In the most recent in a series of lawsuits against the now-defunct Knoedler gallery, testimony in court indicated that, between 1994 and 2008, the gallery’s then-director and president, Ann Freedman, sold forged works by artists including Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko to the value of $70 million. Among the unsuspecting buyers are, Domenico De Sole, Nicholas F. Taubman, John Howard and Pierre Lagrange.
The works were acquired via a Long Island art dealer, Glafira Rosales, for $26 million, and were painted by Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese artist who has been charged in the case but fled to China, The New York Times reports.
Freedman has continued to claim innocence in the case; her lawyers even stating that she herself bought a fake Jackson Pollock work, on which the artist’s name is spelled incorrectly.
We trace the highlights of one of the art world’s biggest forgery scandals in the timeline below:
