Wet Paint

Haverford & Sons Gallery, Upper East Side, New York, Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 8:00 pm. The oldest gallery in the city has closed its doors for the first time in 158 years.

This afternoon, hedge fund manager Sebastian Wexley walked in with a lab report. “Number 11,” a splatter canvas Abel Korshak supposedly painted in 1951, which he bought here in 2007 for 15 million dollars, has a yellow made with a pigment that only exists after 1970. Korshak died in 1956.

The gallery sold 33 other canvases from the same source in twelve years. The board ordered the doors shut, and the police are holding the three people who were inside.

One of them knows who painted that yellow, and who wrote the name in the corner of the canvas.

Main hall of an old Upper East Side gallery, with abstract canvases and an empty easel behind police tape.