February 16, 2022 • 61 mins
Art Fraud is investigative journey through one of the biggest cases of art fraud in US history done by The Knoedler Gallery written by VANITY REPORTER Michael Shnayerson and hosted by Alec Baldwin. On this episode 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 on this episode. Listen to Art Fraud on the iHeartRadio App or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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three or live chat at cal hope dot org. Today
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
(01:33):
people cutting corners and things happening. It was when a Freedman,
then the newly minted director of the Nidler Gallery First
met Rosalis, had a soho art opening. Larry Rubin had
been pushed out of Ndler a year earlier in a
(01:54):
coup that ended with Ann Friedman being installed at the
blessing of Michael Hammer. Knoedler's sails were flat, the clients
were leaving in droves, and Anne Friedman needed new work
to help propel the gallery forward. The Knoedler, always one
step behind the times, was hurtling towards the art world
(02:15):
of a new millennium. The galley's long time assistant, heime Andrade,
had introduced Ann to the soft spoken, polite woman of
Mexican heritage. As fate would have it, Glephara Rosalez had
two works of art on paper she wanted to sell. About.
(02:36):
All that any one could agree on was that heime
Andrade was a shy Equadorian man of modest height. He
was one of eleven children who had 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 Reuben's gallery on fifty seventh Street and worked as
(02:58):
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 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
(03:21):
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 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
(03:45):
two thousand eleven, while the forgery ring was metastasizing amid
criminal investigations, the boyish Andrade gave a talk about Ecuadorian
art and his fifty years of immersion in it at
the mid Manhattan Library. The Knodler, in a press release
for it, would describe Andrat's longtime friend and dealer David
(04:07):
Herbert as quote one of the best American portrait artists
unquote that was patently untrue. But Herbert, upon his death,
would be cast in another role as a central figure
in the back story of Ndler's conspiracy of fakes, possibly
aided and embedded by hime Andrade, who had just become
(04:30):
David Herbert's executor. With boxes of documents rich in art
world lore, Anne would never quite come 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 k Noodler's staffer would take umbrage
at the way Anne defended him less than forcefully in
(04:53):
Vanity Fair. Was Anne implying that hime Andrade had reduced
her to Glafia Rosales knowing the two works at issue
were fake, or had I made done no more than
to introduce his boss to a Mexican woman who shared
his love of Latin American arts. Here again is writer
(05:15):
Michael Shnayerson. Leslie Feeley took a dim review of Anne
and her treatment of Himie. She said Anne treated 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.
(05:38):
He that's he was. He was going and he got
to know a lot of people in the art business.
He had more aught in his home, but all South American.
That's the Noteler's art handler. Joe Stevens Andrade rented a
ground floor apartment in an ornate but musty rental building
(05:58):
at seventeen East seventieth Street, literally next door to the Noodler.
He seemed to like being on call for whatever needs
a rose. I used to stay there whenever I had
openings because I worked so late, and now I don't.
I used to go to my wife said don't I'm
gonna come. I'm sand he niece, because Jimmy, we'd go
a call out and have you know, you know, at
(06:19):
ten o'clock, ten thirty at night, after we locked up
and tell me about the apartment that he had. It
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
(06:44):
put another thing on that counter. That's a packed. He
had closets filled with this stuff. He was like, it
looked like a whoid uphoid did everything. Rosalee and Androde
had struck up a friendship based on Latin American art
sometime in the late nineteen nineties. At some point, Rosalvas
(07:06):
mentioned she was trying to sell two works on paper
by Richard Deepencorn, the great abstract artist represented for years
by the Knoedler Gallery until Larry Reuben's departure and Anne's promotion.
Didai may think Ann Friedman might take a look and
tell Glyphia what she thought. This was a pivotal moment,
(07:28):
the first time Glyphia Rosalis focused on Ann Friedman as
her target for newly minted forgeries. Soon enough, Ann 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
(07:50):
deep In Corn work had come to an end. Deepen
Corn had died in nineteen ninety three, and his daughter
Gretchen and son in law Richard Grant, co heads of
the Artists Foundation, had ended the galleries long association with
deep and Corn. They didn't much like Ann Friedman. They
liked her even less after the coup that put her
(08:11):
in charge. Still, Noodler was widely known as deep and
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
(08:31):
put buyers and sellers together as well or better than
anyone else, given its history with the artist. So when
GPA offered to show an too Deepen Corns, the Nodler's
director jumped the chance. Days after Anne's coup in novemb
a certain calm had come over the Knoedler Gallery. Larry
(08:53):
Reuben had even agreed to stay on as director until
the last day of the year. The old art World
War horse had recovered his spirits somewhat and shrugged off
the coup. Perhaps it was time for him to leave
Niedler after all. Gracefully, he even did Ann Friedman a
favor by agreeing to take a look at the too
(09:14):
Deep and Corn works on paper. Like most of Deep
and Corn's work since the mid nineteen sixties, these were
geometrical abstractions from his Ocean Park series. When Anne asked
where they'd come from, Rosalas demurred. Regrettably. She said her
client wanted to remain anonymous. That was hardly unusual for
(09:36):
works brought in by perfect strangers. Unfortunately, neither of the
drawings had identifying marks on their verso verso is what
dealers call the back of an artwork, no record of
the works tracing back to the artist's studio. There was
no trace of later buyers and sellers, no auction markings either.
In a word, the drawings had no provenance. That was
(10:00):
a problem. So what is provenance. It's the paper trail
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
(10:21):
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
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
(10:43):
it wasn't difficult for the artist's family or executor to
authenticate those works and record them for posterity. The challenge
came with secondary works sold after the artist's death, works
bought and sold and bought again, works that sometimes vanished
and and reappeared. Were they real or not? An artist
(11:05):
like deep and Corn post a special challenge. His Ocean
Park works were all beautiful, but also quite similar. Larry Reuben,
as it turned out, was underwhelmed by the ocean park
esque drawings, and Friedman 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.
(11:29):
He said the gallery couldn't or certainly shouldn't sell them.
Not long after, deepn 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
(11:51):
drawings for a long time. They looked quite good. We really,
we're pretty impressed. It was clearly a beautiful piece. I
am Gretchen deep in corn Grant. My father is Richard
deep and Corny. Despite the exceptional quality of the works,
the family felt they were not authentic. You could see
(12:15):
the hand of the forger in both of them. You
look at someone's work long enough, and my entire life
seventy six years old, so I was alive during my
father's career, and you have a sense of it. Not perfect,
(12:38):
but you do have a pretty good sense. 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
(13:02):
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 a freedman, I think they are fake,
(13:25):
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.
