The Knoedler gallery and the fake abstract expressionists

This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.

Founded in 1846, Knoedler & Company was the oldest art gallery in New York. From the 1990s on, a Long Island dealer, Glafira Rosales, began offering the gallery previously unseen canvases attributed to masters of abstract expressionism, such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. According to her, the works came from an anonymous collector who had supposedly bought them straight from the artists and preferred to stay out of sight. Over about fifteen years, Knoedler and another Manhattan gallery sold dozens of these canvases, in a scheme estimated at 80 million dollars.

Doubts grew until, in 2011, a collector sued the gallery over a fake “Pollock,” and Knoedler, with 165 years of history, suddenly closed its doors that year. The federal investigation showed that the canvases had been painted by Pei-Shen Qian, an immigrant Chinese painter who worked in his home garage in Queens and was paid from a few hundred to 9,000 dollars per work. On one of the fake Pollocks, the signature was misspelled: “Pollok.” A couple of collectors who in 2004 had paid more than 8 million dollars for a fake Rothko took the gallery and its former director to trial in 2016; the case ended in a settlement during the proceedings.

Sources

• theartnewspaper.com/2017/01/31/no-further-jail-time-for-glafira-rosales-for-her-role-in-dollar80m-knoedler-forgery-scandal
• npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/08/16/212679009/painter-created-million-dollar-forgeries-in-queens-garage-officials-say
• nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nyc-jury-hears-modern-masters-forgery-scandal-fake-art-millions-chinese/930192/
• news.artnet.com/market/7-things-knoedler-trial-413285