M Knoedler & Co

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Stereoscopic photo from Galerie M Knoedler & Co, approx. 1860–1880

M Knoedler & Co was a leading New York gallery. With a 165-year history, it was one of the oldest galleries in the United States when it fell in 2011. The downfall of Knoedler is closely linked to one of the largest counterfeit scandals in recent history.

history

The gallery traced its origins back to 1846 when the French art dealer Goupil & Cie opened a branch in New York. Born in Kapf (near Gaildorf ) in Baden-Württemberg in 1823 , Michel (or Michael) Knoedler had worked for Goupil & Cie in Paris since 1844 and moved to New York in 1852 to take over the management of the branch there. In 1857 he bought his employer's US business. His sons Roland, Edmond and Charles later got into the business, and Roland Knoedler (1856–1932) took over the management of the gallery after his father's death (1878).

Together with the art dealer Charles Carstairs , Knoedler opened branches in Pittsburgh (1897), London (1908) and Paris (1895). Under the influence of Carstairs, the gallery made a name for itself as a leading dealer in the field of "old masters". Customers included famous collectors such as Collis P. Huntington , Cornelius Vanderbilt , Henry O. Havemeyer , William Rockefeller , Walter P. Chrysler Jr. , John Jacob Astor , Andrew Mellon , JP Morgan and Henry Clay Frick ; institutional buyers such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Louvre , and the Tate Gallery . Knoedler & Co. was also part of a small group of leading art dealers that dominated the US market for British paintings. Knoedler worked closely and successfully with the London gallery Colnaghi , which found suitable paintings for Knoedler in Europe, which could easily be sold to wealthy US collectors. Knoedler and Colnaghi were (along with the Berlin gallery Matthiesen ) significantly involved in the secret sale of Hermitage paintings by the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 1930s.

After Roland Knoedler retired in 1928, his nephew Charles Henschel took over the management of the gallery, together with Carmen Mesmore, Charles Carstairs and his son Carroll Carstairs . Henschel died in 1956 and the management passed to E. Coe Kerr and Michael Knoedler's grandson Roland Balay. In 1971 the gallery was sold to collector and industrialist Armand Hammer for $ 2.5 million . Five years later, Roland Balay left the company's management - as the last member of the Knoedler family. The gallery now increasingly focused on contemporary art from the late 1970s. After Armand Hammer's death (1990), the Hammer Foundation continued to hold a significant stake in the company until it closed in 2011. Armand Hammer's grandson Michael Armand Hammer was Chairman of the Board at that time.

New York locations

The art shop has had eight different locations over the years. First on Broadway, from the 1890s on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street . In 1911 the gallery moved to a new building on Fifth Avenue (number 556) designed by Carrère and Hastings . In 1925 they moved to a new building near Madison Avenue (14 East 57th Street ), which was also from Carrère and Hastings. In 1970 the gallery redesigned the newly occupied premises (19 East 70th Street ) in the style of an Italian Renaissance townhouse at very high costs .

In 1996, Knoedler held a 150th anniversary retrospective, showing works such as John Singleton Copley 's Watson and the Shark , Thomas Eakins ' Music , and Édouard Manet 's The Plum . The exhibition included loans from 15 institutions (including the Corcoran Gallery of Art , the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art ). This kindness (unusual for a commercial trader) testifies to the prestige that Knoedler enjoyed.

In February 2011, the gallery sold its offices at 19 East 70th Street for $ 31 million. In 2012 the gallery tried unsuccessfully to auction off part of its remaining art holdings.

Nazi looted art and reparations

Knoedler was affected by several legal proceedings in the area of Nazi looted art . Among other things, it was about a Matisse that the National Socialists had confiscated from the property of the Rosenberg family in 1941. Knoedler had acquired the painting in 1954, and it had been in the Seattle Museum since 1996 (a gift from Virginia and Prentice Bloedel). An El Greco , which the Gestapo had confiscated in 1944, was also affected. This El Greco painting (Portrait of a Gentleman) was listed in exhibition catalogs as belonging to the Knoedler Gallery. Knoedler bought the painting from the Viennese dealer Frederick Mont, who, according to Anne Webber (co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe), had worked with the Gestapo. Both paintings were returned to their rightful owners after trials.