J Seli Reggaetel is a reporter currently with the Center
for Investigative Reporting. She pursued the Notler story for several
years and came up with a few scoops, starting with
(13:45):
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 Rush
and Demnquirn 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 see
(14:10):
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 adapt to you know,
there's something strange happening here. Here's Francis Beatty again. I
do remember going to a deep and Corn show of
(14:31):
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 the family
(14:54):
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, the
(15:16):
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 Freedman could justify
selling those two drawings because the artist's wife had not
called them fake, nor had Larry Reuben. I wasn't one
(15:37):
sure they weren't real, Reuben explained later. And you 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 Freedman sold the deep and corn drawings to the
(15:58):
perfect buyer. More art fraud in a minute. Hi, I'm
Joe Piazza, the host of Under the Influence. On season
two of our podcast, we're exploring what it means to
be a woman on social media. We're going into different
pockets of influencing to talk about how Instagram is a
(16:21):
reflection of all the ways that women are mistreated in
our society. We're going into some of the darkest corners
of the social media universe and we might just have
a plan to shut it all that held down. Listen
to season two of Under the Influence with Joe Piazza
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Arden Marine from Shameless
(16:45):
and Stationable, Chelsea Lately and the I Heart Radio podcast
Will You Accept This Rose? And I'm Julianne Robinson and
Emmy and bafta nominated director most recently of Bridgetin. And
we are the hosts of Lady of the Road, a
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influential women about their lives and we get self help advice.
We're always looking to improve ourselves and we figure there's
(17:06):
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from Cavalry Audio, the studio that brought you The Devil
(17:48):
Within and The Shadow Girls, comes a new true crime podcast,
The Pink Moon Murders. The local sheriff believes there may
be more than one killer. It's been four days since
those bodies were found and there's no arrest as it
this morning. They were afraid to face it out in
that area, what if they come back or whatever. It
scared me to death, Like it scared me, I was
(18:09):
very very intimidating to live here. Crazy to think you
go to sleep one night, maybe snuggling with your loved one,
and never wake up, or maybe you wake up in
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(18:31):
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Not long after the Deep and Corn families disconcerting visit
to Knoedler, a doctor named Bernard Krueger received a phone
(18:52):
call he never expected to get. Krueger was a collector,
perhaps not a great collector, but an eager one, especially
in regard to Richard deep In Corn's work. He liked
to think he had an inside track. He was, after all,
and Friedman's doctor. He told me he loved Devoncorn's work
(19:13):
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. And what
ben Krueger told me is that every time he wanted
(19:35):
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, and they
might give a price to me and a different price
to you. And the way that Bernard described to me
(19:58):
is that in Freedman 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, 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
(20:20):
power and having control. Despite having an inside track as
hands 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 and Corn passed away
in early and all of a sudden, Bernard Krueger gets
(20:43):
a call from Knoedler saying, we have the two dippen
corns for you to see. You know, they just came in.
I think you would like it. I was already like,
wait a minute, don't you think that was change? For years,
you've been begging to buy a dipping corn, all of
her sudden they're calling you and offer you a dipping corn.
(21:03):
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 depon corn he had bought
for like a hundred twenty five hundred thirty five thousand,
and that when he bought for eighty thou dollars. So
(21:25):
again he was thrilled. He's like, all of a sudden
had been offered a deep and corn, and it's cheaper
than the last one I bought. Loadler did well by
those two Deep and Corn sales, earning forty five thousand
dollars on each. When word of the sale reached the
deep and Corn family, they were shocked, As the late
(21:47):
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 that
we had come to the gallery and authenticated these works,
(22:09):
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
that we authenticated it. And my mother was very shy
(22:32):
about being in an antagonistic position with anybody, and she
really didn't want me to write for on behalf of
myself or on behalf of her, and so that was dropped. Later,
Dr Krueger would say he had sold the works and
(22:53):
had no idea where they were perhaps, But over the
next fifteen years the Deepened Corns would routinely here 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
knowledge that they were fake. When the works once again vanished,
(23:18):
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
that would find their way to the Deepen Corn Foundation
on a regular basis. Eventually, the family counted some two
(23:40):
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 an art student's
homage for class credit left in a garage to be
celebrated briefly as the real McCoy. Times were tough in
(24:03):
the art market, 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, business wasn't good,
and so she needs something was needed, something really special need. Still,
(24:30):
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 Gafia could share with Anna telling detail or two
details to assure her the works had some shred of provenance.
(24:51):
Gently but firmly 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 mister X Junior,
whose parents had passed on to their son more paintings
by some of the best known artists of the post
(25:11):
war period. Soon enough, Anne was calling him mister ex
Junior too, and referring to his parents as mister and
missus X. It sounded a bit silly, but maybe a
van played ball Glyphia might introduce Anne to mister ex Junior.
Glyphia did say that mister ex Junior had more works
(25:32):
to sell if they could be placed discreetly. These were
works that had been long stored by mister X hermetically sealed.
Even Glyphia 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
(25:55):
and 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,
(26:16):
it just simply doesn't happen. If somebody came to me
and said, I want to sell you this Clifford Still,
and I know that the Clifford still's fair market price
would be a million, and they say to me, well,
(26:40):
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 twenty percent of
(27:00):
its real value, 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 a while happened
to dealers. You just you make a mistake, But the
(27:24):
minute you do, 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 Knodler, this time with
(27:47):
a painting by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko under her arm.
It was a beautiful work, as Anne described it later,
with dark orbs against a pale, pink peach backdrop, and
like the deepen Coorns, it had no provenance other than
the link to Mr and Mrs X. I think that
(28:08):
they were the consortium, not just Cliff hear 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,
(28:31):
let's be honest, Abstract expressionism is not necessarily the most
technically advanced paintings. Now. I'm not saying that Rothco is
non 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.
(28:52):
One thing that I think you said in your book,
it's very important for the con artist 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
(29:13):
you really need to 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 people expect. If you walk in right
(29:38):
away with twenty roth Goes and a few Pollocks in there,
someone's gonna say, Okay, hold on one second, we're going
to 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 and invites less screw.
