The Knoedler Gallery

is more popular than ever. Often from a town house next door, a stooped figure emerges from an upper floor and makes her way down the stately front steps past the Millennials. She looks smaller than she once did, as if scrunched by the circumstances that let her here, though she still has the white corkscrew curls that made her stand out in any art fair or gallery opening, and the stern, almost imperious mien for which she was known. A little over a decade ago. Ann Friedman was among

the most powerful art dealers in New York. Her fiefdom was the Knodler Gallery, from which she sold works by many of the best known artists of the mid twentieth century. Mark Rothkoe, William Dacooning, Barnett Newman, Clifford Still, and Jackson Pollock.

Today the Kndler is gone. Just three blocks down Madison on the north Side Street stand the ghosts of the now infamous gallery to adjoining limestone mansions in the Italian Renaissance style with ornate stone arches topped by decorative balconies. In the galleries own Renaissance. A Royal Blue Awning announced the Ndler's two buildings in appital letters. In this season of Art Fraud, we're examining the rise and fall of

the Knoedler Gallery. It's a story about one of New York City's oldest and most celebrated galleries dealing in world class art, and how its doors would close forever in the face of insurmountable pressure, ultimately in the form of looming prison time. We're talking, of course, about paintings, fake paintings, or more plainly, forgeries. The best fakes are still hanging off people's walls. You know they don't even know or

suspect that they're fakes. Of course, art forgeries only happen because there's money to be made, a lot of money. Tens of millions of dollars would change hands between a cast of characters. Before it was all over, A few profited, some were cheated, and at least one person and would

find themselves behind bars. With me today is Michael Schneerson, a long time contributing editor for Vanity Fair, whose feature story on the Knoedler Gallery appeared in the magazine shortly after the scandal broke in the spring of two thousand twelve. Michael is also the author of Boom Mad Money, Mega Dealers and the Rise of Contemporary Art are compelling and entertaining overview of the dealers who helped make the contemporary

art market what it is today. The honest dealers, I hasten to add, because generally these dealers were and are honest, driven by a passion for their artists far more than profit. Here's Michael Schneerson. I've written a lot of articles for Vanity Fair, but the Notler case sticks in my mind because at the heart of it lies an unresolved mystery. The story, of course, has taken some turns that even Anne Friedman could not have predicted. You could say that

about the whole contemporary art market. I suppose who would have imagined at the start of the century that an artist named Jeff Coon's would make a supersized stainless steel rabbit that's sold at auction in May two nineteen million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a living artist's work.

Who could have predicted that a young Brooklyn artist named Jean Michel Baskuillade would make his oddly haunting abstract portraits of tribal figures and totems in a basement for drug money, only to have them sell after his premature death for as much as a hundred and ten million dollars. Record Breaking sales like that have done more than juice the art market. They've led to a gray market of private

dealings that thrive in a hot climate. It's important to note that the art market is still the world's largest unregulated business. Legal business anyway. You have to do what you say you'll do when striking a deal. You have to pay your taxes, and that's about it. I remember go in to a mega dealer's home in East Hampton one night and commenting that the art market was the last unregulated multibillion dollar equity market in the world. Our host said, and let's try to keep it that way

as his guests raised their glasses and toasted. When a dealer goes further trafficking and paintings that turn out to be fakes, is there any pattern to explain why that happens. Usually it starts with someone down on their luck, a dealer or perhaps an unsuccessful artist. The fraudster may have no intention of doing more than tweaking a painting to make it more saleable, or fabricating just one work to pay the bills. But what if he or she turns out to be awfully good at it and the dealer,

in desperate straits buys it. What if the dealer then sells it for a profit to someone unaware of the fraud. And so a fascinating dance begins to dance about the art that's changing hands, but even more so, a dance about the story behind the art. At first, the froster tells a bit of the story, just one or two tantalizing and fabricated bits to explain how and when the painting was done. And then as the dance goes on, the victim let's call him the mark, grows ever more

eager to hear more. After all, the more he hears, the more the expanding story seems to authenticate the art he's bought and the money he'll lose if it turns out the story was a scam, until the fraudster and the mark are intertwined, each so eager to believe the story that for both it sort of comes true. So it would become for Ann Friedman, the Nole Gallery's director, and a mysterious woman named Lepa Rosalez, who, on her visits to the Nodler starting in always seemed to have

