The Knoedler forgery scam trial is now on

by Marc Masurovsky
Twelve years ago, the now defunct elite New York art gallery, Knoedler and Company, which used to cater to the aristocracy of Europe and nababs from countries worldwide, sold a painting attributed to Mark Rothko which, in reality, had been produced by a Chinese artist living in very modest circumstances in Queens. His paymaster was Glafira Rosales, a self-styled art dealer and collector based in Long Island. All told, Knoedler under the leadership of Ann Freedman, its last president, sold more than 30 paintings which Ms. Rosales offered for consignment to Knoedler as products signed by “the titans of Abstract Expressionism” allegedly coming from a private Swiss collection. All told, 63 million dollars changed hands to Ms. Rosales’ benefit. The Chinese painter who produced the forgeries barely received more than a few thousand dollars for the knock-offs that he so expertly created. He has since high-tailed it back to China. 

Glafira Rosales in front a "Jackson Pollock" painting

The honorable New York gallery was forced to close its doors after being asked to refund millions of dollars to irate collectors who were incensed that the gallery had bamboozled them into thinking that they were investing in major modern paintings. 

Ann Feedman

Why did such a reputable gallery ignore a report produced by an independent organization, the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), which was unable and unwilling to validate the authenticity of one of the Pollocks sold by Knoedler?  Had Ms. Freedman given more credence to the report and seen a light bulb go off, perhaps she might still have kept her clients and averted the shutdown of the gallery.

How do forged “masterpieces” signed by iconic members of the Abstract Expressionist pantheon withstand scrutiny as authentic pieces? How is it that Ann Freedman, Knoedler’s last president of Knoedler, fell for this elaborate scam? Arrogance might play a role in her undoing since, when asked why she did not dig more into the background of Ms. Rosales, she replied that “she doesn’t do that.” Instead, she relies on the advice of art experts. So much for provenance research. If she did not do it or encourage it, who did, at the ex-Knoedler and Company? The absence of due diligence checks and basic provenance research does lie at the core of the case against Knoedler. Had due diligence practices been put into place and applied to Ms. Rosales and her magic trove of Abstract masterpieces, many of which were signed by Pollock, could the scandal have been minimized and even stopped dead in its tracks, Rosales cuffed and jailed for running a sham operation and would Knoedler still be open today? Should a liability verdict be rendered, it might reaffirm the necessity of due diligence checks and provenance research as checkpoints against being scammed and snookered into acquiring dubious cultural assets.

The art world feeds on its own self-imposed practice of “omerta’, a Mafia code of silence, to sustain, maintain, uphold reputations and most importantly, value. It is a very competitive and ruthless milieu where one’s word can be worth gold or tin plate in appraising, authenticating and vouching for the importance and genuineness of an object offered for sale. It is all about producing a constant supply of high quality works for ever hungry and demanding, wealthy individuals, who can stop taking your calls in a second if you do not provide what they want. Or so it appears. Or so one believes.

Image is vital in this world. A woman like Ms. Freedman does not exactly rise to “queen” status but she is a highly-regarded dealmaker and connoisseur in the international art world. Did she finally break down and get ahead of herself, embarrassed about being caught up in a trap so cunningly set up by Ms. Rosales and playing double or nothing, opted to go “all the way”, by acquiring for herself some of the fakes? Perhaps to reassure her nervous clientele?

We’ll soon find out. Self-interest and narcissistic, patronizing behavior are characteristic features of the high-end segment of the global art world much like in the rarified air that one breathes in executive offices of high-performance hedge funds and brokerage firms and global investment firms, as well as auction house executives who cater to their clients’ every whim. Looking upstream to meet the autocratic needs of an ever-expanding super class of excessively wealthy people worldwide is a challenging task no doubt. Who knows where these paintings end up, in some redoubt deep in the hills of Kazakhstan or a dacha outside of Moscow or better still in the nouveau super-riche compound of a freshly-minted Chinese billionaire?