(30:00):
In the end, 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 collection
(30:21):
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 Rothko who I didn't know and who had
no kind of bona fides in the art world, I
(30:43):
would be very suspicious. Where did this person get it?
And it was stolen? I mean, you don't just go
wandering around with Rothko's right and did show the painting
too Ristopher Rothco, son of the late artist, who professed
to find it beautiful. That was enough for Anne. She
(31:07):
bought the painting for one thousand 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. If she showed it to Christopher Rothco, I
(31:32):
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 that Nodler was starting to deal in works
without any provenance. The circle had been confined to a
(31:55):
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 Fra. I just walked in
and saw this great red painting, presuming to be a Rothco.
(32:17):
I just couldn't even look at it because it was
so garish and so not by Rothco. And they were
selling it for at the time million dollars. It was
not that large, and it was clearly a fake. None
of these paintings had any provenance, at least of the
(32:40):
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 not check the provenance. That's what
you're supposed to do for an art fairies, was to
check the provenance and any paint particularly a Rothco. And
(33:03):
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 with his painting. In the old days,
you had to ask Jeane thaw On Francis O'Connor to
(33:24):
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 them down and you say, I'm worried about this.
You know, this is a picture which has been offered
(33:47):
to me. I think it looks beautiful, but it has
I have no provenance 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 on the line for it. One of the most
(34:09):
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
(34:31):
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,
(34:54):
you try to get as much information as you possibly can.
You try to docum meant 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,
(35:18):
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
(35:40):
asking the Deep and 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,
(36:01):
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
(36:21):
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
(36:42):
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 proof.
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.
(37:04):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:48):
the title. That's what the uniform code says you are
doing if you write an invoice. The staffers learned to
keep their distance when Rosalie's name was mentioned whenever something
about the Rosales works was discussed. One stafford said that
(38:11):
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 and
(38:36):
Glapia 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 Newman one or two Calledler's.
That's attorney Emily Rice Baum. Over a decade later, at trial,
(38:59):
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, let me check. She
(39:20):
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 something like that pop up?
(39:41):
A rothco that roughgo 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 five from the same source? Are there eight?
Are there twelve? Or their twenty? Or there forty one?
Early Never, despite her initial estimate of having eight paintings
(40:04):
in the collection, Gafia would manage to deliver over thirty
more works two Noodler, 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 Donald Sulton later
(40:28):
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 Ruben's departure, Sultan said it was as if the
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was like Philippe Demontebello,
(40:53):
deciding that he's going to turn the thing over to
the secretary. According to one staffer who worked close lee
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 for a couple of years,
recalls a staffer. A museum director came into Anne's office
(41:14):
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 tragedy you might have read
about in the news, very sad story. The staffer has said.
(41:35):
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 lied
to this director why we probably got it on the
cheap and Anne was marking it up. On another occasion,
Anne took in a double paneled Milton Avery painting, which
(41:58):
was to say that there was a painting on each
side of the wood, instead of showing it that way
to the aviaries and reportedly how to conservator split the
painting down the middle and get two salable works instead
of one, a considerably greater profit to her and the gallery.
I asked Francis if this was typical in any way
(42:18):
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 my era. It's a kind
(42:41):
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 right back on the latest
(43:07):
season of the Next Question with Katie Couric podcast, Katie
dives into Well Katie Here. Exclusive podcast only conversations between
Katie and the people who made her memoir Going There Possible.
We spent a lot of time together around a dining
room table here and in the city, and you know
it was a very intense experience. All episodes of Next
(43:30):
Question with Katie Couric are available now. Listen on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. What's Up guys on a shoal and I
am Troy Millions and we are the host of the
Ernia Leisure podcast where we break down business models and
examine the latest trans and finance. We hold court and
have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names of business,
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(43:52):
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Listen in as our guests reveal a business models, hardships,
of triumphs and their respective fields. The knowledge is in
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We want to know what you want to know. We
talked to the legends of business, sports and entertainment about
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make their money. Earnie Alisia is a college business class
(44:13):
mixed with pop culture. I want to learn about the
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got you interested in starting a trucking company or a
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credit work. We got it all covered. The Earnie Leision
podcast is available now. Listen to Ernie a Leisure on
the Black Effect podcast Network. I heart radio, app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Scott Rank,
(44:41):
host of the podcast History Unplugged. And if you're dreaming
of being a full time podcaster someday, you and I
have a lot in common. I used to teach history
for a living, which was great, but I wanted something
more and maybe you know what I mean. So I
gave podcasting a try, and I did it with Spreaker.
From my heart. I could explain how it in about
ninety seconds. But all you really need to know now
(45:03):
is that, in my experience, the ad revenue with Spreaker
has been three to four times higher than it has
been with any other host I've worked with. Now I
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(45:26):
So if you want to turn your passion into a
podcast and give this a try, visit speaker dot com.
That's sp r e a k e er dot com.
Get paid to talk about the things you love with
spreaker from my heart Sometimes and seemed drawn by the
sheer challenge of a newly arrived work. Someone might come
(45:50):
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. In Evitably, the owner didn't
want to wait 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
(46:11):
for cash. The staffers said, I was thinking, either there's
something wrong or you're taking this painting and will sell
it for two or three times the amount. I was
seeing this for 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 GlyP Era Rosales.
(46:34):
Like the first ones, they were ocean park abstracts, but
they were different in one sense. According to Rosalee, they
came from the the 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 Anne Friedman to She had
(46:57):
written a letter to Rosalie asking for at least some
provenance on the newly surfaced the Honda Gallery ocean parks.
Leslie Feeley recalls 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
(47:18):
find names that would fool people, and she lied and
lied and made up these fake provenances. I believe from
the beginning she knew these were fakes. They had no provenances.
