The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (20 page)

Less than a year after sentencing, Khan filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. It was an unceremonious end for an art dealer who once moved paintings valued in the hundreds of thousands. In her Bankruptcy Schedule B, Khan listed her antiques inventory as being valued at more than $6 million. The U.S. Trustee assigned to the case, Jason Rund, aware of her conviction and fearing that her information might be unreliable, decided to investigate this appraisal further. He contacted two reputable appraisers who informed him of the actual value of the inventory: $750,000. With her business gone, it would prove to be the last exaggerated appraisal Tatiana Khan would ever make.

Nine

The Printmaker

The famed art critic Robert Hughes once declared Modernist painter Marc Chagall to be “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century.”
1
Born Moishe Shagal in Russia in 1887, Chagall’s Jewish heritage is evident in many of his creations. He produced a large number of works inspired by the Bible, and while he didn’t shy away from Christianity—his
White Crucifixion
was said to be a favorite of Pope Francis—the emphasis of his religious oeuvre was certainly the Jewish experience.
2
He describes the intersection between his religion and art in his autobiography,
My Life:
“In short, this is painting. Every Saturday Uncle Neuch put on a talis, any talis, and read the Bible aloud. He played the violin like a cobbler. Grandfather listened to him dreamily. Rembrandt alone could have fathomed the thoughts of the old grandfather, butcher, tradesman and cantor, while his son played the violin . . .”
3

While perhaps best known for his paintings, Chagall worked in a wide array of mediums, including sculptures, tapestries, and ceramics. His skill with stained glass was such that his windows adorn synagogues, a number of cathedrals, and the United Nations building
in New York, where he created a window titled
Peace
dedicated to the memory of the late UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. After 1966, Chagall did very little painting and instead concentrated on making stained glass. He also turned to the creation of engravings on copper, but despite these efforts, this period of his career would become best known for his lithographs, a skill for which he is widely admired. Chagall learned the art of lithography at the atelier of Fernand Mourlot, a printmaker who was the key force behind the rebirth of lithographs after World War II. Charles Sorlier, who had been one of his teachers at Mourlot’s studio, would soon describe Chagall as “an absolute master of the technique,” and the artist spent years practicing his craft.
4

At about this time, Chagall produced
The Story of Exodus,
a book consisting of 24 vividly colored lithographs measuring about 19.5
×
14.5 inches. Two hundred eighty-five signed portfolios were produced, with 250 of them numbered and printed on
Velin d’Arches.
Copies of
The Story of Exodus
are today quite valuable, with one realizing a price of $40,000 at a Christie’s auction in October 2011.
5
Chagall’s publisher was Leon Amiel, a successful New York publisher with strong ties to the Modernist art community. Though he published dozens of books on art covering artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as works on Judaism and the Holy Land, his involvement with Chagall’s
The Story of Exodus
was more than just that of a businessman selling a product. Like Chagall, Amiel was dedicated to his Jewish roots and published a wide array of works on Judaica, from tomes on Hebrew manuscripts to books on Jewish cuisine. The two collaborated on an illustrated Haggadah—a prayer book for the Passover service, and according to Amiel, it was during this work that he inspired Chagall to create his Exodus series of paintings.
6

Leon Amiel’s connection to legendary Modernists is impressive. In addition to his close relationship with Chagall (he would later write a book titled
Homage to Chagall
), the New Jersey–based publisher with a mansion in Long Island was friends with a number of other well-known artists. Picasso created a work in red, green, yellow, and purple pencil titled
Visage de faune (Pour Leon Amiel)
in 1957. Similarly, Salvador Dalí produced his own
Pour Leon Amiel,
a work in black and blue and including the Surrealist’s trademark melting clock. Amiel was also a friend of the innovative and influential Joan Miró and published many volumes on the artist.