After all, the idea is to make money, even more money, amass, amass, and amass, buy, buy, buy until there is nothing left to buy and boredom sets in. Art is simply an instrumentality in the perplexing game that the super-wealthy play. Getting caught is simply part of the process. There is very little appreciation for the art as long as experts like Ms. Freedman and her equally high-priced experts can convince these moguls to part with their money because they are helping to sustain an illusion of what the cutting edge of culture is all about, as defined by these “experts.”

Whether the art is any good is for you to decide. Meanwhile, tens of billions of dollars and euros are exchanged each year to sustain this fantasy called the global art market.

The trial of Ann Freedman and Knoedler does allow us to peek into their prefabricated, platinum-plated reality, pockmarked by high fashion events, multimillion dollar parties in exotic remote islands, private estates, and well-protected luxury buildings scattered around the world.

If these are the people who actually end up possessing looted art and antiquities, we will have an incredibly difficult time wresting those objects from them. Their sense of morality does not extend to ceding title to expensive conversation pieces called “art," looted or not.

Russian billionaires

Recent auction in Utah

by Marc Masurovsky

An auction recently took place on January 14, 2016, at St. George, Utah, organized by Pine Valley Auctions. Among the lots being offered for sale were works by important 20th century artists such as Egon Schiele, Karel Appel, Serge Poliakof, Bernard Buffet, Sonia Delaunay, Sean Scully, Joan Miro, and Arshile Gorky. All of these works came from a single collection in the name of Michael P. Cornelius. None of the works came with a provenance. The only evidence of an owner or a possessor of these works came in the form of a white label pasted on the back of these works. Michael P. Cornelius, of Fine American Paints, at 110 7th Avenue, New York. The telephone number provided has a Santa Fe, NM, area code. Nowadays, that is less likely to shock since most people keep their cell phone numbers and resettle in remote communities choosing to keep those numbers. The telephone number is associated with a camera shop in downtown Santa Fe.

The question here is one of trust and diligence. If one wanted to contact Mr. Cornelius, where would one go?

Well, for one, the phone number that he provided was registered to someone else in Santa Fe.

Furthermore, there is no Fine American Paints on 7th Avenue in New York or anywhere for that matter in the continental United States. At the address provided on the label, all that one can find is Williams-Sonoma.

Finally, the pièce de résistance is Mr. Cornelius himself. He too does not seem to exist in a location that makes any sense and can be associated to the works being put on sale in St-George, UT.

There are numerous ways by which works of art can be laundered, resold for profit in remote locations like a small town in Utah which does not experience the presence of modern American and European art of a certain quality on a regular or even occasional basis. This comment is not meant to be patronizing but it is a statement of fact.

An equally serious question to ask about these works being sold with fictitious names, addresses and telephone numbers: are these works authentic? It's true that some buyers don't care whether what they buy is authentic or not because they like the look and feel of the works. After all, that is part of what makes art appealing and, like many works or objects of art endowed with an enthralling esthetic, these artistic pieces become expensive conversation pieces that convey instant status to their possessors.

Sonia Delaunay

Add caption

Bernard Buffet

Arshile Gorky

Nevertheless, keep in mind that these kinds of sales occur fairly regularly throughout the United States and across the globe. For those of you who are interested in investing tens of thousands of dollars into iconic names of the modern art world, please check the references of those who consign the works. Do your due diligence or you will be left with the equivalent of an automotive lemon.

Egon Schiele

The Gurlitt Task Force "fact sheet"

by Marc Masurovsky

The Gurlitt Task Force made a three-page fact sheet available to the general public dated 12 January 2016.

Since the discovery of Cornelius Gurlitt’s private collection in November 2012, too much ink has been spilled over the origins, content and disposition of this collection, which, due to its association with Hildebrand Gurlitt, father of Cornelius Gurlitt, has borne the mark of Cain for his association with the Nazi regime and for having profited therefrom. Hildebrand Gurlitt died in an auto accident in 1956. What he left to his heirs, one of whom was Cornelius Gurlitt, we do not know. We are unaware, at least we in the general public, of the total number of art objects that were in Hildebrand Gurlitt’s possession at time of death. We do not know how many objects his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, sold on the international art market, how many he loaned for exhibitions, how many he donated, how many he gave away, how many he swapped for other objects.