another mid century masterpiece under her arm. As we embark on this exploration, it's my opinion that Anne sold those paintings convinced they were real, until the day Glafira brought the whole story crashing down. I don't believe Anne knew they were fakes and sold them as fakes. I have to be honest with you, Alex, I disagree. I think you couldn't be a well known, long time dealer in top tier art and sell paintings one after another with no clear trail of ownership unless you were acting with

criminal intent. I think and knew exactly what she was doing. If not from the beginning, then soon enough and that she hoped she could fool the art world over and over again, as indeed she did for some fourteen years. So the first question is whether Ann Friedman knew what she was buying when she bought these works for whopping

discounts from Fia Rosalie and her confederates. And the next question is should Anne's own customers, to whom she retailed these paintings, should they have been more aware of what they were doing. There's an argument in the art world that when you purchase an expensive work of art, it's your obligation, as a sophisticated buyer to do your research,

talked to experts and so forth. Robert Store, former director of the Yale School of Art and one of the country's most important art critics, said at a conference not long ago, the collectors are quote unquote stupid to spend millions of dollars on a work of art without personally investigating its authenticity. And I think he has a point. That's an interesting idea. So what's your responsibility of your

the buyer, to figure out if my artist fake. I've got a gallery full of art in the Upper East Side. Some of it is real, some of it is not you decide. Well, that's a fair point. I guess my reluctance to think the worst event has as much to do with how I felt about the gallery is what I felt about her. I'm not a serious collector of contemporary art, far from it, but I like looking at art, and on occasion I've bought a painting not for seven

or eight figures, but maybe six. In fact, I've been the victim of an art forgery myself, but we'll get to that later. The Noodler felt different from almost every other gallery in New York. There's a stateliness about the a touch of class, old world manners. The Noder didn't just sell contemporary art. It's old modern art too, which is to say, art by artists who started before World War Two, anyone from Brock and Picasso to Francis Bacon.

A sweeping stairway led from the showrooms to the office above, where Ann Friedman presided. The true marvel of Knoedler was its legacy. It was the oldest gallery in New York, opened in eight Through those five years, it had never closed, not in the Civil War, not in World War Two, through every calamity in American history since the Antebellum era, the k Noodler had survived. But who was Knodler and how did the venerable gallery get its start in New York?

That's after the break. It was an eighteen fifty two that a young and ambitious gallery assistant named Michael Ndler disembark from a Transatlantic ship in New York, scanning the busy waterfront for the face he hoped to find. Soon enough, he spotted his man, William schaus Chaos had come from Paris four years earlier to start a New York branch of a company called Goupil vbel a C soon to be known as Ndler. Michael Knoedler was a Goupeel employee

in Paris. That's Dick McIntosh. For years, Dick worked at the Knoedler Gallery as its historian. He was on the verge of publishing the definitive history of the gallery when its gates came crashing down. Out of Goupiel met Michael Knoedler in Stuttgart in the course of business and brought him to Goupeel in Company in Paris, and Michael Knodler trained in Paris for a good ten or twelve years

he was totally a vassal of Adolf Kupel. William Schaus was the first person sent here to open the gallery, who arrived in eighteen forty seven to scout things out to help us understand how the Noodler became the first art gallery in New York and how for decades it remained the Venerable Nodler Gallery, as if venerable was part of its title. I've asked Noodler historian Dick McIntosh and Francis Batty to art market experts to share some Nodal history with me at my home on the Upper East Side.

The fact that I live on East seventy third Street, steps from Freedom and Arts is just a coincidence, though it does mean I get more sightings of Anne than I otherwise would, And to be candid, I've often found myself turning a corner at almost the exact moment and reaches the corner from the other side, or spotting that mop of silver curls to block away heading in my direction. I would be less than honest if I didn't admit I've taken avoidance measures, darting between parked cars or turning

so abruptly that I bargined to strangers. Partly it said I have nothing to say to her, but also I know that my Vanity Fair story, while it seemed fair to me, cut her deeply. That's never my intent with the magazine story. But sometimes the facts just go where they will at any rate. There's not much to say other than to ask questions she'd rather not answer, and to watch her stock off and a huff dick. I know the firm that came to be an odler didn't

start as an art gallery. What was it exactly? When you walked into the place, what did you see? A store? The family always called it the store, which is an indication of its very eclectic nature. It would be very, very pretentious to call yourself a gallery, because it's like calling yourself a museum, and that would be, I think

at that point, very inappropriate. That's Francis Beatty. Francis has been an art dealer for nearly forty years, first in partnership with the late legendary Richard Fagan, now with her son Alex, a tall and suave dealer in his own right who spends every spare moment schmoozing with tech billionaires ready to cover their walls with art. The point was to sell the excess stock of the Goopeel Company from Paris.

