Knoedler Gallery Fraud: Charges, Lawsuits, and Fallout

The Knoedler Gallery fraud was a fifteen-year forgery scheme in which a Long Island dealer, Glafira Rosales, supplied one of America’s oldest galleries with roughly 63 fake Abstract Expressionist paintings that sold for more than $80 million before the scheme collapsed and the gallery shut its doors in November 2011.¹² The paintings were attributed to Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, and other giants of postwar American art. All of them were painted in a garage in Queens.

How the Scheme Worked

Beginning in 1994, Rosales brought Knoedler paintings she said came from a secretive collector whose identity shifted with the telling: sometimes a Swiss man, sometimes an anonymous European whose son lived in Mexico. Over the next fourteen to fifteen years she supplied about 63 forged works. Knoedler sold roughly 40 of them. A former Knoedler salesman, Julian Weissman, sold the remaining 23 through his own gallery.³²

The paintings were made by Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese-born artist living in Queens. He had been discovered painting on a Lower Manhattan street corner in the late 1980s by José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, Rosales’s longtime partner. Qian worked from a studio in Woodhaven and was reportedly paid $5,000 to $8,000 per painting.⁴⁵ To age the canvases, the conspirators rubbed them with tea bags and emptied dust-buster bins over their surfaces. Bergantiños Díaz added forged signatures.³⁶

The provenance stories Rosales offered were fabricated and inconsistent. She variously pointed to the estate of artist Alfonso Ossorio or to the collector David Herbert, connections that could not be verified. The paintings had no documented sales history and did not appear in the accepted catalogues raisonnés for the artists they were attributed to.²

The financial split was lopsided. In one representative transaction, Rosales received about $670,000 for a fake Pollock while the gallery and its agents kept over $2.4 million from the sale.⁷ Forensic accounting later presented in litigation suggested Knoedler would have operated at a multi-million-dollar deficit without the Rosales revenue; between 1994 and 2011, the fakes were a primary source of the gallery’s profit.²

The Warning Signs Knoedler Missed or Buried

Ann Freedman, the gallery’s director of contemporary art and later its president, was Rosales’s primary contact throughout the scheme. Court filings later documented a long series of red flags.

In October 2003, the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) examined a painting Knoedler was selling as a Jackson Pollock and concluded the work “could not be attributed to the artist.” IFAR’s executive director, Sharon Flescher, later testified that the foundation had “considerable concerns” and could not offer a positive opinion. The report went to the gallery and the painting’s owner but was never disclosed to prospective buyers. It stayed hidden for nearly a decade, surfacing only through litigation.⁸

The family of Richard Diebenkorn had expressed authenticity concerns about works from the same source as early as 1994.⁹ Rosales refused to provide meaningful information about the source of the paintings or to sign statements confirming authenticity. Freedman compiled a list of experts who had “viewed” the works to reassure buyers, but many of those experts later testified they had never been asked to formally authenticate anything and had made only casual, polite remarks.¹⁰ Christopher Rothko, son of Mark Rothko, testified that Freedman “misrepresented” his opinions about works falsely attributed to his father.¹¹ Dealer Marco Grassi publicly called the gallery’s investigation “totally irresponsible” and the provenance story “so totally kooky.”⁷

How the Fraud Fell Apart

The Dedalus Foundation, which manages Robert Motherwell’s estate and was compiling his catalogue raisonné, examined a group of paintings sourced from Rosales. Individually, committee members had not flagged each piece; reviewed together, the works were declared “not genuine Motherwells.” Foundation chief executive Jack Flam brought in the FBI.¹² Forensic analysis later confirmed that some pigments and binding agents used in the paintings did not exist at the time the works were supposedly created.³

A federal grand jury subpoenaed Knoedler in 2009.² On November 30, 2011, after 165 years in business, the gallery announced it was closing permanently, describing the decision as a “business decision” made after “careful consideration.”¹ Days later, the scandal became public.

