The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (6 page)

On February 1, 2011, Killala Fine Art filed suit against Julian Weissman and the Dedalus Foundation over the forged Motherwell painting
Spanish Elegy.
Three days later, Pierre Lagrange met with Freedman’s replacement at Knoedler, Frank DeLeo, to discuss his Pollock purchase. Lagrange’s demand was clear: rescind the sale of the Pollock and refund his money. DeLeo refused, citing the opinions of experts who had provided “positive opinions” about it.
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Hoping to rid himself of the problem painting, Lagrange then approached Christie’s to see if they, unlike Sotheby’s, would be willing to sell his problem Pollock. Again, questions about the provenance of the painting—Rosales’s Mr. X story—caused consternation. Christie’s was clearer still, outlining the issue related to the David Herbert story and requesting the name of the anonymous consignor (Mr. X Jr.). Knoedler stubbornly refused to furnish the information, with DeLeo informing Christie’s that the gallery was “not able to provide you with any additional information with respect to this work other than what Mr. Lagrange already has in his possession.”
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Of course, it was becoming clear that what Lagrange had in his possession was not much at all. So he sought a scientific analysis of the painting.

Nine months after Killala Fine Art filed its civil complaint against Julian Weissman and the Dedalus Foundation, a legal settlement over the phony Motherwell
Spanish Elegy
was concluded, and the agreement between the parties would prove to be the turning point for the Glafira Rosales scam. The settlement called for Killala to be reimbursed by Rosales and, to a lesser extent, Weissman. And most remarkably, the parties agreed that the spurious
Spanish Elegy
would be forever branded as a fraud with the following text permanently stamped on back: “After physical examination and forensic testing, the Robert Motherwell catalogue raisonne project of the Dedalus Foundation, Inc., has determined that this painting is not an authentic work by Robert Motherwell but a forgery.”
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Meanwhile, analysts had concluded their examination of Pierre Lagrange’s Pollock in November 2011. The examination proved the painting was not the work of the famous creator of priceless drip paintings. Analysts reported that two of the paint samples “that were clearly and unambiguously integral” to the painting were discovered in 1957 and not commercially available until 1970. Pollock, who died in an automobile accident in 1956, could not have used these pigments.

The results of the analysis were the death knell for the David Herbert/Glafira Rosales Collection, and Knoedler apparently knew it. One day after receiving the results of the Lagrange analysis, on November 30, 2011, Knoedler & Company released the following statement: “It is with profound regret that the owners of Knoedler Gallery announce its closing, effective today. This was a business decision made after careful consideration over the course of an extended period of time. Gallery staff will assist with an orderly winding down of Knoedler Gallery.”
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The closing of Knoedler after 165 years of business sent shockwaves around the art world. Lucy Mitchell-Innes, president of the
Art Dealers Association of America, told the
New York Times,
“My reaction is one of tremendous sadness. This is a very venerable institution that provided great art to a number of the great collections and great institutions in this country.”
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Venerable, true, but not without previous missteps related to the provenance of works it sold. In 1998, Knoedler was sued by the Seattle Art Museum when the museum itself was sued by the heirs of Jewish art dealer Paul Rosenberg. A painting in the SAM’s collection,
Odalisque
by Henri Matisse, had been stolen from Rosenberg by the Nazis. In 1954, the painting was purchased from Knoedler by Prentice and Virginia Bloedel, with the couple unaware that the painting had been looted from Rosenberg. When the Bloedels sought further information from the Knoedler salesperson about the provenance of
Odalisque,
they received a letter from the gallery about which the court wrote, “For whatever reason, the facts set forth in that letter were false, despite the fact that Knoedler apparently had the correct information in its possession at the time the letter was written.”
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The Bloedels later innocently donated
Odalisque
to the SAM, but in 1996 the couple’s granddaughter recognized the painting in the book
The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art
by Hector Feliciano, leading her mother to contact the Rosenbergs.
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After the SAM spent two years researching the ownership of the painting,
Odalisque
was returned to the Rosenbergs. The SAM and Knoedler eventually settled their federal civil suit, with Knoedler agreeing to give to the museum one or more works from its inventory or the equivalent in cash.
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In 2003, Knoedler was sued again, this time by the Springfield Museum in Massachusetts. In 1955, the museum purchased
Spring Sowing
by Jacopo de Ponte from Knoedler, a painting that had been hanging in the Italian embassy in Warsaw until it was looted by the Nazis when they shut down the building. While the Italian
government long believed that the painting in Springfield was the same one taken from their Warsaw embassy, they were unable to prove it until an Italian official located a photo taken in 1939, which showed the de Ponte hanging in the embassy. It was a match for the Springfield painting. As a result, the Springfield Museum returned the painting to the Italians.
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The museum sued Knoedler, seeking money damages and citing the gallery’s claim that it had examined the painting’s provenance and had clear title to sell it to the museum. In 2005 the parties settled out of court.

Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, clearly stirred by these events surrounding Knoedler and the fictitious David Herbert Collection, also sought scientific analysis of their painting, submitting the alleged Rothko to James Martin. Martin was a sensible, if belated, choice. Educated in the field of conservation at the esteemed Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware and a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the University of Cambridge in England, Martin’s expertise includes having conducted more than 1,700 analytical studies, as well as six years teaching paint analysis and infrared spectroscopy to the FBI’s Counterterrorism and Forensic Science Research Unit. He founded Orion Analytical in 2000, based the firm in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and equipped it with the most advanced technology for the analysis of paintings. It’s an art authenticator’s paradise, with equipment ranging from a scanning electron microscope with backscattered electron imaging to confocal Raman microspectroscopy: things a conservator would love and a forger would likely not understand. Martin is among the most well-known art authenticators in the United States. His results, too, were conclusive: “In spite of his signature, ‘
mark rothko
’, and date, ‘1956’, materials and techniques used to create the Painting are inconsistent and irreconcilable with the claim that Untitled was painted by Mark Rothko . . . in 1956 or any other date.”
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Martin’s work showed that the efforts to disguise Pei-Shen Qian’s work as an original Rothko—undertaken by the artist and by Carlos Bergantiños—were no match at all for scientific analysis. In fact, the Orion Analytical report makes it clear that the painting bore indicators of fakery that were blatant. For instance, Martin’s research of Rothko’s technique helped him determine that the artist used temporarily fastened crossbars on the back of stretchers for the very purpose of retarding the development of stretcher-bar marks on the surfaces of large canvases. And while vertical crossbar marks from the painting’s support structure appear on the front and back of the painting, the stretcher holding the canvas contained only a horizontal crossbar.

In addition, Martin discovered clear indicators that the painting was done after the crossbar marks formed, a sure sign that the canvas had been used previously. He also found the canvas to be strip-lined, a measure usually taken to compensate for a tear or weakness in a canvas. However, Martin found no reason for strip-lining. Finally, he found that “the presence of white opaque primers on the Painting (and no evidence of transparent pigmented size) is inconsistent with Rothko’s technique,” and other materials inconsistent with the artist’s work.
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In short, James Martin’s analysis decimated the best and most creative efforts the Rosales forgery ring could imagine.

Meanwhile, FBI agents paid a visit to the Queens home of Pei-Shen Qian to question him about his role in the fraud scheme that was unraveling virtually by the day. While Qian would eventually claim to be an innocent dupe in the scam—simply making copies of famous artists for people who could not otherwise afford them—findings by investigators indicate this was not the case. During questioning by the agents, Qian lied about matters that did not match his claims. For instance, Qian told the FBI that he did not recognize Rosales’s name. He also denied having ever heard of famous artists about
whom he not only owned books, but whose names he had actually painted onto the forgeries. And, most tellingly, he stated that he had never attempted to mimic the style of Abstract Expressionist artists. During a search of his home, FBI agents found paintings completed in the style of Pollock and Barnett Newman; auction catalogs and books on Abstract Expressionist artists and techniques; and even an envelope of old nails marked “Mark Rothko.”
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More than 60 forged paintings created by Qian and brokered through Rosales and Bergantiños were sold to just two galleries: Knoedler & Company and Julian Weissman Fine Art. In all, Rosales and her cohorts received over $33 million selling their faked art, an amount that pales in comparison to the $80 million taken in by the two companies. And while the largesse they made would lead to a mountain of lawsuits and badly damaged reputations for the galleries, Freedman, and Weissman, the millions that Rosales and Bergantiños made would prompt the feds to pursue the pair as they did Al Capone: they indicted them for tax evasion and related charges.