All we know is what we have been told by the German authorities: that there were 1256 works of art which comprised the Cornelius Gurlitt collection. 

The Task Force set about to ascertain how many of these objects had an explicit provenance which could connect it to an act of spoliation, to a theft or misappropriation directed or inspired by the Nazi regime against its owner.

After two years of work and the employment of over 20 contractual researchers on renewable short-term contracts, the Task Force has identified only 11 works as being explicitly the product of Nazi confiscations and thefts, some of which have been returned to their rightful owners, after laborious and unnecessarily complicated negotiations.

Eleven?

499 Gurlitt-owned works are listed on the lostart.de database, proof apparently that there is still a question about their ownership histories.

Let’s look at the other figures:

507 works were not considered to be tainted as Nazi loot, of which 231 works were de-accessioned from German public museums in the 1930s. Did the Task Force even bother to research their provenances once their link to German public institutions was clearly established? What if they were on loan to those institutions prior to being purged for being “degenerate”? Will we ever know?

Isn’t it a fact that the American government upheld during its occupation of a defeated Germany the Nazi de-accessioning law as a legitimate act by the Nazi Government to protect the “values” of German society? Sounds like the forerunner of our modern-day “family values” movement. The questions surrounding that politically motivated act by the American government in the immediate postwar years should be discussed in the open. One wonders if the decision to uphold this Nazi attack against culture was not motivated more by a fear of provoking a wholesale purge of American collections which had been stocked in part by donations from private collectors and dealers who had bought large quantities of “degenerate” works on the international market at fire sale prices and justified their purchases as “rescues”. One should not be shy to express these thoughts because one’s “rescue” is another’s act of complicity with acts of plunder associated with genocidal undertakings. Indeed, had the American government declared the de-acccesion law illegal, the question of repatriating to the reborn Germany all works sold to non-German collectors--private and institutional-would have had to be dealt with in one fashion or another. It never was.

We need to return to Square One here. 

We don’t really know how the Gurlitt Task Force has defined “Nazi loot.” Does it include works that were subject to “internal plunder” during the 1930s which were acquired by Hildebrand Gurlitt at auctions at which objects were sold as a direct result of racial and political persecutions against the owners of those works, forced to sell in order to garner some income to be used to flee Germany? Did the Gurlitt Task Force consider as plundered objects confiscated by Nazi collaborators operating in German-occupied territories?

We don’t know.

We don’t even know how many of the works in Cornelius Gurlitt’s collection were acquired by him on the international art market without due regard for provenance.

We don’t know anything about the methodology used by the Task Force, the archives that were consulted, how far and deep the research was conducted.  Were private archives consulted? How many art historians were consulted as experts on specific artists? How did one determine that an object was subject to Nazi theft besides the obvious description of a Gurlitt object on inventories drawn up by agents of the Nazi government as confiscated?

We might hope that some or all of these questions have been answered in the full report of the Task Force, which was released in German, several hours before the German government made a public announcement of its release, thus giving no time even for Task Force members to review the report.

None of this sounds good. If this is the best that the German government can do under the klieg lights of international opinion, its every moves analyzed and scrutinized for the past two years, we should not hope for German authorities and their agents in museums and cultural circles to practice what we consider to be “transparency”, an absence of “opacity.”

Murkiness has characterized the Gurlitt process since the investigation into Cornelius Gurlitt was initially announced in late 2012. It appears to be as thick as odorous sludge.

Enclosed is the first page of the Gurlitt Task Force “fact sheet.”