Amiel, a heavyset man with large plastic-framed glasses and an even larger smile, has been described as “a major force in the art world,” hobnobbing with a veritable who’s who of artists from his period and rising to the upper echelon in the world of fine art publishing.
7
By the mid-1980s, it was estimated that he was worth upward of $40 million. And a great deal of the fortune he was amassing was earned through the sale of the art prints he was producing at his publishing enterprise in Secaucus, New Jersey. Perhaps the key to his success was the modern and efficient printing presses he imported in the 1970s that utilized photography and color separation. These machines allowed him to produce thousands of lithographs per hour, while the traditional method of using lithographic stone produced just 30 in the same time.
8

The creation of lithographs and serigraphs can be divided into three categories. First, lithographic and serigraphic prints are most valuable when they are produced as part of an original limited edition print. This category of prints must be created under the artist’s supervision in order to meet the standard of ethics of the art industry. These prints are then signed and numbered by the artist as proof of
their acceptance of the edition, and the artist sometimes reserves a small percentage of them for his own use or for use by a publisher. Referred to as “artist’s proofs,” these are identified by the designations H.C. (
hors de commerce,
or “not for sale”), or E.A. (
épreuve d’artiste,
or “artist’s proof”) or A.P. (also meaning “artist’s proof”), usually in place of the edition number. Second, “afters” are copies of an original work made by others with the artist’s permission. These copies have only nominal value in the decorative art market. And third, there are unauthorized reproductions of an artist’s works, or works made to resemble what an artist might have created, made without the consent or involvement of the artist. If these works carry the artist’s signature, they are considered forgeries.
9

While things were going well for Leon Amiel’s business, associates of his in the world of print dealing, Carol Convertine and her husband Martin Fleischman, had reason to worry. In 1986, their business, Carol Convertine Galleries, was raided by New York state authorities investigating them for using misleading sales tactics to peddle counterfeit art to investors via a telephone marketing scheme. Although Convertine Galleries boasted a Madison Avenue address that situated it near Museum Row, all of the Convertine sales were made by telephone through scripted salespeople who could reap 25 percent commissions for each sale. The script used by the print pushers made the claim to potential investors that art historically appreciated in value at a rate better than stocks, oil, diamonds, or rare stamps.
10
The climate was ripe for convincing potential buyers that they could expect their investments to appreciate dramatically and quickly. Before Convertine and Fleischman would be brought to trial, Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
would sell for $39.9 million—a then record auction price for a single painting. The prior high-water mark for a painting at auction was nearly $30 million less.
11
This market, combined with
the ever-present desire for investors to believe they have found the opportunity of a lifetime, ensured that the Convertine operation didn’t disappoint its principals, grossing $1.2 million from the sale of about 2,000 poster-quality prints that they had bought for as little as $30 and sold for up to $3,000 by falsely portraying them as original lithographs by Dalí, Chagall, and Picasso. However, the scam also ultimately brought prison sentences for Convertine and Fleischman, who were charged with securities fraud because they sold the prints as investments.
12

The Convertine prosecution was unique in that it amounted to the nation’s first felony convictions against what was described as a “telephone boiler-room gallery.”
13
At the heart of the case was an exploding trade in questionable fine art prints, and it would soon lead to investigations that would rock the art world.

Leon Amiel’s name would surface as a result of the Convertine case when he acknowledged that “some of” the fake lithographs had come from him. Speaking to the
New York Times,
Amiel explained that the Dalí lithographs he had provided were not fakes at all; rather, they were “lithographic interpretations” of Dalí’s original works.
14

Provenance for Dalí’s works has been the subject of great scrutiny, and the ways in which his prints have become among the most faked in the world are as bizarre and difficult to believe as some of the surreal pieces he created. For instance, in the late 1970s, Dalí was paid $400,000 by a publisher named Lyle Stewart to produce illustrations for a series to be called
Tarot Cards.
When Dalí gave Stewart his completed illustrations, the publisher was unimpressed with the works and decided not to produce
Tarot Cards
and demanded a refund. When Dalí refused to give back the $400,000, Stewart filed a lawsuit. In an unusual resolution to the case, the judge ordered Dalí to sign 17,000 blank sheets of paper on which
Tarot Cards
would
have been printed so that Stewart could sell the package and recover his losses. Dalí, following the judge’s orders, signed all 17,000 sheets under the watchful eye of an attorney.
15
There were now thousands of sheets of printing paper bearing the signature of the artist without also including his artwork. Anything could have been printed on it.