She made up provenances every day. The Honda Gallery works
(47:39):
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 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
(48:00):
like Picasso and some of the earlier abstract people. I
just remember thinking, Wow, that just seems odd. Apparently Rosales
had made some calls and came up with provenance for
the Jande Gallery. Deepen corns. The key figure was a
(48:21):
Spanish restaurant owner named Caesario Fontanella. Supposedly, he told Rosalee
that he had owned a restaurant called Taverna says Are
on Fleming Street near Madrid's Castellana Plaza from the late
nineteen seventies until the Taverna Caesar had been a hangout
(48:41):
for artists. Everyone from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol had
frequented the place, or so Rosalees heard. Nearby was the
Janda Gallery, said Suzario Fontanella, where many of those artists
had shown. Fernando Vijande would often bring them over to
the Taverna. Cesar deep and Corn had been one of
(49:01):
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 depon corns that way, and kept them for all
those intervening years, he said, and was selling them only
now after deepon Corne's death. There was a fine story,
(49:22):
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,
because Rodrigo had helped run the gallery with his father
and knew of its artists upon his father's death. In
(49:49):
the most off key detail of Caesar Fontenelle's story was
the Taverna's address. Even if it had existed, it wouldn't
have been a hangout for arti from the the Honda Gallery,
because it's supposed address on Fleming Street was two or
three miles from the gallery. Both galleries that my father
(50:10):
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,
declared his son Rodrigo, was why he lived some fifty
yards from his galleries. At first and Freedman may have
(50:31):
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 GPA Rosalis was
bringing in one by one. With their now distinctive the
Honde Gallery labels had cast a glow of authenticity over
(50:52):
all the ocean park Deepened Corns and over GLPA Rosalee herself.
But a label isn't proven. It's just a label. If
the label had been part of a paper trail of ownership,
the result would have been picture perfect provenance. In this case,
the trail petered out as soon as it began. What
(51:14):
was it fair to say that every time you saw
a deep in corn ocean park that had any label
on back, that it was almost certainly fake. I think
one could say that, Yes, she swears that she didn't know,
which seems hard to believe. That's noodler artist Michael David Again,
(51:41):
should she have known? Yeah? And is this business fraud
with people cutting corners with fraud? Absolutely? And Friedman had
her Deepen Corns with the Honda Gallery labels, but she
pressed rosal Us for more proof of the works provenance.
(52:04):
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,
the late artist's son. Since then another Rothko expert, David Antham,
(52:24):
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 Lafia do something to fill in the story
of the ex family and arranged for Anne to meet
Mr x Jr. At last, not yet, Rosavas deflected soon,
(52:47):
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 their conversations
and Anne often talked about art of the post war period,
(53:09):
Lathira knew a lot enough to impress Anne, and the
two women share their favorite artists, one of whom was Clifford.
Still in most cases, a would go through Mr X's
collection searching for a painting by one of the artists
and had spoken of with great admiration. Miraculously, Glafira would
(53:30):
find onefa Rosales told investigators that the galleries would often
ask her for specific things without asking many questions where
it came from. So think about this. You are a
gallery and you are buying painting after painting from this
woman from Mexico, who says as representing a famous collector.
(53:55):
So then, as a gallery owner, I turned to her
and say, so do you think you might happen to
have some mother will? And then a few weeks later
she comes with a 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 Gopa to
(54:19):
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. 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
(54:41):
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 called Friedman
with terrible news. While the driver was bringing Mr X's
Clifford still painting from the photograph for a studio. She
said there had been an accident. The car had a
(55:04):
rear engine and the engine had caught fire. The painting
was nearly destroyed, all but a fragment. When she got
over her shock and told Rosale's to bring her the fragment,
the painting was indeed badly burned. It would have been
two and a half feet by three ft, Friedman said later. Indeed,
(55:25):
nearly all of the paintings Rosale's would bring were of
medium scale. To Anne, it made absolute sense that the
painting had been stored in the trunk. Anne was fascinated
with the fragment, and more so with the transparency that
accompanied it. The transparency, after all, showed the whole painting
(55:46):
before it was consumed by fire. On the drive back
to Mr X Junior's house, you could see the whole thing,
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, Ann would
beam with triumph. Quote would a con artist burn the
(56:08):
painting and then save a fragment so it could be
forensically examined if the painting wasn't real, wouldn't that make
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 happens. Proof positive the
(56:28):
pigment proved the painting was real, or so felt Anne
as for the burned fragment and kept it as proof
that the first Clifford still Mr x Jr. Had sold
her had been real as well. One staff are recalled
that the fragment was kept in a flat white portfolio.
(56:48):
You could see the burn marks on the edges. It
was and Friedman's own shroud of Turin Conveniently, Mr Junior
managed to find another Clifford still in storage and sent
it along and in turn took it to the annual
(57:09):
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
had dispatched from the Nler. According to Freedman, Bill Reuben
looked hard at the Clifford still and said, yes, that's
(57:33):
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,
none of the details in gas story of the burned
Clifford Still painting were true. Now we know, no fire
(57:55):
really happened, right did it happened? Actually, Carlos was preparing
the pieces, and he was treating them with her dryers
and for in them in coal and had temperatures so
that one got burned because he forgot to turn the
hair dryer of, and of course it went in flames.
(58:16):
And now Anne is waiting for the piece. And what
is this planation? I'm going to give Carlos tolm It
will tell them this. I want people to know that
I have never talked to nobody. I have never been
interviewed about my life or about this case, except for
the government of course. More from Glafira Rosale's herself next
(58:40):
time on art fraud. You have the cool, clear eyes
of a secret of wisdom and truth. Yet there's that top.
I'm the Grell loving pat You youth, believe you, leaveing
(59:12):
you Art Fraud is brought to you by I Heart
Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers are Matt del Piano,
Keegan Rosenberger, myself and Michael Schneyerson. We're produced by Brandon
Morgan and Zach McNeice. Zack also edited and mixed this episode.
(59:32):
Lindsay Hoffman is our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Schneyerson.
I believe you and my faith and my fo Did
(59:58):
you know that on the day Dr King was shot,
the old black security detail normally assigned to him was
called off. They're the ones who would not allow him
to stay at any hotel with balconies. All about This
(01:00:18):
is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now.
Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Conquer your New Year's resolutions
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you'll learn how to make the most of your time
with practical tools to help you feel less busy and
get more done. Listen to Before Breakfast on the I
(01:00:39):
Heart Radio app four. Wherever you get your podcasts, you're there.
I'm Scott Rank, host of the podcast History Unplugged Now.
It really is a dream come true to get paid
to talk about history without all the stress, while still
being able to make a living, and I did it
with Spreaker from my heart. Not only did they make
it super easy to monetize my podcast, but at revenue
is three to four times higher with Spreaker than with
(01:01:00):
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The more we learn about COVID nineteen, the more questions
and worries we have. Cal Hope can help with free
COVID nineteen emotional support. Call eight three three three one
seven four six seven three or live chat at cal
hope dot org. Today, he loves me, he loves me not?
