The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (7 page)

In contrast to the sense of loss many felt with the loss of the venerable gallery, the famous face of Knoedler, Ann Freedman, became the subject of ire for some buyers. Pierre Lagrange was incensed at her role in the sale of the phony Pollock. Domenico and Eleanore De Sole filed suit against her and Knoedler over the fake Rothko, accusing her of abdicating her responsibility and having reckless disregard for the truth in a civil complaint. John Howard, the head of a multibillion-dollar private equity firm, also sued Freedman, likening the whole affair to “a joke on the art world.”
47

While some may question Freedman’s integrity in legal filings and interviews, it would be quite difficult to argue that after spending many decades building a first-rate career as an art dealer and rising to the top spot in one of the country’s oldest and most venerable galleries, she decided to take a criminal turn. Further to the point, it was revealed that Freedman had herself purchased a 12
×
18-inch
Pollock from Rosales. The painting, which might seem like a bargain at only $280,000, was later found to feature an important error: Pollock’s signature was spelled “Pollok.”
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In her defense, Freedman argues, “discreet sources are my stock in trade,” and that throughout her career she had dealt with sellers who insisted upon anonymity. Besides, Rosales responded to one of Freedman’s requests to know more about the mysterious X family by saying, “Don’t kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg,” insinuating that Freedman’s requests to meet him would irritate him. Worse yet, in Freedman’s estimation, was the possibility that other dealers could be bidding against her.
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Thus, she had to seize the moment.

After the fall of Knoedler, Freedman was subjected to widespread second-guessing in the media from colleagues in the world of art dealing. One such dealer was Marco Grassi, the owner of Grassi Studios in Manhattan, who was harshly critical of Freedman’s role in the controversy, telling
New York Magazine,
“This has ruined one of the greatest galleries in the world. It has trashed a lot of people’s money. It seems to me Ms. Freedman was totally irresponsible, and it went on for years. . . . A gallery person has an absolute responsibility to do due diligence, and I don’t think she did it. The story of the paintings is so totally kooky. I mean, really. It was a great story and she just said, ‘This is great.’”
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Freedman, unwilling to let her reputation be attacked any longer, filed suit against Grassi, alleging defamation, libel, and slander, and maintaining that she subjected the Rosales paintings to due diligence, sticking to her claim that numerous experts, scholars, and critics had agreed with her assessment of the works as being authentic. The embattled art dealer said that she went “well beyond what is customary” to ensure the art was authentic and that “few galleries would have sought even a quarter of the confirmation Freedman demanded before selling these works.”
51
She cited one instance where the former
conservator of the Mark Rothko Foundation carefully examined every work Rosales brought to the gallery. “That conservator found the works to be classic works of the artists,” Freedman argued. She also quoted art dealer Ernst Beyeler, who described one of the Rosales Rothkos as a “sublime masterwork.”
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Ann Freedman is far from incompetent. But she also is no criminal. In fact, a former member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team asked to review the case for an expert opinion described her actions as “inconsistent with a fraudulent intent.”
53
Instead, it seems far more probable that she was intoxicated by the prospect of being part of the unleashing of a heretofore unknown collection on the world, just as so many others who have been duped by clever con men were. That’s not to say she was acting altruistically: ego, greed, and acclaim were also possible components of what seemed like an ardent desire to believe that the unlikely was fact. How else to explain an expert dealer’s willingness to buy into a provenance story that not only evolved drastically, but revolved around characters named Mr. X and Mr. X Jr.?
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Three

The Art Ponzi Scheme

While she was busy selling what turned out to be millions of dollars in forgeries from Glafira Rosales, Ann Freedman was interviewed by
New York Magazine
about another major figure in the Manhattan art gallery world, Larry Salander. In what might or might not have been a case of projection, she said, “Larry always has some mystery. Success for him was to find the undiscovered painting, to prove this was a masterwork against all odds.”
1
If Freedman’s evaluation may have offered a glimpse into her own psyche, it was accurate nonetheless when it came to Salander. Salander was at the time working feverishly on two major shows that he saw not only as a financial necessity, but also as a grand moment for the art market the world over. One exhibition, to be titled
Masterpieces of Art: Five Centuries of Painting and Sculpture,
would feature the works of true classical giants such as Rubens, Correggio, Botticelli, El Greco, Titian, and Michelangelo.

Masterpieces of Art
represented Salander’s deep interest in what he saw as truly valuable art—that of the classical masters. Speaking to the critic James Panero, Salander made a blunt comparison between
the prices fetched by the work of contemporary artists versus that of the Old Masters: “Our society now values a Warhol for three times as much money as a great Rembrandt. That tells me we’re fucked. It’s as if people would rather fuck than make love.”
2

Salander’s other show,
Caravaggio,
which he curated with the art historian and dealer Clovis Whitfield, would not only further Salander’s goal of emphasizing the value of the Old Masters: it was also a natural headline grabber. The show would be centered on a classical painting called
Apollo the Luteplayer,
which had last been sold in January 2001 at a Sotheby’s auction of important Old Master paintings and arts of the Renaissance in New York. At the time, the auction house listed an estimate for the painting at a range of $100,000 to $150,000—a relatively low figure for the work based on the fact that experts consulted by Sotheby’s deemed the painting to be from the circle of Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio. The work was likely simply a copy based on existing Caravaggio works featuring a lute player hanging at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia.

When he saw the Sotheby’s auction catalog—which stated that the work might have been created by Carlo Magnone—Whitfield was taken with the image of
Apollo.
Working on behalf of an anonymous American client, Whitfield went about examining the painting further. He was no novice: in addition to running a London art gallery, Whitfield was educated at both Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He would go on to write
Caravaggio’s Eye,
a detailed study of the artist’s revolutionary approach to painting. Of
Apollo
he said, “We had an idea that it was something more interesting. When I went to New York to look at the painting and put a lens close to it, I thought it was electrifying.”
3
So taken was he that Whitfield advised the American to buy it, and he did so for $110,000. It turned out to be quite a bargain. When Whitfield had it analyzed closely by
paintings conservators, they found evidence that the painting was not a copy at all. For instance, X-ray analysis revealed that the artist had made corrections to the picture that indicated he had changed course in the midst of painting it, including changes to the profile of the lute player’s hands. That’s not something an artist would do had he simply been copying an already-completed painting onto another canvas. Further analysis showed that the canvas bore preparatory incisions that were indicative of Caravaggio’s technique.
4

Despite the findings, Sotheby’s remained unmoved. “Were we to take the painting in for sale today, we would definitely not catalogue it as by Caravaggio,” a spokesman said.
5
But both Salander and Whitfield were undeterred by Sotheby’s stubborn refusal to budge. After all, no one expected Sotheby’s to suddenly tell the world that they had mistakenly undervalued a piece of art by tens of millions of dollars. And furthermore, the pair had to be buoyed by the approval they received from Sir Denis Mahon, one of the world’s most respected experts in Italian art of the Baroque period, about the painting. With a newly attributed Caravaggio headlining his exhibition, Salander knew he had something the art world could not ignore. Here was a true Old Master who met all the criteria for top billing and a sky-high asking price: previous high prices, a very low number of available paintings, and an important place in art history. And added to this was the emerging information about his fascinating life. Put simply, Caravaggio was a rock star.

Today, Caravaggio is considered an innovator, described by British artist and photographer David Hockney as having “invented a black world that had not existed before, certainly not in Florence or Rome.” “Caravaggio,” Hockney adds, “invented Hollywood lighting.”
6
Perhaps this was because the Milanese artist’s life was filled with a great amount of drama and turmoil, which included a duel over a woman, a purported murder, and imprisonments. Despite
such turbulence, he did not want for commissions, and though his first works sold for very little, he eventually captured the eye of collectors, leading his fellow artist Giuseppe Baglione to complain that Caravaggio “was paid more for his individual figures than others for history paintings.”
7

Today, his paintings are worth astronomical figures. In 2006, almost a year to the day before Salander’s planned exhibition, it was announced that the restoration of a Caravaggio that had been found in the attic of an Italian church was complete. The painting’s value was estimated at more than $110 million. A similar value was attached to his painting
The Taking of Christ.
8

So Salander, emboldened by these estimates and eager to make a splash with his important shows, attached an ambitious price tag to Caravaggio’s
Apollo the Lute Player:
$100 million—one thousand times its previous sale price. Salander’s gambit was that the art buyers would—and should—return to putting their big bucks on what he saw as the true greats: the Old Master paintings made by Caravaggio, Rembrandt, El Greco, Tintoretto, and others. In his view, contemporary art—the conceptual and sometimes downright bizarre—had been commanding top dollar for too long, and Salander saw his exhibition as the pivotal moment where it just might turn course, or rather, get back on course. He told the
New York Sun
that his exhibition would mark the first time a Caravaggio was sold in public and, therefore, “I’m not sure what we’re going to get for it, but $100 million is cheap. It’s the most important painting ever sold.” Apparently believing that the significance of the exhibition to his own career and the art world could not be overstated, he added, “There’s not a lot left to do after a show like this. It’s going to be a hard act to follow.”
9

The man who would reestablish the classical masters as the marquee-grabbers of the art world was born in 1949 and grew up in a
respectable but modest middle-class neighborhood on Long Island. His father, the owner of a small gallery himself, died when Salander was a young man, and the tough, tenacious art lover took on the responsibility of providing for his mother and sisters. Though he didn’t finish college, he became a self-taught expert in the world of art, impressing others with his voracious appetite for all things related to his field. In 1976, well before his thirtieth birthday, Salander and a partner opened the Salander-O’Reilly Gallery in Manhattan and built it into one of America’s best known and regarded art galleries. And he himself became a major figure in the world of art, known for an unmistakable passion for his work. His friend and former employee Ron Gerston recalled that Salander “didn’t sleep at night. He ate, drank, and breathed art. When he wasn’t in the gallery selling art, he was in his office reading about art and writing about art.”
10

