Vanity Fair Reports on the Knoedler

Vanity Fair has an article on the troubles surrounding Anne Freeman and the forgery allegations called A Question of Provenance.  The full article is in the May issue of Vanity Fair, but parts of it are online.

I travel to Tempe next week for the ISA Annual conference and will probably hold off reading the full article until I am on the plane.

Vanity Fair reports

Ann Freedman had come to Knoedler one last time.

On a mid-February day, she approached the mansion at 19 East 70th Street, where New York’s most venerable art gallery used to be, before its sudden, shocking closing last fall amid forgery allegations. “It’s amazing to think that this institution never stopped for 165 years,” she said. “It didn’t stop during the Civil War, World War I, World War II … I kept it open on 9/11.”

Now the doors were locked, the building cleaned out. The new owner was about to take possession. Knoedler’s former director had wangled a walk-through: a chance, as she put it, to be the last one in and the last one out of this gallery that had once sold Raphaels and Vermeers to Mellons and Fricks. She seemed not to wonder whether she was part of the reason these rooms were now empty.

Freedman is 63 now; tall and gaunt, with silver corkscrew curls and round wire-rimmed glasses, she is given to stylish pantsuits and dramatic belts. She’s genial but somehow remote, the sort who seems to talk mostly to control the airspace.

“The significance of this institution,” she declared, “will not rest on the David Herbert collection.”

But it will.

To read more of this Vanity Fair post, click HERE.

 Another Vanity Fair online post reports

“The works are of a five-star quality. Maybe a few are four-star, but mostly five-star, which is why they’ve stirred such attention,” Ann Freedman, former director of the Knoedler gallery, tells contributing editor Michael Shnayerson of the David Herbert collection in the May issue of Vanity Fair. Touted by Freedman as one of the great troves of unknown Abstract Expressionist works, the collection instead brought scandal to the venerable Knoedler, which shut its doors last November amid allegations it sold forgeries, including the threat of a lawsuit from Pierre Lagrange, a London hedge-fund executive. (Knoedler has said that the closing was a business decision unrelated to the Lagrange suit.) Shnayerson investigates the events that brought such a bizarre and sudden end to what was, not so long ago, one of the world’s best-known art galleries and a New York institution.

According to Freedman, the paintings—attributed to painters including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Barnett Newman—came to the gallery from Glafira Rosales, a Long Island woman virtually unknown in the art world, who claimed to represent an anonymous owner. Rosales is now a subject of investigations by the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which has impaneled a grand jury. Untitled 1950, a painting attributed to Jackson Pollock, was among the works that were sold by Knoedler for tens of millions of dollars without ever being authenticated. “Because we haven’t yet sorted out the provenance doesn’t mean there’s no provenance,” Freedman says. 

To visit the article on the Vanity Fair site click HERE.