Once upon a time, there was an art gallery in New York City called Knoedler & Company.
Knoedler & Company made more than a fair amount of money selling art. As a matter of fact, they made a lot of money selling art supplied by one dealer, Glafira Rosales.
Between 1996 and 2008, the suit asserts, Knoedler earned approximately $60 million from works that Ms. Rosales provided on consignment or sold outright to the gallery and cleared $40 million in profits. In one year, 2002, for example, the complaint says the gallery’s entire profit — $5.6 million — was derived from the sale of Ms. Rosales’s works.
But there are some problems. Ms. Rosales’s “collection of works attributed to Modernist masters has no documented provenance and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.” One of the works that passed through her hands, a Mark Rothko painting, was sold by Knoedler for $8.3 million dollars, and has now been declared a fake.
At the moment 14 works Ms. Rosales brought to market — 9 of which were handled by Knoedler — have been judged as fake by authenticating bodies.
A company called Orion Analytical also conducted forensic tests on at least five Rosales paintings and reported that materials on the canvasses were not available or were inconsistent with the dates on the works.
Knoedler stopped selling works from Rosales in 2009, and immediately started losing money. They closed in 2011.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2012 at 7:46 am and is filed under Art, Clippings, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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