Salander was somewhat of an anomaly in the art world, as he was successful as both an art dealer
and
acclaimed as an artist. As a painter, his works were so well regarded that one of them,
Crucifixion,
painted in 1992, is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Eight feet tall, the painting is executed in the same American Modernist style upon which he first established himself as a dealer. His paintings were the subject of nine solo and ten group exhibitions. According to Gerston, “He was a painter and that’s what he cared about.”
11

His background as an artist may have been the driving force behind his passion for the art he sold, but it was his forceful, dynamic personality that suited him well for wheeling and dealing with the powerful figures who created high-value art and those who could afford it. Salander made no attempt to conceal his background and upbringing as a regular guy, and his gift of gab made him an attractive figure to other powerful men. According to art critic and writer Judd Tully, the stocky, balding, somewhat unrefined yet charming
Salander was not what one envisions when they picture a high-profile art dealer in Manhattan. “He was very gruff-speaking and contrary to almost any profile you might think of in terms of what an art dealer might look like, sound like, dress like, and act like.” Yet his status near the top of the New York art world spoke for itself. “When he was in the nice digs, the Wall Street people were able to look past his eccentricity and trust this guy’s success and want to listen to him. The other people didn’t mind the eccentricities; he was an artist like they were.”
12
His friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of the
New Republic,
said Salander is “a very unusual combination of street vitality and aesthetic refinement.”
13

It wasn’t just Wall Street types who gravitated to Salander. He called many celebrities friends, including Robert DeNiro, Liam Neeson, and Bruce Springsteen. And when tennis legend John McEnroe was considering turning his SoHo residential loft into a gallery space, he turned to Salander for guidance. Salander brought him into his Upper East Side gallery in a nonpaying role to study the inner workings of the business. “You can’t learn guitar without learning the basic chords, and you can’t learn the art business without knowing the nuts and bolts,” McEnroe later wrote in his autobiography
You Cannot Be Serious.
14
The two became so close that McEnroe would eventually become the godfather to Salander’s child.

Salander’s opulent lifestyle matched that of the company he kept. Wieseltier described him as “a street kid who reads Ruskin. I don’t know anybody else who so naturally recognizes the brutality of the world but lives in such a fine way.”
15
He had two homes: one a 60-acre estate in Millbrook, New York, that included not just tennis courts but also a baseball field for his kids to play on; and a three-story brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that he purchased for nearly $5 million. His propensity for flying only on private jets was such that it left even DeNiro incredulous. When the pair
went to Portugal, DeNiro recalled, “I saw I had a plane and Larry had a plane. It just didn’t add up to me.”
16
And when his second wife, Julie, turned 40, Salander rented the Frick Collection museum for a $60,000 birthday bash. He also lavished her with a half-million dollars worth of jewels.
17

As his business grew and became more successful, Salander decided to make another major acquisition. He expanded Salander-O’Reilly Galleries to incorporate a new location on East 71st Street in Manhattan, a 45-foot-wide neo-Italian Renaissance mansion that was nothing less than spectacular. Tully described it as “One of these beautiful nineteenth-century buildings with a big staircase, beautiful rooms, beautifully appointed. You walked in and you thought, ‘Oh my god, this place is a palace.’”
18
The location featured three stories of exhibition space, a greenhouse roof, and skylight-illuminated upper levels.
New York Magazine
raved that it was “well worth a visit in itself with its arched front entrance, velvet-walled rooms, and inlaid wood floors.”
19
Such space doesn’t come cheap, especially in Manhattan. Rent for the new gallery space exceeded $150,000 per month.

Despite the sumptuous new gallery space, all was not as it seemed in the world of Larry Salander and Salander-O’Reilly. With six children, an ex-wife, two multimillion-dollar residences, and a lavish lifestyle—not to mention two Manhattan gallery locations—to support, pressure to earn large amounts of money was intense for the art dealer. Furthermore, Salander had now embarked on his quest to bring a rebirth to Renaissance art. This meant acquiring Old Master paintings, which required that he find additional large investments. An acquaintance told the
New York Post
that Salander “had delusions of becoming the major American dealer in Renaissance art. He would sign any piece of paper, he was buying everything in sight. He just went crazy.”
20
While some saw craziness, however, Salander saw a quest for the soul. He wrote an unpublished manuscript titled
Soul
Wars
and told James Panero, “When I’m talking about the soul to people, they look at me like I’m nuts. But there has been a longtime manipulation of people who want to make money to dumb down the American society and rob us of the curiosity of our souls.”
21

While Salander may have seen himself on a mission of salvation, his chosen route to rescue the soul was a curious one. Burdened by intense financial pressures to support his personal and professional lives, he embarked on a number of schemes to stay afloat—which would put all he built at risk.