The technology of making reproductions had improved to the point that many more a much larger quantity of reproductions could be made could be manufactured. Did reproductions usually mean engravings? Originally it meant engravings, but by this time there were lithographs, which were the cheapest and easiest to produce in the largest quality, and etchings and media. At the same time. Though, in the eighteen forties when this store opened, someone was

painting right, even in America. Thomas cole A should b drand the whole school in school, then Coloss Let us not forget the German American Immanuel Leitza who painted the famous Washington crossing the Delaware right. In fact, goo Pelee made reproductions of the painting in all sizes in Paris and sent them to America, where they sold like hock kicks.

Mark Twain famously said that if General Washington had known the extent of reproductions that were going to be made of his image, he'd have thought twice about crossing the Delaware in the first place. How did Michael Nodler get involved. When Goopeelee and Shouts had a serious disagreement over how profits from the New York Gallery, We're going to be divided.

Chow's quit and set up his own business, and Michael Nodler was dispatched here to continue on in eighteen fifty two, how would you describe the store's evolution from selling reproductions to actual paintings for the store to become the first real art gallery in New York gradual, and then it kind of starts to really pick up steam in the eighties.

Then you have this extraordinary kind of explosion for the next thirty years of them bringing major, major pictures, Goya, Turner, I mean, just these legendary names of incredible quality to America. Did a few collectors become the lynchpins of notary success? I'm thinking Henry Clay Frick, for one, the great steel industrialist. Frick,

for many years was Noler's biggest client. The first painting he bought was four and immediately afterwards he began buying in real quantity, and his close association with the Knodler Gallery lasted for the rest of his lifetime, in other words, until when he died, and when he died. Charles Carstairs, the man who had sold him the first painting, was a pall bearer at his funeral. Michael K. Nodler made

the gallery grow, and so did his sons. As it did, it began moving uptown, up along Broadway, then over to Fifth Avenue, following the city's own restless course. The location of the store was important for two reasons. First, it was in Little Farge buildings. The choice of the location was determined by a network of French people in New York, one of whom was the father of Jean LeFarge, the artist, who was a real estate investor, a successful real estate

investor in early New York. Secondly, due to the rise of department stores in Paris in the mid nineteenth century, which is where they really began in the form that we know them today, it was clear to all concern that it was a good idea to be located near a department store, because that's where everybody went for every last little thing. As the Nodlers migrated, they started taking

on more original art, even oil paintings. They sold to the founders of New American fortunes Erbilt's Asters and Rockefeller's all frequented Kndler, so did Henry Flagler of Standard Oil and sugar refiner H. O. Have Ameyer. In the course of two days, railroad magnate Jay Gould bought twenty two pictures. All of these grandees had more than paintings on the

walls of their brand new mansions. They had collections. Then, in the early nineteen twenties, the dashing Roland Ballet, a Knodler on his mother's side, came from Paris in his twenties to work at the family business. The last of the Ndler family directors, Roland had no choice, really, but to join the store when he came of age. Roland liked to recall that his very first memory of meeting an artist came when he was just five. His parents brought him to the Parisian countryside of State of Verny

to have lunch with Claude Monet. They brought a ham that got sliced at a table in the arden. For the rest of his life, Roland would remember the white bearded artist eating the ham and looking at him with kindly eyes against a backdrop of water lilies. Roland arrived in New York in n at the age of twenty two, drinking most of the way with Pierre Matisse, the artist's son, who would remain a lifelong pal. He came bearing other friendships with some of Paris's best contemporary artists, brac Lege