He loves me, He loves me not. He loves me not.
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(01:11):
three or live chat at cal hope dot org. Today
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
(01:33):
people cutting corners and things happening. It was when a Freedman,
then the newly minted director of the Nidler Gallery First
met Rosalis, had a soho art opening. Larry Rubin had
been pushed out of Ndler a year earlier in a
(01:54):
coup that ended with Ann Friedman being installed at the
blessing of Michael Hammer. Knoedler's sails were flat, the clients
were leaving in droves, and Anne Friedman needed new work
to help propel the gallery forward. The Knoedler, always one
step behind the times, was hurtling towards the art world
(02:15):
of a new millennium. The galley's long time assistant, heime Andrade,
had introduced Ann to the soft spoken, polite woman of
Mexican heritage. As fate would have it, Glephara Rosalez had
two works of art on paper she wanted to sell. About.
(02:36):
All that any one could agree on was that heime
Andrade was a shy Equadorian man of modest height. He
was one of eleven children who had 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 Reuben's gallery on fifty seventh Street and worked as
(02:58):
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 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
(03:21):
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 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
(03:45):
two thousand eleven, while the forgery ring was metastasizing amid
criminal investigations, the boyish Andrade gave a talk about Ecuadorian
art and his fifty years of immersion in it at
the mid Manhattan Library. The Knodler, in a press release
for it, would describe Andrat's longtime friend and dealer David
(04:07):
Herbert as quote one of the best American portrait artists
unquote that was patently untrue. But Herbert, upon his death,
would be cast in another role as a central figure
in the back story of Ndler's conspiracy of fakes, possibly
aided and embedded by hime Andrade, who had just become
(04:30):
David Herbert's executor. With boxes of documents rich in art
world lore, Anne would never quite come 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 k Noodler's staffer would take umbrage
at the way Anne defended him less than forcefully in
(04:53):
Vanity Fair. Was Anne implying that hime Andrade had reduced
her to Glafia Rosales knowing the two works at issue
were fake, or had I made done no more than
to introduce his boss to a Mexican woman who shared
his love of Latin American arts. Here again is writer
(05:15):
Michael Shnayerson. Leslie Feeley took a dim review of Anne
and her treatment of Himie. She said Anne treated 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.
(05:38):
He that's he was. He was going and he got
to know a lot of people in the art business.
He had more aught in his home, but all South American.
That's the Noteler's art handler. Joe Stevens Andrade rented a
ground floor apartment in an ornate but musty rental building
(05:58):
at seventeen East seventieth Street, literally next door to the Noodler.
He seemed to like being on call for whatever needs
a rose. I used to stay there whenever I had
openings because I worked so late, and now I don't.
I used to go to my wife said don't I'm
gonna come. I'm sand he niece, because Jimmy, we'd go
a call out and have you know, you know, at
(06:19):
ten o'clock, ten thirty at night, after we locked up
and tell me about the apartment that he had. It
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
(06:44):
put another thing on that counter. That's a packed. He
had closets filled with this stuff. He was like, it
looked like a whoid uphoid did everything. Rosalee and Androde
had struck up a friendship based on Latin American art
sometime in the late nineteen nineties. At some point, Rosalvas
(07:06):
mentioned she was trying to sell two works on paper
by Richard Deepencorn, the great abstract artist represented for years
by the Knoedler Gallery until Larry Reuben's departure and Anne's promotion.
Didai may think Ann Friedman might take a look and
tell Glyphia what she thought. This was a pivotal moment,
(07:28):
the first time Glyphia Rosalis focused on Ann Friedman as
her target for newly minted forgeries. Soon enough, Ann 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
(07:50):
deep In Corn work had come to an end. Deepen
Corn had died in nineteen ninety three, and his daughter
Gretchen and son in law Richard Grant, co heads of
the Artists Foundation, had ended the galleries long association with
deep and Corn. They didn't much like Ann Friedman. They
liked her even less after the coup that put her
(08:11):
in charge. Still, Noodler was widely known as deep and
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
(08:31):
put buyers and sellers together as well or better than
anyone else, given its history with the artist. So when
GPA offered to show an too Deepen Corns, the Nodler's
director jumped the chance. Days after Anne's coup in novemb
a certain calm had come over the Knoedler Gallery. Larry
(08:53):
Reuben had even agreed to stay on as director until
the last day of the year. The old art World
War horse had recovered his spirits somewhat and shrugged off
the coup. Perhaps it was time for him to leave
Niedler after all. Gracefully, he even did Ann Friedman a
favor by agreeing to take a look at the too
(09:14):
Deep and Corn works on paper. Like most of Deep
and Corn's work since the mid nineteen sixties, these were
geometrical abstractions from his Ocean Park series. When Anne asked
where they'd come from, Rosalas demurred. Regrettably. She said her
client wanted to remain anonymous. That was hardly unusual for
(09:36):
works brought in by perfect strangers. Unfortunately, neither of the
drawings had identifying marks on their verso verso is what
dealers call the back of an artwork, no record of
the works tracing back to the artist's studio. There was
no trace of later buyers and sellers, no auction markings either.
In a word, the drawings had no provenance. That was
(10:00):
a problem. So what is provenance. It's the paper trail
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
(10:21):
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
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
(10:43):
it wasn't difficult for the artist's family or executor to
authenticate those works and record them for posterity. The challenge
came with secondary works sold after the artist's death, works
bought and sold and bought again, works that sometimes vanished
and and reappeared. Were they real or not? An artist
(11:05):
like deep and Corn post a special challenge. His Ocean
Park works were all beautiful, but also quite similar. Larry Reuben,
as it turned out, was underwhelmed by the ocean park
esque drawings, and Friedman 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.
(11:29):
He said the gallery couldn't or certainly shouldn't sell them.
Not long after, deepn 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
(11:51):
drawings for a long time. They looked quite good. We really,
we're pretty impressed. It was clearly a beautiful piece. I
am Gretchen deep in corn Grant. My father is Richard
deep and Corny. Despite the exceptional quality of the works,
the family felt they were not authentic. You could see
(12:15):
the hand of the forger in both of them. You
look at someone's work long enough, and my entire life
seventy six years old, so I was alive during my
father's career, and you have a sense of it. Not perfect,
(12:38):
but you do have a pretty good sense. 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
(13:02):
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 a freedman, I think they are fake,
(13:25):
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.
