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Knoedler

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Stereoscopic photograph of the Knoedler gallery interior, c.1860-1880

M Knoedler & Co was an art dealership in New York City founded in 1846. When it closed in 2011, amid lawsuits for fraud,[1] it was one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US, having been in operation for 165 years.

History

Knoedler dates its origin to 1846, when French dealers Goupil & Cie opened a branch in New York. Michel (later Michael) Knoedler (1823-1878), born in Kapf near Gaildorf in Baden Wuerttemberg, Germany, started to work for Goupil & Cie in Paris in 1844, and moved to New York in 1852 to take charge of the New York branch.[2] He purchased the U.S. arm of the business in 1857, and was later joined by his sons Roland (1856-1932), Edmond and Charles, with Roland taking the lead after his father's death in 1878.[2]

With dealer Charles Carstairs, Knoedler opened branches in Pittsburgh (1897), London (1908) and Paris (1895),[3] and, under Carstairs' influence developed a reputation as a leading dealer of Old Master paintings, with customers including collectors such as Collis P. Huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry O. Havemeyer, William Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick, and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Tate Gallery. Knoedler & Co. became part of an elite group of art dealerships, which dominated the market for British painting in America.[4] Knoedler developed a fruitful relationship with London gallery Colnaghi, with Colnaghi finding suitable paintings in Europe for Knoedler to sell to wealthy collectors in the US. Knoedler and Colnaghi were involved in the secret sales by the Soviet government of works from the Russian Imperial collection in the Hermitage in the 1920s and 1930s, along with Matthiesen in Berlin.

After Roland Knoedler retired in 1928, the management of the firm passed to his nephew Charles Henschel, with Carmen Mesmore, Charles Carstairs and his son Carroll Carstairs. Henschel died in 1956, and E. Coe Kerr and Roland Balay (Michael Knoedler's grandson) took over. The firm was sold to industrialist and collector Armand Hammer for $2.5 million in 1971.[2] Five years later, the last member of the Knoedler family - Roland Balay - ceased his involvement in the management of the firm. It increasingly concentrated on contemporary art from the late 1970s. After Hammer's death in 1990, the Hammer foundation continued to hold a controlling interest in the gallery until it closed in 2011, when Michael Armand Hammer (Armand Hammer's grandson) was its chairman.[5]


Locations

The art dealership occupied eight different locations, starting on Broadway. By the 1890s, it operated from a row house at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. In 1911, it moved to a new building at 556 Fifth Avenue, designed by Carrère and Hastings,[6] and then to another new building by Carrère and Hastings at 14 East 57th Street, near Madison Avenue, in 1925.[6] The firm incurred significant costs in refurbishing new premises in an Italian Renaissance-style town house at 19 East 70th Street in 1970.[6]

Knoedler held a 150-year retrospective in 1996, exhibiting works such as John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, Thomas Eakins's Music, and Édouard Manet's The Plum, with loans from 15 institutions, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art, a coup for a commercial gallery.

In February 2011, the gallery sold its premises at 19 East 70th Street for $31 million.[7] In 2012, the gallery attempted to auction a portion of its remaining inventory of artworks.[8]

Art fraud scandal and closure

The gallery's president Ann Freedman[9] resigned in October 2009,[10] amid rumours of problems with fakes involving paintings supplied to the gallery by Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales.[11][12]

It was later discovered that between 1994 and 2011, under the direction of Ann Freedman, the gallery had sold faked paintings of works by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among others.[13] Freedman had purchased the paintings for Knoedler from Glafira Rosales, who had in turn obtained the fake paintings from the art forger Pei-Shen Quian.[14][15] Quian had reportedly painted the forgeries in his Queens, New York Garage.[16] He is reported to have received less than $9000 USD for each painting from Rozales, while Rosales sold the paintings for millions of dollars each to Knoedler.[17]

A statement issued on Wednesday 28 November 2011 by Knoedler stated simply that it was closing permanently for business reasons [10] unrelated to the lawsuits it faced over the sale of forged paintings.[18]

By 2012, the FBI was investigating "at least two dozen paintings"[19] that were supplied to the gallery by Glafira Rozales. While Rozales initially claimed not to have defrauded anyone,[20] in 2013, she pled guilty to selling over 60 fake works of art to two New York art galleries, conspiracy to commit money laundering, money laundering and tax evasion.[21] Spanish art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz (Ms. Rosales' boyfriend) and his brother Jesus Angel Bergantiños Diaz were also indicted in US District Court for the fraud.[22] The Diaz brothers were arrested in Spain,[23] and released on bail, in 2014. In 2016, a Spanish court ruled that Jesus Angel Bergantinos Diaz could be extradited to the United States.[24]

The art forger who painted the fakes, Pei-Shen Quian, was indicted but avoided prosecution by fleeing to China.[14]

In 2003, Goldman Sachs executive Jack Levy had bought an untitled Jackson Pollock painting for $2 million, but when the International Foundation for Art Research declined to authenticate the work,[2] Levy asked for and received his money back.[25]