and Picasso. To his chagrin, he found his older family members in New York underwhelmed by the paintings he brought. Put them in the basement. They told him when he showed them the new Cubist that Paris had embraced, the children will take them. The Knoedler wasn't avant garde, as its family directors reminded Roland. It solved the art of its times, or, perhaps more accurately, it sold the art of the times it's buyers embraced, which tended to be

a decade or two behind contemporary art. Roland had no choice but to guit his teeth and sell his clients what they wanted. In the aftermath of World War Two, a new school of art arose to show its devastation the often brutal, sweeping brushstrokes of abstract expressionism. Yet Noodler kept its distance, as painters like Jackson Pollock and William Dacooning Clifford still Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko rose with a new generation of dealers, namely Betty Parsons, Sidney Janie

and Leo Castelli. These were the groundbreaking dealers of the nineteen fifties. Very few people were buying contemporary art. If Pollock hadn't had Peggy Guggenheim, he would have starved. They were all starving in the fifties. They really weren't, not until sort of Andy Warhol started to make money out of art under Rolla Ballet. The Knodler was running out of steam. Having missed the post war era, it went

on to overlook pop art too. By the end of the sixties, it had moved to One East, then proceeded to spend so much money renovating its newly acquired mansion that it nearly went broke. The Knodler needed an angel, someone far more deep pocketed than Roland Ballet. In nineteen seventy one, the Knodler found that angel in Armand Hammer, the billionaire industrialist. Knowing how financially imperiled Rollan Ballet's ndler was, Hammer bought the gallery for two point five million dollars

in nineteen seventy one. For that modest sum Hammer got Knodler's business, its artists, its reputation and history. He also got the Italian Renaissance mansion at nineteen East seventieth Street. Not long after that deal, Hammer would buy the adjacent mansion at one East sevente Street. For Hammer, the deal was as much about real estate as art. Hammer hired one of his two grandsons, Michael, to run the gallery as part of a family foundation. Incidentally, Michael's son, Army Hammer,

would become a well known Hollywood actor. Still, Michael Hammer needed top rate dealers who could finally bring contemporary artists to Musty Old Noler. He found them in Lawrence Reuben and John Richardson. Reuben was a widely respected private dealer whose artists included Richard Deepencorn, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg. Larry Ruben was very famous because he was the brother of Bill Ruben, who I had actually worked for in

the seventies. They were arguably two of the most important

people in the entire art work or. Bill Ruben was the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art, and that was a time when the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art was more important than any director anywhere, and the fact that his brother actually ran Kndler was a let's say, a subject of both admiration and envy and some sort of I would say snarkiness because people would say, well, Bill Rubens having a big Frank Stella show at the Museum of Modern Art, which would of

course make Frank Stella's incredibly valuable. And at the same time Stella was represented by his brother who was running the Kndler gallery, So there was some more than whispering about conflict of interest, but um, it was evaded by Bill Ruben very effectively. We'll be back in a minute. Larry brought with him a number of artists who really, almost overnight, returned the not Aler to some sort of eminence. I mean, I'm thinking of obviously Stella, as you mentioned,

Deven Corn, Richard Depon Corn, another huge coup. And wasn't Robert Rauschenberg there for at least part of the time, Yes, I think Rauschenberg was there, and mother, well, you know, abstract Expressionism was Bill and Larry's kind of sweet spot, and so you know, those artists were artists that were celebrated the Museum of Modern art and celebrated, and I'm sure ensured Ndler's financial viability and success at that time.

Along with Larry Reuben, Michael Hammer's other heavy gun was John Cherson, an english born critic, curator, Picasso biographer, and men about town. He told naughty stories about wealthy people and made them clamor for more. Along with handling artists he brought to Knodler himself. Richardson was induced to take on Salvador Dolly, or as he came to put it, to join the Dolly team. Dolly had been with k Noodler since the nineteen twenties, when Roland Ballet had brought

him in. Roland's wife, Pelisse, tells the story of how he brought Dolly Toner. Roland was a very good friend of Christian Dio since they were young, and Christian Dio was had a little gallery in Paris, and he and Rollan had lunch one day and Dior said him, you know, I'm representing a Spanish artist. I'm having a show of his right now. Would you come to the gallery after lunch?