Incredibly, the situation got even worse. Stewart sold the blank sheets to Peter J. “Captain” Moore, a former assistant to Dalí whose relationship with the artist had soured. Moore sold the cache of signed blank sheets to three publishers in Paris. Then, according to A. Reynolds Morse, the founder of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, Moore realized “if he could sell 17,000 sheets, he could sell 40,000.” Soon, Moore began forging a large but untold number of signed blank sheets and selling them for $40 apiece to French publishers. The scam was finally discovered by French customs officials who nabbed a truck carrying 40,000 signed blanks. “Since that time, we have no idea how many [Dalí] sheets were forged, but it’s in the millions,” Morse said.
16

Though it’s still unknown how many Dalí frauds are in circulation, it’s certain that the pieces pushed by Amiel through the ill-fated Carol Convertine Galleries were among them. Amiel further explained his dubious defense that the pieces were “lithographic interpretations” by saying, “I don’t know how these people sell to the public. What they claim and how they sell it is something I don’t get involved with.”
17
In other words, his operating philosophy was that he merely produced prints; how dealers described them was up to them. And this credo would be an inspiration for generations of Amiels to come.

Though realizing outstanding profits from his business, the late 1980s would soon become a devastating period for the family of the publishing magnate. First, federal agents—apparently unimpressed by the statements Leon gave to the
New York Times
and spurred by
numerous accounts to the Federal Trade Commission about what appeared to be an art print fraud ring—turned their attention to his operation. And second, Leon Amiel was diagnosed with liver cancer that would take his life in October 1988.

Saddened but undeterred by the death of their powerful patriarch, the Amiel family forged ahead. First, Leon’s brother Sam took over the business, but he was soon fired by Leon’s widow, Hilda, when she discovered he had been stealing paintings.
18
Hilda then assumed the helm of the business herself with her daughters Kathryn and Joanne, and even her granddaughter Sarina, helping her run the business. The women met with Marc Kniebihler, Leon’s trusted chromist—the person who had actually created the fraudulent artwork since 1983.
19
The Amiel women made it clear to him that they wanted to continue Leon’s business. Kniebihler told the women that he would be willing to continue his work with them, but no longer wanted to be paid with the prints that were created at the Amiel workshop. Instead, the chromist said he “wanted to be paid with prints preferably made by the artist and signed by the artist.” He told his new bosses that if they ran a “clean business” that, in time, they could be legitimately profitable. However, the Amiel women would have none of that.

Like Kniebihler, other associates wanted to discuss how work would proceed under the new Amiel leadership. One such person was art dealer Philip Coffaro, who had been dealing with Leon as far back as 1979. Though Coffaro initially believed he was obtaining legitimate art from Amiel, it took just a couple of years for him to realize that the works he was purchasing were, in his words, “no good.” The prints were too plentiful, and the color and paper just not right. But it wasn’t just connoisseurship that told Coffaro that the prints were frauds. He had witnessed Leon boldly sign and number “limited edition” works in other artists’ names at his Secaucus facility.
Leon even taught Coffaro how to place fraudulent edition numbers on prints in a manner by which he could avoid detection. Nevertheless, Coffaro was pleased with the profits he was turning and continued to deal with Amiel. But now Leon was gone, and Coffaro wanted to talk to the women to discuss what he felt was a “downgrading” in the quality of the prints they produced.

Hilda assured Coffaro that the prints would be better and that they had already “taken care of most of that in Secaucus, and the material was looked at and everything that looked bad was thrown out.” She even promised letters of authenticity for future prints he bought from them. But Coffaro found that Hilda didn’t make good on her assurances, and he remained dissatisfied with the quality of the prints he was receiving. According to Coffaro, the signatures that the Amiels were putting on their prints were problematic and appeared “child like.” Since the days when Leon was running the operation, the practice was to leave the prints unsigned until the last moment in case law enforcement officers visited the facility, at which time they could simply say they were selling posters as opposed to authentic, authorized fine art prints. Coffaro eventually confronted Hilda and Kathryn about the poor quality of signatures he was receiving. Coffaro recalled that Kathryn explained, “Look, I know [they] are terrible, my mother had my uncle signing them, but Sarina will be coming home soon and they will be better.” Sarina was away at college in Boston and was the best signature-forger on the team. Her return would improve matters.