J Seli Reggaetel is a reporter currently with the Center
for Investigative Reporting. She pursued the Notler story for several
years and came up with a few scoops, starting with
(13:45):
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 Rush
and Demnquirn 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 see
(14:10):
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 adapt to you know,
there's something strange happening here. Here's Francis Beatty again. I
do remember going to a deep and Corn show of
(14:31):
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 the family
(14:54):
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, the
(15:16):
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 Freedman could justify
selling those two drawings because the artist's wife had not
called them fake, nor had Larry Reuben. I wasn't one
(15:37):
sure they weren't real, Reuben explained later. And you 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 Freedman sold the deep and corn drawings to the
(15:58):
perfect buyer. More art fraud in a minute. Hi, I'm
Joe Piazza, the host of Under the Influence. On season
two of our podcast, we're exploring what it means to
be a woman on social media. We're going into different
pockets of influencing to talk about how Instagram is a
(16:21):
reflection of all the ways that women are mistreated in
our society. We're going into some of the darkest corners
of the social media universe and we might just have
a plan to shut it all that held down. Listen
to season two of Under the Influence with Joe Piazza
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Arden Marine from Shameless
(16:45):
and Stationable, Chelsea Lately and the I Heart Radio podcast
Will You Accept This Rose? And I'm Julianne Robinson and
Emmy and bafta nominated director most recently of Bridgetin. And
we are the hosts of Lady of the Road, a
funny and inspiring podcast where we have come stations with
influential women about their lives and we get self help advice.
We're always looking to improve ourselves and we figure there's
(17:06):
no better source for learning how to be brave, take
risks and advocate for yourself in life than speaking with motivating,
uplifting women. Some of them we've met throughout our careers
and some of them were just meeting now. We talk
about money, health, relationships, parenthood, running a business, you name it,
from inspiring women like Joan Jet, Nicole Buyer, Lauren Lobkis Htta,
(17:28):
Ricky Lynde, Tom Kate mccouchee, Kate Walsh, shondaland producer Betsy
bears Adua and o Jen Kirkman and more. Listen and
subscribe to Lady of the Road on the I Heart
Radio app Apple Podcasts over if you get your podcasts
from Cavalry Audio, the studio that brought you The Devil
(17:48):
Within and The Shadow Girls, comes a new true crime podcast,
The Pink Moon Murders. The local sheriff believes there may
be more than one killer. It's been four days since
those bodies were found and there's no arrest as it
this morning. They were afraid to face it out in
that area, what if they come back or whatever. It
scared me to death, Like it scared me, I was
(18:09):
very very intimidating to live here. Crazy to think you
go to sleep one night, maybe snuggling with your loved one,
and never wake up, or maybe you wake up in
a struggle for your life, which you lose. Joint host
David Radiman as he explores one fateful night when evil
descended upon small town, Ohio killed eight members of an
Ohio family in a pre planned execution. The family was targeted,
(18:31):
most of them targeted while they were sleeping. The Pink
Moon Murders is available on February twenty second, and you
can follow The Pink Moon Murders on the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Not long after the Deep and Corn families disconcerting visit
to Knoedler, a doctor named Bernard Krueger received a phone
(18:52):
call he never expected to get. Krueger was a collector,
perhaps not a great collector, but an eager one, especially
in regard to Richard deep In Corn's work. He liked
to think he had an inside track. He was, after all,
and Friedman's doctor. He told me he loved Devoncorn's work
(19:13):
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. And what
ben Krueger told me is that every time he wanted
(19:35):
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, and they
might give a price to me and a different price
to you. And the way that Bernard described to me
(19:58):
is that in Freedman 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, 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
(20:20):
power and having control. Despite having an inside track as
hands 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 and Corn passed away
in early and all of a sudden, Bernard Krueger gets
(20:43):
a call from Knoedler saying, we have the two dippen
corns for you to see. You know, they just came in.
I think you would like it. I was already like,
wait a minute, don't you think that was change? For years,
you've been begging to buy a dipping corn, all of
her sudden they're calling you and offer you a dipping corn.
(21:03):
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 depon corn he had bought
for like a hundred twenty five hundred thirty five thousand,
and that when he bought for eighty thou dollars. So
(21:25):
again he was thrilled. He's like, all of a sudden
had been offered a deep and corn, and it's cheaper
than the last one I bought. Loadler did well by
those two Deep and Corn sales, earning forty five thousand
dollars on each. When word of the sale reached the
deep and Corn family, they were shocked, As the late
(21:47):
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 that
we had come to the gallery and authenticated these works,
(22:09):
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
that we authenticated it. And my mother was very shy
(22:32):
about being in an antagonistic position with anybody, and she
really didn't want me to write for on behalf of
myself or on behalf of her, and so that was dropped. Later,
Dr Krueger would say he had sold the works and
(22:53):
had no idea where they were perhaps, But over the
next fifteen years the Deepened Corns would routinely here 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
knowledge that they were fake. When the works once again vanished,
(23:18):
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
that would find their way to the Deepen Corn Foundation
on a regular basis. Eventually, the family counted some two
(23:40):
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 an art student's
homage for class credit left in a garage to be
celebrated briefly as the real McCoy. Times were tough in
(24:03):
the art market, 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, business wasn't good,
and so she needs something was needed, something really special need. Still,
(24:30):
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 Gafia could share with Anna telling detail or two
details to assure her the works had some shred of provenance.
(24:51):
Gently but firmly 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 mister X Junior,
whose parents had passed on to their son more paintings
by some of the best known artists of the post
(25:11):
war period. Soon enough, Anne was calling him mister ex
Junior too, and referring to his parents as mister and
missus X. It sounded a bit silly, but maybe a
van played ball Glyphia might introduce Anne to mister ex Junior.
Glyphia did say that mister ex Junior had more works
(25:32):
to sell if they could be placed discreetly. These were
works that had been long stored by mister X hermetically sealed.
Even Glyphia 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
(25:55):
and 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,
(26:16):
it just simply doesn't happen. If somebody came to me
and said, I want to sell you this Clifford Still,
and I know that the Clifford still's fair market price
would be a million, and they say to me, well,
(26:40):
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 twenty percent of
(27:00):
its real value, 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 a while happened
to dealers. You just you make a mistake, But the
(27:24):
minute you do, 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 Knodler, this time with
(27:47):
a painting by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko under her arm.