Fact sheet

Results on Munich Stock of Artworks

1258 artworks: Total number of works Composed of:

          1224 artworks: Number of seized artworks 


          34 artworks: Finds from Cornelius Gurlitt’s estate which were entrusted to the Taskforce for 
provenance research after Cornelius Gurlitt’s passing in August/September 2013 


Thereof: 


507 artworks: Number of works that were found not to be Nazi-looted

Results:


o 231: Works which were dislocated from German museums by the “Degenerate Art” operation, but which had been acquired by each respective museum already before the Nazi regime came into power in 1933 and which were not on loan from private individuals

o 276: Works which could be attributed to the Gurlitt family stock because they either were created after 1945, or were made by members of the Gurlitt family, or could be attributed on the basis of personal dedications

499 artworks: Posted on the Lost Art online database since suspicions had not yet been ruled out that they may be Nazi-looted art

Results:


o 11 artworks: work identity assured; provenance established (4 works: Nazi-looting confirmed; 2 works: strong suspicion of Nazi-looting after establishing their provenance; 5 works: initial suspicion of Nazi-looting ruled out)


o 117 artworks: work identity assured; provenance indications on possible Nazi-looting; very specific indications in case of 25 artworks


o 27 artworks: work identity assured; due to provenance indications Nazi-looting seems unlikely


o 152 artworks: work identity assured; low provenance indications

o 143 artworks: work identity assured; no provenance indications


o 49 artworks:work identity not assured; noprovenance indications

252 artworks: Artworks (mainly from the “Degenerate Art” operation) for which further research is necessary before they can be categorized

Transparency

by Marc Masurovsky

Transparency is the condition of being transparent.

Synonyms can be lucidity, clearness, translucence.

Transparency can be purity like the crystal clarity of the water.

Antonyms are murkiness and opacity

Decades ago, while in high school in Paris, my class visited a water purification plant run by the Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE), the people responsible for ensuring that potable water runs through the taps of Parisian homes, offices and businesses, park fountains, swimming pool intake pipes.

As the CGE engineer blithely told us, Parisian water is 50 per cent chemicals, 50 per cent refuse (he actually used the word “merde” which made us all laugh). Nine steps of purification were required to transform the dark brown sludge that we saw turn into pristine-looking, “transparent”, clear as crystal, water. Quite a tour de force! We were all visibly, very impressed.

Is it possible to achieve the same result with the provenance of a work of art? If we compare raw, pre-treated, water flowing into Paris with the typical provenance that we find in museums, auction catalogues and gallery brochures, we could rightfully say that they “stink" much like the murky Seine water being processed by the CGE.

Do we have a process of filtration and purification much like the one put in place by the CGE, to “clean up”, to “purify”, to make the provenance “transparent”, “crystal clear”? Not really, but there has been some improvement over the past decade. However, the means allotted to purify the history of ownership of art objects are chronically lacking and, to a large extent, still elude us. Some say that the leadership of institutions in the art market view provenance research as a perk, a luxury, and merely an option. Although viewed as a necessity by a growing number of museum professionals, auctioneers and even dealers and collectors, there is no significant movement to underwrite the cost of research. And why should there be since billions of euros' worth of art objects were traded last year without regard for provenance?

In the mean time, here are some examples of “murky” histories associated with objects which were randomly selected out of forthcoming sales organized by Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the two largest global auction market power houses in the world. These examples are provided simply to show that there still is much work to be done and to provoke a discussion about what it would take to ensure that all art objects should be accompanied with a "clear" provenance. Or is that even possible?

1/ our first candidate is a15th century Italian Old Master drawing. The first item on the provenance dates to 1975 and there is an indication that the item was exhibited in London in 1953. Two gaps are obvious: between the year of its creation and the London exhibit of 1953 and between 1953 and the 1975 date. Hard to imagine how one fills up 400 years of history. Less fanciful is how to fill the gap between the 1953 exhibit and the 1975 date. The work is of Italian origin. At some point, it left Italy to parts unknown. Assuming that there are no collectors' markings on the back of this work on paper, one is left with little to go with.

2/ Lot 21 of a forthcoming sale of Italian Old Masters at Christie’s New York, features a watercolor on vellum by Mauro Gandolfi, which was produced in the late 18th century. The first item in the provenance is a Max Perl sale in Berlin on 3 December 1936. Afterwards, the watercolor resurfaces in New York in 1989, at Colnaghi’s.

