1. Knoedler Gallery And The Rothko, Pollock Art Fraud
The gallery’s president resigned in October 2009, amid rumours of problems with fakes, involving paintings supplied to the gallery by a Long Island art dealer.The day before the gallery closed in November 2011, Belgian hedge-fund manager Pierre Lagrange sued the gallery in relation to an untitled work attributed to Jackson Pollock that he purchased for $17 million in 2007, tests later showed that some of the paint used was not available until some years after Pollock’s death. Other lawsuits followed: a South Carolina couple – Domenico De Sole, a former Gucci executive and chairman of Tom Ford International, and his wife, Eleanore – claimed that the gallery sold them a fake Mark Rothko, “Untitled 1956”, for $8.3 million in 2004; and Wall Street executive John D. Howard claimed for a fake Willem de Kooning painting that he bought for $4 million in 2007. In total it is estimated that the gallery sold over $80 million worth of forgeries before it closed. Read our article here