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In general, a book is turned into a film—more, or less, successfully. This book is the other way around, in that Barry Avrich penned it after directing Made You Look, the 2020 documentary about the $80m faking scandal that brought down New York’s venerable Knoedler Gallery and severely damaged the reputation of the art world. It still stands as one of the world’s largest art frauds, duping several high-profile experts, famous collectors and even one museum.
Avrich says in his preface: “Making the film was one of the greatest thrills of my life, as everyone involved was totally committed to telling their side of the story, and perhaps engage in an often humorous and puzzling form of revisionism.”
So why write the book? He explains: “It is the story that keeps on giving, with new facts and characters surfacing…”
Among those characters are Avrich’s “victims/conspirators (?)” such as the Knoedler director Ann Freedman, along with the collector David Mirvish, who gets the same significant question mark against his name. The foreword is written by none other than Dominico De Sole, “collector, victim” who dubs it “the definitive book about the Knoedler Gallery story”.
That story is well known and is, indeed, one of the major art scandals of this century. Over a period of 14 years a previously unknown “dealer” called Glafira Rosales supplied Knoedler with 40 expertly crafted counterfeits, among them works by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. By doing so, she saved the gallery from almost certain bankruptcy and greatly enriched its owner Michael Hammer—according to court papers, Hammer routinely charged the gallery for trips to Paris with his then wife, plus several cars including a $482,000 Rolls-Royce.
To say that the book has manifold new elements to reveal is a stretch. The first few chapters give some general information about the art market, sometimes in the form of bullet points(!) and the author rather discouragingly recommends that “to get to the juicy parts” the reader “can skip the early chapters that set the table for the crime that unfolds”.
No day in court
From then on, the book outlines how the fraud unravelled. The last chapters are heavily based on the court case concerning Domenico and Eleanor De Sole’s “Rothko”. And while Freedman had proclaimed she was looking forward to her day in court, at the last minute the case settled, so the jury never got to hear her testimony.
Even so, she had talked to Avrich. For months he listened while Freedman consumed bottle after bottle of expensive wine, as he wooed her to take part in his film. In the end, Avrich “schlepped away” no less than 55 tote bags that she had supplied, filled with photocopied newspaper articles featuring people who were the victims of massive art cons. She has always claimed that she was taken in as much as the others. Freedman was never charged with any crime, and yet one feels that Avrich is not convinced. Certainly, his film implied that Rosales was a victim too, of a scheming ex-boyfriend who was the real instigator of the scam: she was the only one to go to jail in the whole sorry affair.
The book is sloppily written. There are bulleted lists of transactions made by Knoedler in its glory days, or names of various fakers, from Han van Meegeren to the deeply unknown Eric Spoutz (he exists and went to jail for his fakes, but really? In this book?) The writing is careless: Armand Hammer “would begin a legacy of buying and selling art, some of it fake, some of it stolen by Nazis, and most of it priceless”. Sorry, but you cannot buy and sell “priceless” art. Some of the bulleted lists look like fillers, rather than relevant to the story.
And there is a bizarre reference to “paintings in the barn, undisclosed assets”, which Freedman apparently cited, “referring to the $25bn Barnes Collection of art that would tour internationally in the 1990s to shore up the finances of a cash-strapped foundation”.
These grumbles apart, the book does supply considerable detail about the Knoedler fakes, even if it does not produce any stunning new revelations. De Sole is probably right: it may well be the definitive book about the Knoedler scandal.
- Barry Avrich, The Devil wears Rothko: Inside the Art Scandal that Rocked the World, Post Hill Press, 240pp, $30 (hb), published 10 June
- Georgina Adam is the art market editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper and a contributor for the Financial Times
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