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How a 165-Year-Old Gallery Sold $80 Million in Fake Pollocks

By prove.art Editorial · · 5 min read

Knoedler & Company was, until 2011, the oldest commercial art gallery in New York, founded in 1846 and trusted for over a century and a half by museums, collectors, and the artists it represented. That reputation is precisely what made it the ideal vehicle for one of the largest and longest-running art forgery schemes in modern history: roughly $80 million in fake Abstract Expressionist paintings, sold over fourteen years, that the gallery’s own reputation vouched for at every step.

An unknown dealer with an unbelievable story

In 1994, a Long Island art dealer named Glafira Rosales approached Knoedler’s then-president, Ann Freedman, with a painting in the style of Robert Motherwell. Rosales’s story was that she represented an anonymous client — later described only as the son of a wealthy collector, who wished to remain unnamed — who had inherited a substantial trove of previously unknown Abstract Expressionist works, acquired directly from the artists decades earlier with the help of a intermediary sometimes referred to only as “Mr. X.”

It was, on its face, an extraordinary claim: a private hoard of masterworks by Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Clyfford Still, and Richard Diebenkorn, never before exhibited, never before published, surfacing all at once through an unknown intermediary who insisted on anonymity. Over the following fourteen years, Rosales brought Knoedler and one other New York gallery a total of 31 such paintings. Knoedler alone sold 24 of them.

The man behind the paintings

The works were, in fact, produced in the garage of a house in Queens by a Chinese immigrant painter named Pei-Shen Qian. Qian had trained formally in China, moved to New York in 1981, and struggled to establish himself, reportedly selling his own work on a Manhattan street corner where Rosales and her partner, José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, first noticed his talent and recruited him.

Qian used real, period-appropriate materials and technique to construct convincing fakes — reportedly aging canvases with tea and dust collected from a vacuum cleaner to simulate decades of accumulated grime — and was paid only a small fraction of what his paintings eventually sold for, between roughly $5,000 and $8,000 per work, according to his own later account, while individual pieces resold through Knoedler for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars each.

Selling to people who wanted to believe

Between 1994 and 2008, Knoedler sold the paintings to collectors, including a $17 million de Kooning to Manhattan collectors Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, and a purported Rothko sold to the Lichtenstein-based Hilti Family Trust for $5.5 million in 2002. The gallery presented each work with Rosales’s account of the anonymous Swiss-connected collection standing in for verifiable provenance — a gap that experts and prospective buyers were, by multiple later accounts, repeatedly reassured about rather than shown documentation to close.

Cracks began appearing publicly in 2009, when a painting sold to a prominent couple from the fashion industry was identified as fake. Knoedler closed abruptly in 2011, without public explanation at the time, as a wave of lawsuits from defrauded buyers began.

What forensic testing actually found

The scientific case against the paintings, once buyers pursued it, was unambiguous. Paint samples submitted for forensic analysis contained pigments that were not commercially available during the period the works were purportedly painted — a chemical anachronism no amount of surface craftsmanship could talk around, echoing the same kind of forensic mismatch that eventually undid Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers seventy years earlier, and the Greenhalgh family’s Amarna Princess a few years before this scandal broke.

Accountability, unevenly distributed

Glafira Rosales pleaded guilty in 2013, admitting that every painting she had brought to Knoedler was a forgery painted by Pei-Shen Qian. Her cooperation with prosecutors earned her a lenient sentence: three months in jail, nine months of house arrest, three years of probation, and a restitution order of $81 million to the scheme’s victims.

Qian himself was indicted but had by then returned to China, which has no extradition treaty with the United States; he has never faced trial and maintains in interviews that he did not know his paintings were being sold as work by famous artists. Bergantiños Diaz fled to Spain and also avoided extradition. Of the nine civil suits filed against Ann Freedman personally, and seven against Knoedler & Company, most were settled out of court for undisclosed amounts over the following years; the final outstanding case, brought by the Hilti Family Trust over its fake Rothko, was not fully settled until nearly a decade after the scandal first broke, formally closing the book on the affair.

Why the story still matters

The Knoedler scandal is, in one sense, the least technically sophisticated case in this series — Qian’s paintings, while skillfully executed, were ultimately unmasked by straightforward pigment analysis. What made the fraud extraordinary was its duration and scale, and both depended almost entirely on one asset: the 165 years of institutional trust that Knoedler’s name carried into every transaction. A gallery’s reputation substituted for provenance for fourteen years. It’s a pointed reminder that “sold by a trusted name” and “verified” are not the same claim, even when a buyer’s instinct treats them as interchangeable.

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