More than 200 years separate the time of creation of the Gandolfi item from the time of its sale in Berlin in 1936 by the Max Perl auction house in Berlin. The auction house is described as a “Jewish auction house” in Barbara Hoffman’s, “Art and Cultural Heritage: Law, Policy and Practice,” [p. 186]. One might wonder how and why this work was on sale in Berlin three years after Hitler took power. Who put it up for sale? Was it, perchance, as a result of a “forced sale” or driven by dire economic necessity unrelated to acts of persecution? Indeed, for a forced sale label to be ascribed to any transaction after 1933, proof must exist that racial, political, or other forms of persecution lay at the root cause of the decision to sell.

A number of works on paper and paintings sold through Max Perl in the mid-1930s became the subject of Holocaust claims decades later.

The Max Perl auction house operated on the edge of what was acceptable by Nazi esthetic and ideological standards regarding the type of art that could be sold in the Reich. As reported in Bernhard Fulda and Aya Solka’s “Max Pechstein, the Rise and Fall of German Expressionism” [p. 324), the Gestapo had raided the Max Perl auction house for selling “pornographic” works—a euphemism used to describe Expressionist and “degenerate” works of art. In that regard, James van Dyke in Franz Radziwill’s “the Contradictions of German art history, 1919-1945” [p. 220) argues that the Max Perl auction house was able to sell many works by Jewish artists unmolested by Nazi authorities.

With this simple check of secondary literature regarding Max Perl, one is entitled to ask the question: who owned this watercolor prior to the sale of 1936? As with most works on paper, and the price that they command on the market, there is little likelihood that the layers of opacity can be thinned out by lengthy research to reach some low level of clarity in the provenance. Murkiness prevails.

3/ At Sotheby’s, similar questions are ever present. A painting by Paul Signac dated 1904, Voiles dans la brume, Canal de la Giudecca, provides a tantalizing provenance which, although, close to complete, reveals its gaps.

To wit: the last pre-1940 owner listed on the provenance of this Signac work in the Sotheby's entry was Claude Roger-Marx, who had acquired this painting by 1922. The next reference to an owner dates to 1956. That owner's name was Alex Maguy, the founder of the Galerie de l’Elysée. 36 years elapsed between the Roger-Marx ownership and Maguy, a game of hopscotch which allows the reader to leapfrog over the German occupation of France (1940-1944).

Sotheby’s is not sure about the 1956 date, it might have been earlier. A quick check of the Jeu de Paume/ERR database shows 35 works by Signac being plundered by the Nazis in German-occupied France, one of which belonged to Claude Roger-Marx. This work does not appear in the Roger-Marx restitution claim which can be read at the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at La Courneuve [the old citation for the Roger-Marx claim is RA 608]. We can infer therefrom that Roger-Marx sold the Signac to X…. prior to 1940. Hence, we can ask: who owned the Signac between Roger-Marx and Maguy? We are left in a historical, proto-genocidal haze, regarding the temporal interval between Roger-Marx and Alex Maguy. How many owner were there prior to Maguy? 1, 2, 3?

A note on Alex Maguy: he stood in the periphery of the recycling of art looted from Jewish art collectors in wartime Paris. There are lingering suspicions about the inventory with which Maguy opened the Galerie de l’Elysée in 1955 on Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris.

In this brief overview, we have not achieved transparence in the provenance of the three aforementioned items. Was I unfair? I don't think so. They were selected as illustrations of a deep-seated, endemic, no, systemic and ethical problem that permeates our conception of culture, the production, consumption of art objects worldwide, and our desire to sustain or sever their links to the larger history of civil societies from which they sprang and through which they traveled in time and space.

Doubts will linger as to the complete history of these pieces.

You might ask yourselves: is there enough information out there to flesh out those provenances so that one can achieve crystal-clear clarity? Is that even possible?

Entretemps, the art market rolls on, buying, displaying, selling, and we are left to expose its obvious flaws, at worst, for posterity.


Sources:
Sotheby's New York, Lot 5, 7 February 2016
Christie's New York, Lot 21, 27 January 2016