The day before the gallery closed in November 2011,[10] Belgian hedge-fund manager Pierre Lagrange sued the gallery in relation to the work Untitled 1950, which Knoedler attributed to Jackson Pollock.[18] Lagrange had purchased the painting for $17 million in 2007, on the understanding that it would be included in a supplement to the Pollock catalogue raisonné.[26] It was later claimed[by whom?] that no such supplement was planned; tests later showed that some of the paint used was not available until some years after Pollock's death.[2] The suit was settled out of court in 2012.[27]

In 2012, Domenico De Sole and his wife Eleanore claimed that the gallery sold them a fake Mark Rothko, "Untitled 1956", for $8.3 million in 2004.[19] The lawsuit, with Knoedler and Ann Freedman as defendants, went to trial in January 2016. The Soles settled out of court with Ann Freedman on February 7, 2015,[28] but continued their suit against Knoedler.[16]

Wall Street executive John D. Howard sued Knoedler and its former director Ann Freedman in 2012, claiming Willem de Kooning painting that he bought for $4 million in 2007 was a fake. The suit was settled out of court in December 2015.[29]

Archive

In 2012, the Getty Research Institute announced that it had purchased the majority of the gallery's archives, dating from 1850 to 1971.[30] The Getty subsequently digitized parts of the archive and made them available online. With the exception of the reference library, which the Knoedler Gallery sold separately in January 2012, and which consists of titles already in the Getty Research Institute's library, this acquisition represents the complete archive of the gallery's operations from the 1850s to 1971, when it was acquired by Armand Hammer. The archival material includes business records; correspondence among clients, artists, and Knoedler staff; card files on clients and artworks; photographs; prints; rare books; sales catalogs dating to the 18th century; and gallery installation plans.[31]

References

  1. ^ "Knoelder Gallery again accused of fraud in new lawsuit". blogs.nytimes.com. January 30, 2013.
  2. ^ a b c d e Shnayerson, Michael. "A Question of Provenance". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  3. ^ Goldstein, 2003, p. 167
  4. ^ Reist, 2014, p. 168.
  5. ^ Corbett, Rachel. "LAWYERS CHASE ELUSIVE FIGURE IN KNOEDLER LAWSUIT". Artnet.com. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  6. ^ a b c Gray, Christopher. "When Elegance Sold Art". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  7. ^ Grant, Daniel. "READING THE TEA LEAVES IN THE KNOEDLER MESS". Artnet. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  8. ^ Corbett, Rachel. "Works From Knoedler Gallery Bomb at Doyle New York Auction". Blouin Artinfo. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  9. ^ Miller, M.H. "In Court, Experts Say Knoedler Ignored Warnings About Forgeries". Artnews. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  10. ^ "The Knoedler-Rosales Case - artnet Magazine". artnet.com. 4 April 2012.
  11. ^ a b Hays, Tom. "New York City jury hears how a forger's fake fooled art buyers". The Toronto Star. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  12. ^ Rashbaum, William K.; Cohen, Patricia; Maslin Nir, Sarah. "Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $80 Million New York Fraud". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  13. ^ a b Moynihan, Colin. "Suit Against Knoedler Gallery Over Fake Rothko Continues After a Settlement". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
  14. ^ Wang, Yanan. "N.Y. art gallery thought it spent $80 million on Modernist classics — but they were all 'genius' copies". The National Post. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  15. ^ a b "The Knoedler's Meltdown: Inside the Forgery Scandal and Federal Investigations". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
  16. ^ a b Cohen, Patricia. "Second Suit Accuses Knoedler Gallery of Selling Fake Art". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  17. ^ Cohen, Patricia. "Artist's Family Says Gallery Ignored Warning of Fakes". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
  18. ^ "Art Dealer Pleads Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to $80 Million Fake Art Scam, Money Laundering, and Tax Charges". Federal Bureau of Investigation. U.S. Government. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  19. ^ "Bergantinos Diaz Qian Indictment" (PDF). US Department of Justice. United States Government. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  20. ^ Swaine, Jon. "Artist at centre of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  21. ^ Clendenning, Alan (16 February 2016). "Extradition to US for Spanish dealer in big art fraud case". The Associated Press. Retrieved 23 February 2016.
  22. ^ Warnica, Richard. "How did David Mirvish end up in the decade's most shocking art forgery scandal?". Canadian Business. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  23. ^ Klasfeld, Adam. "Collector Calls $17 Million Pollock a Phony". Courthouse News Service. Retrieved 9 February 2016.
  24. ^ Pettersson, Edvard; Hurtado, Patricia. "Closed New York Gallery Settles Suit Over 'Forged' Pollock". Bloomberg Business. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  25. ^ Moynihan, Colin. "Knoedler Gallery Director Settles Lawsuit Over Fake Rothko". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  26. ^ Neuendorf, Henri. "Knoedler Gallery Reaches Out-Of-Court Settlement Over $4 Million Fake de Kooning". Artnet news. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  27. ^ Vogel, Carol. "Getty Institute Buys Knoedler Gallery Archive". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
  28. ^ "Knoedler Gallery archive". Getty Research Institute. Retrieved 11 February 2014.
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