated them all and yet still get
(27:59):
this job. So thanks to Michael Hammer, I guess right.
So the amazing thing to me about this story at
this point is that you know, Anne gets her wish,
and be careful what you wish for, because now there's
no one to guide her and to keep her from
making truly calamitous decisions. Making a calamitous. I don't I
(28:26):
think she wanted to make more money, so she didn't
care how she did it. I mean, don't you think
it was in her blood? She wasn't making enough money
to carry the gallery, and now that she had gotten
this job and this power and pushed aside any chance
(28:46):
of these other artists coming in, also having artists leave
because of her deep and colorin gone. Wow, when did
that happen? I think Rodway, I think she was pushed
out of Stephen Corn right away because they never liked her.
(29:08):
Joe Stevens got an earful of Larry Reuben's fury that
Stevens drove Larry across town that day. We're coming back
from Frank Stella's studio and you got a call. It
might have been a treasury. He spoke to me. He goes,
dad fucking and now he's boiling. He wants to kill him.
(29:31):
He says, what the are you fucking fitting me? And
he just rent and raved. So he says, I says, Larry,
what's going on? He says that bitch, and but he
didn't get into it. He just says that you'll you'll
hear about it soon enough. So I had said to him,
(29:52):
Mrs Larry, do I have to get another job? He says,
I don't know, Joe, he is things are happening right now.
I don't know. He didn't specify it, like say, if
you get along with an you'll be around for a while,
you know. But he was absolutely furious, and within a
(30:15):
month he was gone and had seized power in the
last ticking moments she had while that letter from Donald
sav lay in Michael Hammer's inbox. With that move, she
changed the course of her life and ultimately the Knodler
(30:37):
Galleries too, But it came with a drawback. The problem
was that the art market of the early to mid
was terrible like all her rivals, and needed top quality
art to sell. It wasn't so easy to find, especially
for a dealer who lacked a lifetime of friendships with
(30:59):
famous artists. Anne's predicament was actually worse than it seemed.
Her harsh personality and the swiftness with which she had
grabbed her prize had alienated many of the galleries living artists,
along with the estates that represented deceased ones. The Adolph
(31:19):
Gottlieb Foundation was alarmed, so was the David Smith Foundation.
The Robert Motherwell Foundation and the Richard Deepencorn Foundation. Upon
Anne's coup, they all left the gallery. Joe Stevens recalls
Anne's rise to leadership with mixed feelings. She became an
(31:40):
officer of the company. You know, she became like a
vice president. So she changed. Now she had authority to me,
she just became bitchy because she knew who she was.
She sold a lot of all work. She was a
big time salesperson. I had really good working with her
the very beginning, and then she became the borce. She
(32:04):
never really said nothing much to me in the beginning
because she knew. I knew my job I do. I
took care of everything. I took care of everything that
had to be taken care of. I was the top
sergeant in that place, and it's in physical I took
care of the building everything. If a window cracked, I
had have it fixed, the air conditioning. I did it all.
But my main job was I was the shipping manager
(32:27):
and the head preparative of all the artwork. I don't
care if you the precedent the company, I deserve respect.
I take care of this whole gallery from the minute
it opens to the minute it closes, and I handled
all the artwork, every bit of it. In that capacity,
(32:52):
there was a lot that Joe would see as the
gallery began to sink and money became an issue. Even
as an began wielding her new power, as noted as Director,
sales were plummeting, and aggressive and ruthless tactics had pushed
away the gallery's best clients and the staff were turning
against her, and Friedman was now totally on her own
(33:16):
to decide which artists to promote and sell. Her standards
became the galleries standards. Her eagerness to close these deals
conveyed a clear message, sell, sell, sell, no matter what.
This guy, I think his name was Bud Larkin. He
used to be a directive of like Bewitched. He bought
(33:37):
this Pollock. Now, if you remember, Michael, do you go
back when Cartier was sending out empty packages so people
don't have to pay taxes? Absolutely, Okay, here's the scam
that Joe is referring to. Cardier, the world famous jewelry brand,
was helping its customers evade sales tax. At the time,
(33:58):
those taxes in New York's city were eight point to
five out of state buyers were exempt from those taxes.