It was a beautiful work, as Anne described it later,
with dark orbs against a pale, pink peach backdrop, and
like the deepen Coorns, it had no provenance other than
the link to Mr and Mrs X. I think that
(28:08):
they were the consortium, not just Cliff hear 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,
(28:31):
let's be honest, Abstract expressionism is not necessarily the most
technically advanced paintings. Now. I'm not saying that Rothco is
non 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.
(28:52):
One thing that I think you said in your book,
it's very important for the con artist 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
(29:13):
you really need to 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 people expect. If you walk in right
(29:38):
away with twenty roth Goes and a few Pollocks in there,
someone's gonna say, Okay, hold on one second, we're going
to 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 and invites less screw.
(30:00):
In the end, 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 collection
(30:21):
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 Rothko who I didn't know and who had
no kind of bona fides in the art world, I
(30:43):
would be very suspicious. Where did this person get it?
And it was stolen? I mean, you don't just go
wandering around with Rothko's right and did show the painting
too Ristopher Rothco, son of the late artist, who professed
to find it beautiful. That was enough for Anne. She
(31:07):
bought the painting for one thousand 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. If she showed it to Christopher Rothco, I
(31:32):
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 that Nodler was starting to deal in works
without any provenance. The circle had been confined to a
(31:55):
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 Fra. I just walked in
and saw this great red painting, presuming to be a Rothco.
(32:17):
I just couldn't even look at it because it was
so garish and so not by Rothco. And they were
selling it for at the time million dollars. It was
not that large, and it was clearly a fake. None
of these paintings had any provenance, at least of the
(32:40):
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 not check the provenance. That's what
you're supposed to do for an art fairies, was to
check the provenance and any paint particularly a Rothco. And
(33:03):
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 with his painting. In the old days,
you had to ask Jeane thaw On Francis O'Connor to
(33:24):
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 them down and you say, I'm worried about this.
You know, this is a picture which has been offered
(33:47):
to me. I think it looks beautiful, but it has
I have no provenance 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 on the line for it. One of the most
(34:09):
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
(34:31):
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,
(34:54):
you try to get as much information as you possibly can.
You try to docum meant 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,
(35:18):
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
(35:40):
asking the Deep and 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,
(36:01):
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
(36:21):
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
(36:42):
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 proof.
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.
(37:04):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:48):
the title. That's what the uniform code says you are
doing if you write an invoice. The staffers learned to
keep their distance when Rosalie's name was mentioned whenever something
about the Rosales works was discussed. One stafford said that
(38:11):
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 and
(38:36):
Glapia 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 Newman one or two Calledler's.
That's attorney Emily Rice Baum. Over a decade later, at trial,
(38:59):
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, let me check. She
(39:20):
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 something like that pop up?
(39:41):
A rothco that roughgo 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 five from the same source? Are there eight?
Are there twelve? Or their twenty? Or there forty one?
Early Never, despite her initial estimate of having eight paintings
(40:04):
in the collection, Gafia would manage to deliver over thirty
more works two Noodler, 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 Donald Sulton later
(40:28):
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 Ruben's departure, Sultan said it was as if the
director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was like Philippe Demontebello,
(40:53):
deciding that he's going to turn the thing over to
the secretary. According to one staffer who worked close lee
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 for a couple of years,
recalls a staffer. A museum director came into Anne's office
(41:14):
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 tragedy you might have read
about in the news, very sad story. The staffer has said.
(41:35):
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 lied
to this director why we probably got it on the
cheap and Anne was marking it up. On another occasion,
Anne took in a double paneled Milton Avery painting, which
(41:58):
was to say that there was a painting on each
side of the wood, instead of showing it that way
to the aviaries and reportedly how to conservator split the
painting down the middle and get two salable works instead
of one, a considerably greater profit to her and the gallery.
I asked Francis if this was typical in any way
(42:18):
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 my era. It's a kind
(42:41):
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 right back on the latest
(43:07):
season of the Next Question with Katie Couric podcast, Katie
dives into Well Katie Here. Exclusive podcast only conversations between
Katie and the people who made her memoir Going There Possible.
We spent a lot of time together around a dining
room table here and in the city, and you know
it was a very intense experience. All episodes of Next
(43:30):
Question with Katie Couric are available now. Listen on the
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts. What's Up guys on a shoal and I
am Troy Millions and we are the host of the
Ernia Leisure podcast where we break down business models and
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Listen in as our guests reveal a business models, hardships,
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(44:41):
host of the podcast History Unplugged. And if you're dreaming
of being a full time podcaster someday, you and I
have a lot in common. I used to teach history
for a living, which was great, but I wanted something
more and maybe you know what I mean. So I
gave podcasting a try, and I did it with Spreaker.
From my heart. I could explain how it in about
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is that, in my experience, the ad revenue with Spreaker
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So if you want to turn your passion into a
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That's sp r e a k e er dot com.
Get paid to talk about the things you love with
spreaker from my heart Sometimes and seemed drawn by the
sheer challenge of a newly arrived work. Someone might come
(45:50):
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. In Evitably, the owner didn't
want to wait 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
(46:11):
for cash. The staffers said, I was thinking, either there's
something wrong or you're taking this painting and will sell
it for two or three times the amount. I was
seeing this for 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 GlyP Era Rosales.
(46:34):
Like the first ones, they were ocean park abstracts, but
they were different in one sense. According to Rosalee, they
came from the the 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 Anne Friedman to She had
(46:57):
written a letter to Rosalie asking for at least some
provenance on the newly surfaced the Honda Gallery ocean parks.
Leslie Feeley recalls 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
(47:18):
find names that would fool people, and she lied and
lied and made up these fake provenances. I believe from
the beginning she knew these were fakes. They had no provenances.