Who Was Charged, and What Happened to Them

Glafira Rosales

Rosales was the only participant in the scheme prosecuted in the United States. In September 2013 she pleaded guilty in federal court in the Southern District of New York to nine counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy to sell fake works of art, money laundering, and filing false tax returns.¹³¹⁴ She cooperated with prosecutors, helping trace bank accounts in Spain and shape indictments of her co-conspirators.

Rosales said she had been coerced into the scheme by Bergantiños Díaz, citing physical abuse and threats against her daughter. On January 31, 2017, Judge Katharine Polk Failla sentenced her to time served of 82 days, nine months of house detention, and three years of supervised release, citing her cooperation, a PTSD diagnosis, and evidence of duress. She was ordered to pay $81 million in restitution and forfeited all assets except her retirement account.¹³¹⁵

The Bergantiños Díaz Brothers

A March 2014 federal indictment charged José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, his brother Jesús Ángel Bergantiños Díaz, and Pei-Shen Qian. José Carlos was described in court filings as the mastermind. Both brothers were arrested in southern Spain. A Spanish court initially approved extradition for both in February 2016, then in May 2016 reversed itself on José Carlos, ruling his health was too fragile for the trip; the court suggested he could be prosecuted in Spain instead. Jesús Ángel’s extradition was approved.¹⁶

Pei-Shen Qian

Qian fled to Shanghai before charges were filed. Because the United States has no extradition treaty with China, he has remained beyond the reach of U.S. prosecutors. Contacted by reporters, Qian maintained his innocence, telling The Guardian: “I made a knife to cut fruit. But if others use it to kill, blaming me is unfair.”⁴

Knoedler and Ann Freedman

Neither the gallery nor Freedman was criminally charged. Prosecutors cited the high burden of proving intent to defraud beyond a reasonable doubt.³

The Civil Lawsuits

Defrauded collectors filed ten federal lawsuits against Knoedler, Freedman, gallery owner Michael Hammer, his holding company 8-31 Holdings, and others. By August 2019, all ten had been settled, none for publicly disclosed amounts.¹⁷

De Sole v. Knoedler Gallery

The most prominent case was brought by Domenico De Sole, chairman of the board of Sotheby’s, and his wife Eleanore. In 2004, the De Soles paid $8.3 million for a work presented as a 1956 Mark Rothko color field painting. They later learned it was a Qian forgery and sued for $25 million, alleging fraud, conspiracy, breach of warranty, and violations of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).²

In October 2015, Judge Paul Gardephe denied the defendants’ motion for summary judgment, finding “ample circumstantial evidence” that Freedman intended to deceive. He pointed to her role in constructing provenance stories, her own “demonstrated doubt” about other Rosales works, and the suppressed IFAR report. The court also rejected the argument that the De Soles, as sophisticated collectors, should have conducted their own due diligence, ruling their reliance on the gallery’s representations could have been reasonable.¹⁸

The case went to trial in January 2016, the only one of the ten to do so. After roughly two and a half weeks of testimony, Freedman settled with the De Soles for an undisclosed amount just before she was expected to take the stand. The remaining defendants settled days later.⁹¹¹

Other Cases

Hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange filed the first suit against Knoedler over a $17 million alleged fake Jackson Pollock; it settled in October 2012 on confidential terms.¹⁹ The last suit, from the Liechtenstein-based Martin Hilti Family Trust over a $5.5 million fake Rothko purchased in 2002, settled in August 2019 and was dismissed with prejudice.¹⁷

Michael Hammer and 8-31 Holdings

Michael Hammer, grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer, owned Knoedler through 8-31 Holdings. In a May 2019 ruling in the Hilti case, Judge Gardephe found evidence that Hammer had used his corporations as his “alter ego,” noting that 8-31 Holdings had reimbursed him nearly $2 million for seven luxury cars and that funds moved from Knoedler to 8-31 on request. A jury could conclude, the judge wrote, that 8-31 had “siphoned more than $13m from the gallery.” The ruling opened the door for plaintiffs to pierce the corporate veil and pursue Hammer personally if the defunct gallery lacked assets. Separate fraud and racketeering claims against Hammer, based on his personal knowledge of the forgeries, were dismissed for insufficient evidence.²⁰

