The instructive thing about the two largest forgery scandals of the modern era is that neither was undone by the painting. In both cases the pictures were good enough to satisfy specialists, museums and one of the oldest galleries in New York. What failed was the story attached to them.
Which is the argument for provenance research, made twice, at a combined cost of well over a hundred million dollars.
Knoedler: $80 Million and a 165-Year-Old Gallery
Over roughly fourteen years, a Long Island dealer named Glafira Rosales supplied 31 previously unknown Abstract Expressionist paintings to Knoedler & Company and one other New York gallery. Rothkos, Pollocks, Motherwells, de Koonings. The gallery sold them for something in the region of $80 million. One fake Rothko alone went for $17 million.
They were painted in a garage in Queens by Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese-born artist working for a fraction of what they realised.
The provenance was a single sentence doing enormous work: the paintings came from an anonymous collector, referred to only as Mr X, whose family had acquired them privately in the 1950s. No names. No invoices. No exhibition history. Nothing checkable.
That should have been the end of the conversation. An unnamed source and an unverifiable chain, attached to previously unrecorded works by artists whose output is exhaustively catalogued. Instead it functioned for fourteen years, because the works were beautiful and the gallery was Knoedler.
Knoedler closed in 2011 after 165 years in business. Ten former clients sued; most cases settled for undisclosed sums. The scheme unravelled when the Dedalus Foundation, which handles Motherwell’s work, identified fakes among the paintings the gallery had sold — and forensic analysis then confirmed what the documents had always implied.
Beltracchi: Forty Years and a Tube of Paint
Wolfgang Beltracchi did something more sophisticated than copying. He painted new works in the manner of Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger, André Derain and Max Pechstein — pictures those artists might plausibly have made and which no catalogue could contradict, because they had never existed.
Then he built the provenance. He claimed the paintings came from the collection of his wife’s grandfather. He photographed his wife Helene posed in front of the forgeries wearing period clothing, and aged the prints. He fabricated collection labels. One art adviser’s assessment of the operation was simply that it was brilliant.
It ran for around forty years and earned an estimated $45 million. His works reached museum exhibitions and, on one occasion, the cover of a Christie’s catalogue.
What ended it was titanium white. A painting dated 1914 contained a pigment not commercially available until the 1920s. Beltracchi had used a tube of paint labelled as a different pigment without knowing it contained traces of titanium. He was arrested in 2010, convicted in 2011, and sentenced to six years.
Five Things Both Cases Teach
1. Unverifiable provenance is the tell. Not bad painting, not a wrong signature. In both schemes the fatal document was the one nobody could check — an anonymous collector, a family collection with no independent record. This is why an unnamed owner is a gap rather than an entry.
2. Newly discovered works deserve more scrutiny, not less. Both operations relied on the appeal of the unrecorded masterpiece. For heavily catalogued artists, a picture nobody has ever seen is a claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
3. A reputable dealer is not a substitute for diligence. Knoedler had traded since 1846. The Dedalus Foundation’s president put the reasonable version of the counter-argument — buying from a reputable dealer is itself part of your due diligence — and it remains true. It is simply not sufficient on its own.
4. Science is the backstop, not the first line. Pigment analysis destroyed Beltracchi and confirmed the Knoedler fakes. But it arrived years late in both cases, and it works by disproving rather than proving. A forger using period-correct materials leaves nothing for the laboratory to find.
5. Experts were fooled, repeatedly. Specialists, museums and auction houses accepted these works. If connoisseurship alone were sufficient, neither scheme could have run for a decade — let alone four.
How Much of the Market Is Fake?
In 2014 Switzerland’s Fine Art Expert Institute estimated that half of all work on the market was fake. The figure was immediately disputed and is almost certainly too high — it derived from works submitted for examination, which are self-selecting for suspicion.
But nobody credible argues the true number is negligible, and the honest position is that it is unknowable. Forgeries are counted only when detected, and the successful ones are by definition uncounted. Beltracchi’s works remain in collections whose owners do not know which ones they are.
What It Costs to Do This Properly
Set against $80 million: an Art Loss Register search costs less than dinner, a condition report by an independent conservator costs a few hundred, and provenance research on a significant work runs into the low thousands. Scientific analysis is more, and proportionate to what is at stake.
The buyers in both scandals were sophisticated people spending very large sums. What they did not do was insist on a chain of ownership that could be independently verified — and that single omission is what the entire pillar of this series comes down to.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Knoedler forgery scandal?
Knoedler & Company sold roughly $80 million of forged Abstract Expressionist paintings supplied by dealer Glafira Rosales over about fourteen years. The gallery closed in 2011 after 165 years. The works were painted by Pei-Shen Qian in Queens.
How was Wolfgang Beltracchi caught?
A painting dated 1914 was found to contain titanium white, a pigment unavailable commercially until the 1920s. He had used a tube containing traces of it unknowingly.
Are half of all artworks on the market fake?
A 2014 Swiss estimate said so, but the figure was drawn from works submitted for examination and is widely regarded as too high. The true proportion is unknown, since undetected forgeries go uncounted.
What did both scandals have in common?
Fabricated, unverifiable provenance — an anonymous collector in one case, an invented family collection in the other. The paintings themselves passed expert scrutiny for years.
Part of our series on provenance and authentication. See also: how to verify provenance, nine red flags, and who can authenticate a painting.
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