She made up provenances every day. The Honda Gallery works
(47:39):
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 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
(48:00):
like Picasso and some of the earlier abstract people. I
just remember thinking, Wow, that just seems odd. Apparently Rosales
had made some calls and came up with provenance for
the Jande Gallery. Deepen corns. The key figure was a
(48:21):
Spanish restaurant owner named Caesario Fontanella. Supposedly, he told Rosalee
that he had owned a restaurant called Taverna says Are
on Fleming Street near Madrid's Castellana Plaza from the late
nineteen seventies until the Taverna Caesar had been a hangout
(48:41):
for artists. Everyone from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol had
frequented the place, or so Rosalees heard. Nearby was the
Janda Gallery, said Suzario Fontanella, where many of those artists
had shown. Fernando Vijande would often bring them over to
the Taverna. Cesar deep and Corn had been one of
(49:01):
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 depon corns that way, and kept them for all
those intervening years, he said, and was selling them only
now after deepon Corne's death. There was a fine story,
(49:22):
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,
because Rodrigo had helped run the gallery with his father
and knew of its artists upon his father's death. In
(49:49):
the most off key detail of Caesar Fontenelle's story was
the Taverna's address. Even if it had existed, it wouldn't
have been a hangout for arti from the the Honda Gallery,
because it's supposed address on Fleming Street was two or
three miles from the gallery. Both galleries that my father
(50:10):
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,
declared his son Rodrigo, was why he lived some fifty
yards from his galleries. At first and Freedman may have
(50:31):
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 GPA Rosalis was
bringing in one by one. With their now distinctive the
Honde Gallery labels had cast a glow of authenticity over
(50:52):
all the ocean park Deepened Corns and over GLPA Rosalee herself.
But a label isn't proven. It's just a label. If
the label had been part of a paper trail of ownership,
the result would have been picture perfect provenance. In this case,
the trail petered out as soon as it began. What
(51:14):
was it fair to say that every time you saw
a deep in corn ocean park that had any label
on back, that it was almost certainly fake. I think
one could say that, Yes, she swears that she didn't know,
which seems hard to believe. That's noodler artist Michael David Again,
(51:41):
should she have known? Yeah? And is this business fraud
with people cutting corners with fraud? Absolutely? And Friedman had
her Deepen Corns with the Honda Gallery labels, but she
pressed rosal Us for more proof of the works provenance.
(52:04):
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,
the late artist's son. Since then another Rothko expert, David Antham,
(52:24):
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 Lafia do something to fill in the story
of the ex family and arranged for Anne to meet
Mr x Jr. At last, not yet, Rosavas deflected soon,
(52:47):
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 their conversations
and Anne often talked about art of the post war period,
(53:09):
Lathira knew a lot enough to impress Anne, and the
two women share their favorite artists, one of whom was Clifford.
Still in most cases, a would go through Mr X's
collection searching for a painting by one of the artists
and had spoken of with great admiration. Miraculously, Glafira would
(53:30):
find onefa Rosales told investigators that the galleries would often
ask her for specific things without asking many questions where
it came from. So think about this. You are a
gallery and you are buying painting after painting from this
woman from Mexico, who says as representing a famous collector.
(53:55):
So then, as a gallery owner, I turned to her
and say, so do you think you might happen to
have some mother will? And then a few weeks later
she comes with a 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 Gopa to
(54:19):
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. 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
(54:41):
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 called Friedman
with terrible news. While the driver was bringing Mr X's
Clifford still painting from the photograph for a studio. She
said there had been an accident. The car had a
(55:04):
rear engine and the engine had caught fire. The painting
was nearly destroyed, all but a fragment. When she got
over her shock and told Rosale's to bring her the fragment,
the painting was indeed badly burned. It would have been
two and a half feet by three ft, Friedman said later. Indeed,
(55:25):
nearly all of the paintings Rosale's would bring were of
medium scale. To Anne, it made absolute sense that the
painting had been stored in the trunk. Anne was fascinated
with the fragment, and more so with the transparency that
accompanied it. The transparency, after all, showed the whole painting
(55:46):
before it was consumed by fire. On the drive back
to Mr X Junior's house, you could see the whole thing,
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, Ann would
beam with triumph. Quote would a con artist burn the
(56:08):
painting and then save a fragment so it could be
forensically examined if the painting wasn't real, wouldn't that make
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 happens. Proof positive the
(56:28):
pigment proved the painting was real, or so felt Anne
as for the burned fragment and kept it as proof
that the first Clifford still Mr x Jr. Had sold
her had been real as well. One staff are recalled
that the fragment was kept in a flat white portfolio.
(56:48):
You could see the burn marks on the edges. It
was and Friedman's own shroud of Turin Conveniently, Mr Junior
managed to find another Clifford still in storage and sent
it along and in turn took it to the annual
(57:09):
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
had dispatched from the Nler. According to Freedman, Bill Reuben
looked hard at the Clifford still and said, yes, that's
(57:33):
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,
none of the details in gas story of the burned
Clifford Still painting were true. Now we know, no fire
(57:55):
really happened, right did it happened? Actually, Carlos was preparing
the pieces, and he was treating them with her dryers
and for in them in coal and had temperatures so
that one got burned because he forgot to turn the
hair dryer of, and of course it went in flames.
(58:16):
And now Anne is waiting for the piece. And what
is this planation? I'm going to give Carlos tolm It
will tell them this. I want people to know that
I have never talked to nobody. I have never been
interviewed about my life or about this case, except for
the government of course. More from Glafira Rosale's herself next
(58:40):
time on art fraud. You have the cool, clear eyes
of a secret of wisdom and truth. Yet there's that top.
I'm the Grell loving pat You youth, believe you, leaveing
(59:12):
you Art Fraud is brought to you by I Heart
Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers are Matt del Piano,
Keegan Rosenberger, myself and Michael Schneyerson. We're produced by Brandon
Morgan and Zach McNeice. Zack also edited and mixed this episode.
(59:32):
Lindsay Hoffman is our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Schneyerson.
I believe you and my faith and my fo Did
(59:58):
you know that on the day Dr King was shot,
the old black security detail normally assigned to him was
called off. They're the ones who would not allow him
to stay at any hotel with balconies. All about This
(01:00:18):
is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now.
Listen on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Conquer your New Year's resolutions
with the Before Breakfast podcast and each bite sized daily episode,
you'll learn how to make the most of your time
with practical tools to help you feel less busy and
get more done. Listen to Before Breakfast on the I
(01:00:39):
Heart Radio app four. Wherever you get your podcasts, you're there.
I'm Scott Rank, host of the podcast History Unplugged Now.
It really is a dream come true to get paid
to talk about history without all the stress, while still
being able to make a living, and I did it
with Spreaker from my heart. Not only did they make
it super easy to monetize my podcast, but at revenue
is three to four times higher with Spreaker than with
(01:01:00):
any other host I've worked with. So if you want
to turn your passion into a podcast and give this
a try, visit spreaker dot com. That's s p r
e a k e er dot com. Get paid to
talk about the things you love.
Host
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