Art forgery scandal and closure

In October 2009, the gallery director, Ann Freedman, resigned under the impression of never-ending rumors, all of which revolved around suspected fakes that the gallery had obtained from the dealer Glafira Rosales.

As a result, it turned out that between 1994 and 2011 the gallery, under Freedman's direction, had sold counterfeit works by numerous artists, including Robert Motherwell , Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko . Freedman had acquired these paintings for Knoedler from Glafira Rosales, who in turn had received them from the art forger Pei-Shen Quian. Quian allegedly received less than $ 9,000 apiece from Rosales for the fakes. Rosales sold each of the paintings to Knoedler for seven-figure amounts. On November 28, 2011, Knoedler published a statement in which it merely stated that it would cease business operations for economic reasons that had nothing to do with the legal disputes in the context of the counterfeit scandal.

By 2012, the FBI was under investigation into at least two dozen paintings the gallery had received from Glafira Rosales. Rosales originally denied cheating on anyone. But in 2013 she pleaded guilty to selling more than 60 counterfeit works of art to two New York galleries. She also pleaded guilty to money laundering, money laundering, and tax evasion conspiracies. The friend of Glafira Rosales, the Spanish art dealer José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, was charged with fraud in an American court as was his brother Jesus Angel Bergantiños Diaz. The two brothers were arrested in Spain in 2014 but released on bail. In 2016 a Spanish court ruled that Jesus Angel Bergantinos Diaz could be extradited to the USA. Later that year it was decided that his brother José Carlos Bergantinos Diaz could not be extradited for health reasons.

The forger who created the works, Pei-Shen Qian, was also charged, but fled to China.

Legal disputes and claims in connection with the counterfeit scandal

In 2003, Goldman Sachs manager Jack Levy acquired a Jackson Pollock painting for $ 2 million. But when the International Foundation for Art Research refused to authenticate the work, Levy asked for his money back and got it.

The day before the gallery closed in November 2011, Belgian hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange sued the gallery over the work Untitled 1950 , which Knoedler had attributed to Jackson Pollock . Lagrange bought the painting in 2007 for 17 million US dollars, under the impression that the work would be included in a supplement to the Pollock catalog raisonné . Such a supplement was probably never planned. Laboratory research later found that the painting had used paint that was not released until years after Pollock's death. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2012.

In 2012, Domenico De Sole and his wife Eleanore claimed that the gallery had sold them a fake Mark Rothko , "Untitled 1956", for $ 8.3 million in 2004 . The lawsuit was directed against both Knoedler and Ann Freedman. The De Soles couple entered into an out-of-court settlement with Ann Freedman, but the lawsuit against Knoedler remains.

Also settled out of court was a lawsuit by Wall Street manager John D. Howard against Knoedler and Freedman, in which Howard stated that a Willem de Kooning sold to him for 4 million US dollars in 2007 was a fake.

