Covered in thick glass and protected by an alarm, an $8.3 million Mark Rothko painting hung on Domenico and Eleanore De Sole’s Hilton Head wall for years. A bright, papercut red foregrounds two soft-edged trademark Rothko rectangles, deep black above crimson. The couple flaunted the tableau to guests: a stunning piece of art, and also fodder for vanity, proof of their ability to pay an exorbitant sum.
But in an overcrowded Manhattan courtroom in 2016, the painting was worthless.
Author Barry Avrich interrogates what happened between their 2004 purchase and the front-page lawsuit in his new book The Devil Wears Rothko. The book tracks a large cast, chief among them the brilliant forger Pei-Shen Qian who imitated the styles of a series of such Abstract Expressionists as Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock; a criminal couple who shuffled these works off to Knoedler gallery with conjured stories of provenance; and Ann Freedman, president of the gallery, who sold these paintings for tens of millions.
I’m drawn to these tangled tales of art and provenance. I picked up Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief earlier this year, a gripping but simply-written story of thief Stéphane Breitwieser’s path to stealing hundreds of artworks. Only beauty interested Breitwieser, not monetary gain; he used the works to bedeck an attic he shared with his girlfriend. But where Finkel’s focus is theft, Avrich’s is forgery, and here, money does matter—more than anything.
The story is simple: art dealer Glafira Rosales walked into Knoedler gallery with paintings Pei-Shen Qian faked, Ann Freedman sold them, and her unwitting collectors became characters in the scandal. The crux of the story lies in Ann Freedman’s knowledge, or lack thereof. Did she know she was selling fakes? Freedman claims she did not, but a series of red flags provoke doubt.
Firstly, experienced and savvy gallerist Freedman was willing to believe in a suspect chain of provenance, centering on an anonymous owner Rosales refused to disclose. Freedman also acquired the paintings for prices much lower than market ones, making profit margins of 700% in some cases.
So what are our stakes? At worst, we lose faith in cultural institutions and the power of artistic expression, and, at best, wealthy individuals waste some money they can afford to lose. As Ann Freedman said, “This is [about] works of art. I didn’t slay anyone’s first-born.”
But thinking about fakes and forgeries proves an interesting philosophical exercise. If we are looking at a picture so identical to its authentic twin that experts fail to detect its inauthenticity, what does it mean to call it fake? Perhaps we do not care about brushstrokes and pigments; we care that an individual owns one of a fixed number of Rothkos in the world and participates in an insider institution.
As Avrich exposes, however, fakes infest our world—far more than we realize. Avrich goes beyond this particular scandal to offer an education on the art world. He gifts us history lessons on gallerists and famed forgeries. His tone is irreverent, sensational and flashy: superlatives and lists of threes crowd the copy, in a way that occasionally peeves but entertains.
The June book piggybacks off the 2021 release of Avrich’s documentary Made You Look, which mashes together interview segments and photographs with auction clips and other media. Avrich’s hand moves more invisibly in the documentary, though his juxtaposing of interview clips often result in contradictions that paint Freedman as humorously incompetent. Conversely, Avrich’s authorial voice is more obviously crafty in the book, his first-person judgments coloring the narrative with personality.
The book seemed more sympathetic towards Freedman than the documentary, which makes her seem small. Both works left me convinced that Freedman might not have been an intentional fraudster from the get-go, but her eagerness to make a buck blindsided her to an obvious truth. Once the truth was laid plain, she was in too deep. With a once-friend going to the FBI on her and her embroilment in seven simultaneous lawsuits, the fallout wasn’t easy for Freedman or her reputation. (Although she started her own gallery after exiting Knoedler.)
As the book turns to courtroom drama in its finishing sections, we learn that Ann created documents for collectors stating that a slate of experts authenticated artworks. The experts pledge that they didn’t. Did Freedman lie or did the experts aboutface? Somewhere in the spectrum of accounts lies the truth.
We might not learn all the intricacies of that truth, if there is one, but in his preface, Avrich articulates the most seductive element of his book—that he brings us into a field often veiled: “Welcome to a world to which you are mostly not invited.”