So the scam was when a customer came in and
purchased an expensive item, cartier would ship an empty box
to a bogus address and the customer would walk out
of the store with their merchandise. And it worked for
(34:19):
a while. Time Magazine reported in April that at least
two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in taxes went unpaid
on a hundred and twenty five sales over three years.
Similar scams at the time were estimated to have cost
New York State and local governments more than a hundred
million and tax revenue annually. Well, this guy here had
(34:43):
to go and delivered his painting to Kauai, Hawaii. Hid
I jumped on a plane in North flew Non stopped
to Honold, got in another plane and flew Kauai and delivered.
It took me seventeen hours, seven million dollars US. You
know why, because she saved dollars in taxes by me delivering.
(35:07):
It was your sense that that was common place at Noler. No.
I did it once, and I said I'll never do
it again. In the aftermath of Larry Ruben's departure, the
changes at Ndler were profound with the gallery still struggling
through tough times, and became more demanding and sharp tongued,
(35:31):
even imperious. Even Michael Hammer, the galley's owner, seemed to
defer to Enne more often than not and was always
screaming at everybody. One staffer recalled, always screaming for himI Andratti,
her assistant. If she didn't have the right pen, she
would call to himaid to get her more. As personal
(35:51):
assistance came and went in dizzying succession. If you unwrapped
her sandwich, she wouldn't eat it, says one former assist.
If you answered the phone in the wrong way, she
would pounce on you. One woman was fired after three
days for having too strong an Eastern European accent, a
staff are recalled. Another lasted two weeks for being too
(36:15):
young and inexperienced, So the next assistant they hired was
older in her forties. She was fired after a few
months because Anne seemed threatened by her. One staffer recalled
that she and her colleagues kept a list of all
the assistants who came and went during the years she
was there. As she said, if you made it past
(36:37):
the hazing rituals. You became part of this dysfunctional family.
The most memorable of that long line of the demoralized
was a fragile Southerner straight out of a Tennessee Williams play,
and would call her five or six times a day.
One staff are recalled, they would be crying and screaming,
(37:04):
and Friedman's Nodler Gallery was in free fall. Help would
come not long after Anne's ascension at a Soho art
gallery opening, surprisingly in the form of a demure Mexican
art dealer in her mid forties named La Rosalis. Anne
(37:25):
had never met Rosalee, and upon learning that she had
something to do with a gallery and Great Neck Long Island,
she might have given the woman a pain to smile
and moved on. But Rosalves had sailed up to Anne
on the arm of the Nodler's own him Andrade, and
so Anne was intrigued. From such a casual meeting, the
(37:47):
whole art market would be seismically altered, leaving the Knodler
itself devastated and ultimately doomed, depending on who you asked him.
And Ratty was either a long trusted employee of the gallery,
harmless and endearing or an agent provocateur who saw a
(38:08):
way to put Ann Friedman together with hero Rosalee, ensuring
that all three of them would profit from their endeavors.
Oh please, that's not a connection. I mean, that's just
trying to push the guilt onto this poor, uneducated sweet man.
It has nothing to do with I mean, Anne would
say that, of course, But I take your point. I
(38:30):
mean it sounds like she was just just naming someone
else besides her. Okay, he introduced her. So what she
made the judgment? She That's right, She just nothing else.
I mean it was totally her call. Next time on
(38:52):
art Fraud, she swears that she didn't know, which seems
hard to believe. Should she have known? Yeah, I believe
from the beginning she knew these were fakes. They had
no provenances. She made up provenances. Every Day, Art Fraud
(39:13):
is brought to you by I Heart Radio and Cavalry Audio.
Our executive producers are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself,
and Michael Shnayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice.
Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is
our managing producer, our writer is Michael Schneerson. I can
(40:01):
can't be anything in add
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