The U.S. government put together an airtight case against Rosales, showing that the money she received from the sales of the paintings did not, in fact, go to a Mr. X Jr. in Spain. Instead, she and Bergantiños kept the ill-gotten gains. And of course, they failed to claim this income on their tax returns either as individuals or business owners. The feds were also able to determine that Rosales kept her money in a foreign bank account, a fact that she failed to declare. Faced with 99 years in prison, Rosales decided to plead guilty in hopes of leniency from the court. She also agreed to forfeit the $33.2 million and her 5,000-square-foot, $2.4 million home in Sands Point, New York, and to pay restitution not to exceed $81 million, though it’s not clear how she would do so.
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Carlos Bergantiños didn’t stand by his girlfriend. Instead, he and his older brother Jesus Angel Bergantiños Diaz fled the United
States to avoid arrest and decades in prison, taking cover in Seville, Spain. Authorities sought the pair for months before finding them in a luxury hotel in April 2014. Carlos, overcome by the arrest and facing extradition to the United States to answer for his massive fraud, suffered an anxiety attack that landed him briefly in the hospital. Within days of their capture, the Bergantiños brothers were indicted by the United States for crimes including wire fraud and money laundering, with Carlos facing additional charges for defrauding the IRS, filing false tax returns, and willful failure to file a “Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts,” charges he shared with Rosales.
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Like the Bergantiños brothers, Pei-Shen Qian, now 75 years old with his name emerging in the media and up to his neck in trouble for the lies he told the FBI, left the United States and returned to his native China. It’s an ideal choice for a fugitive from American justice: China and the United States do not share an extradition agreement, and it’s quite unlikely that Qian will ever be forced to return to the United States to answer for his crimes.

Qian’s departure came despite his insistence that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Speaking to
Bloomberg News
in a rare interview with Western media in December 2013, he said, “I made a knife to cut fruit. But if others use it to kill, blaming me is unfair.” Qian called the whole forgery scam “a very big misunderstanding.” The paintings, he believed, wouldn’t be taken seriously. “It’s impossible to imitate [the masters]—from the papers to the paints to the composition.”
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But Qian’s behavior runs contrary to his claims. Though he received a few thousand dollars per painting at first, prosecutors described a seminal moment in the relationship between the brokers and their artist: Qian spotted one of his creations in a booth at a Manhattan art show priced very far above his fee and then held out for more money from Bergantiños, who boosted Qian’s payments to up to $7,000 per painting.
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This, of course, was little more than
pennies on the dollar compared to the cuts that Bergantiños and Rosales took in, but on the other hand, Qian was now obviously aware that he was not producing cheap, obvious fakes. Still, he continued to produce art for Bergantiños and Rosales. Further, Qian’s lies to the FBI and the evidence they unearthed (including the Rothko nails) did not point to the behavior of an innocent man. But the world will probably never see all of the evidence against Qian put before a jury of his peers. Instead, he will likely spend the rest of his life in Shanghai in the studio where he still paints.

Aside from Rosales and the Bergantiños brothers, it appears unlikely that anyone else will ever be prosecuted for the $80 million David Herbert Collection forgeries. But the scam left a disaster in its wake. A storied gallery was closed, buyers were defrauded, the courts were flooded with enormous civil suits, and respected art dealers had seen their reputations suffer.