Company archive

In 2012 the Getty Research Institute announced that it had acquired the gallery's corporate archive, which spans from 1850 to 1971. The institute has since digitized parts of this archive and put them online. The reference library, which consisted of titles that the Getty Research Institute already has in its own library, was not part of the purchase; this reference library was sold separately by Knoedler in January 2012. The archive material acquired from the Getty Research Institute includes the books of accounts, correspondence with buyers, artists and employees, index cards for customers and works of art, as well as photographs, prints, rare books, sales catalogs dating back to the 18th century, and gallery plans .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Knoelder Gallery again accused of fraud in new lawsuit. blogs.nytimes.com, January 30, 2013, accessed December 18, 2016 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e Michael Shnayerson: A Question of Provenance. In: Vanity Fair. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Goldstein, 2003, p. 167
  4. ↑ Reist, 2014, p. 168.
  5. ↑ Rachel Corbett: LAWYERS CHASE ELUSIVE FIGURE IN KNOEDLER LAWSUIT. In: Artnet.com. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  6. ↑ a b c Christopher Gray: When Elegance Sold Art. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Daniel Grant: READING THE TEA LEAVES IN THE MESS KNOEDLER. In: Artnet. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  8. ^ Rachel Corbett: Works From Knoedler Gallery Bomb at Doyle New York Auction. (No longer available online.) In: Blouin Artinfo. Archived from the original on February 14, 2016 ; accessed on February 8, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / blogs.artinfo.com
  9. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/04/arts/seattle-museum-is-sued-for-a-looted-matisse.html
  10. ↑ https://news.artnet.com/market/el-greco-nazis-loot-returned-280817
  11. ^ MH Miller: In Court, Experts Say Knoedler Ignored Warnings About Forgeries. In: Artnews. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  12. ^ The Knoedler-Rosales Case - artnet Magazine. In: artnet.com. April 4, 2012, accessed December 18, 2016 .
  13. ↑ a b Tom Hays: New York City jury hears how a forger's fake fooled art buyers. In: The Toronto Star. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  14. ↑ William K. Rashbaum, Patricia Cohen, Sarah Maslin Nir: Struggling Immigrant Artist Tied to $ 80 million New York Fraud. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  15. ↑ Yanan Wang: NY art gallery thought it spent $ 80 million on Modernist classics - but they were all 'genius' copies. In: The National Post. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  16. ↑ a b The Knoedler's Meltdown: Inside the Forgery Scandal and Federal Investigations. In: Vanity Fair. Retrieved February 9, 2016 .
  17. ^ A b Patricia Cohen: Second Suit Accuses Knoedler Gallery of Selling Fake Art. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  18. ↑ Patricia Cohen: Artist's Family Says Gallery Ignored Warning of Fakes. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 9, 2016 .
  19. ^ Art Dealer Pleads Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to $ 80 Million Fake Art Scam, Money Laundering, and Tax Charges. In: Federal Bureau of Investigation. US Government, accessed February 8, 2016 .
  20. ^ Bergantinos Diaz Qian Indictment. (PDF) In: US Department of Justice. United States Government, accessed February 8, 2016 .
  21. ↑ Jon Swaine: Artist at center of multimillion dollar forgery scandal turns up in China. In: The Guardian. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  22. ^ Alan Clendenning: Extradition to US for Spanish dealer in big art fraud case. In: The Associated Press. February 16, 2016, accessed February 23, 2016 .
  23. ^ Spanish Court Denies US Extradition Request for Member of Knoedler Forgery Ring. In: Artforum. Retrieved May 28, 2016 .
  24. ↑ Richard Warnica: How did David Mirvish end up in the decade's most shocking art forgery scandal? In: Canadian Business. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  25. ^ Adam Klasfeld: Collector Calls $ 17 Million Pollock a Phony. In: Courthouse News Service. Retrieved February 9, 2016 .
  26. ^ Edvard Pettersson, Patricia Hurtado: Closed New York Gallery Settles Suit Over 'Forged' Pollock. In: Bloomberg Business. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  27. ↑ Colin Moynihan: Knoedler Gallery Director Settles Lawsuit Over Fake Rothko. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  28. ↑ ColinMoynihan: Suit Against Knoedler Gallery Over Fake Rothko Continues After a Settlement. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 9, 2016 .
  29. ^ Henri Neuendorf: Knoedler Gallery Reaches Out-Of-Court Settlement Over $ 4 Million Fake de Kooning. In: Artnet news. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  30. ^ Carol Vogel: Getty Institute Buys Knoedler Gallery Archive. In: The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2016 .
  31. ↑ Knoedler Gallery archive. Getty Research Institute, accessed February 11, 2014 .