Ann Freedman’s Defense

Freedman was named in nine of the ten suits and has consistently said she was herself a victim. She described herself as the “perfect mark” and called Rosales and her co-conspirators “exquisitely conspiratorial wizards,” presenting herself as a “dealer and art lover” who “always looked to scholars” for expertise. At the De Sole trial, expert witness Martha Parrish testified that Freedman had ignored significant red flags and that “a reputable and responsible dealer would run like hell.”⁹ A forensic accounting expert testified that Freedman had earned approximately $10.4 million in profit shares from the sale of the Rosales works during her tenure.² She settled the remainder of her litigation by mid-July 2019.¹⁷

Julian Weissman Fine Art

Julian Weissman, the former Knoedler salesman, sold 23 of the 63 forgeries through his own gallery, attributed to Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Diebenkorn, Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis, and Franz Kline.²¹²²²³

What the Case Changed

The fraud exploited practices the art world had long accepted: seller confidentiality, reliance on informal expert opinions rather than formal authentication, and the absence of routine forensic testing on high-value works.⁷

Around the same period, several major authentication boards shut down entirely, not because of Knoedler specifically but because of the litigation climate the scandal exemplified. The Andy Warhol Foundation closed its authentication board in 2011 after a single lawsuit reportedly cost the estate $7 million. The boards for Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jean-Michel Basquiat also ceased operations. Independent authenticators have moved to fill the gap, often providing more transparent written reports than the foundation boards had offered.²⁴

The rulings also shifted legal expectations for dealers. Courts increasingly weigh whether parties exercised reasonable diligence in context, and the Knoedler decisions made clear that relying on informal representations, or on the absence of obvious red flags, may not be enough to avoid liability. If you are buying at this level, the practical takeaways from the case are concrete: insist on formal written authentication, get contractual contingencies covering that authentication, and ask directly whether any negative findings about the work exist. A gallery that will not answer that last question, or will not name the source, is telling you something.

1
New York Times. Knoedler Art Gallery Closes After 165 Years
2
ARTnews. The Big Fake: Behind the Scenes of Knoedler Gallery’s Downfall
3
Reveal. Galleries, Art Fraud, Nazi, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock
4
The Guardian. Forged Art Scandal: New York Artist, China, Spain
5
Artnet News. Knoedler Forger Claims Innocence
6
Vanity Fair. Glafira Rosales Guilty Plea
7
Its Art Law. Knoedler Obituary: Select Legal History
8
The Art Newspaper. What We Learned From the Knoedler Fakes Scandal
9
Artnet News. Ann Freedman Knoedler Forgery
10
CLM. Knoedler Gallery Forgery Case Analysis
11
New York Times. Ann Freedman
12
Artforum. Claims Against Dedalus Foundation Dismissed
13
The Art Newspaper. No Further Jail Time for Glafira Rosales
14
Its Art Law. Is It a Crime: The Empty Defendant’s Chair at the Knoedler Civil Trial
15
Artnet News. Glafira Rosales Knoedler Art Fraud
16
Artnet News. Spanish Court Denies Extradition for Knoedler Fraud
17
Artnet News. Final Knoedler Forgery Lawsuit Settled
18
Columbia Law and Arts. De Sole v. Knoedler Gallery
19
Bloomberg. Defunct New York Gallery Settles Suit Over Fake Pollock
20
The Art Newspaper. Knoedler Owner Michael Hammer May Be Liable for Fraud
21
Stetson Advocacy Journal. Lessons From Two Recent Art Forgery Cases
22
The Art Newspaper. Who Sued Whom: A Comprehensive Timeline of the Knoedler Lawsuits
23
Courthouse News. Collector Says Gallery Sold Fake Motherwell
24
The Guardian. Fake Art Market Authentication