And Rolland said sure, I'd love to. And he went to the gallery and looked at the paintings and It was this young Spanish artist named Salvador Dolly, And of course Nodler Gallery was a big deal gallery, and Christian Dior just had this little thing. And he said to Rolland do you really like him? He said, yes, I like his work very much. And Dior said, would you be interested in taking him on for Ndler? And Rolland said, I really would. I'd like to meet him and I'd

like to to see more of his work. And that's what happened, and his Rolland always tells the story. I took Dolly to Ndler, and Christian Dior went onto the dress business. Dolly's health was fragile now, but the old surrealist remained immensely popular and sold out bi annual shows at Nodler with a little help from the staff. In an interview for Vanity Fair, Richardson described Dolly's poignant situation.

It was fascinating because he couldn't draw anymore. Richardson recalled of Dolly his hands were too weak for him to do the work. All he could do was sign his name. His eyes had gone. To put Dolly in a good mood, the staff would bring female models down to the basement have them undress and tell them to roll around naked on large pieces of rolling paper smeared with blue paint. For one show, Dolly had the idea to do holograms of his own work, but he hadn't made them yet.

Richardson explained, in order to do them, we had to find some original dollies. So Roland and I went down to the basement and we found a bunch of old nineteen century sculpture of no great distinction. We got someone to paint antlers on a loaf of bread and other surrealist cliches, and this crap sold. Dolly's only contribution was a huge signature, because that's all he could do anymore.

It was, in its way a kind of art world fraud, except that the clay lumps and the blue painted paper and the holograms were at least touched and blessed by the artist, and buyers, foolish as they might be, more or less new what they were buying. Coincidentally, it was at a Salvador Dolly opening at the Knodler Gallery in Night where Philly Say first laid eyes on Roland Dalet.

As she recalls, it was love at first sight. It was a Dolly opening I was representing Dolly at the time in the United States, and I went with his manager and his wife and we went to the gallery and as I walked in, I saw this man at the end of the gallery and I just thought to myself, my god, that's the man of my life. I was married at the time you were married. Yes, he was married without don know how many mistresses, and there were

thirty eight years between you. Yes, he was so delightfully charming. This is European elegance like doesn't exist anymore, didn't even really exist then. It was five years later, in ninety three, when Philice Say was arriving at Michael Hammer's gallery to meet a client for lunch, when fate would bring the two back together, this time for good. I went to the gallery and we were up on the second floor and the elevator opened and then off the elevator came Roll on and I was like, oh my god, and

I said, I've been in Paris for three months. If I can't pull this off today, there's something definitely wrong with me. At the end of lunch, we got up and rolland came over to me and he said, you know, I really enjoyed having lunch with you. I find you charming, but I would like it if we could have lunch just the two of us. Would you do that? And I said, just tell me when, And we had lunch

the next day and really practically didn't separate from that moment. On. With the sale of Knodler to armand Hammer, Roland Ballet began organizing his exit. He married Philie Say she at he at sixty six, and the two moved to Paris. They lived like the newly weds. They were oblivious to their nearly four decade age difference until armand Hammer disrupted their idol. Hammer owed a third and final payment to Ballet to complete his purchase of the Ndler Gallery and

simply refused to make it. Roland was appalled. He never thought armand Hammer would be so awful and such a crook, Phelice Say recalled later. A judge had to intervene. We were in Paris and we got this call from his lawyer that Almand Hamma was going to be in New York in two days and he wanted to settle it, and Roland, if he really wanted to do, they should come to New York. So we dropped everything and flew

to New York. Roland went to court and Hamma was there and the thing was he said, yes, you know, I'll settle in. And Roland said, I I have to go back to France and I have things to do, and if you want to settle it, I want a bank check for it by the end of the day. Today. Hammer gave the check. By the end of the day,

the bank check, and we went back to Paris. Sick of the art business, Roland Ballet resigned as Ndler's director and settled in to enjoy what would prove to be more years of conjugal bliss with his young and adoring wife. He owned one of the two buildings on East sevent Street, number twenty one, which would eventually pass to Philly Say and be sold by her in two thousand eleven for fifteen and a half million dollars, but he rarely came

to the gallery anymore. So he almost certainly failed to notice a nine year old salesperson who joined Nodler in December. Her name was Ann Friedman, and her impact on the gallery would be both profound and tragic. Over many of its one fifty plus years, the Knoedler had been a living, breathing presence, a character in the story of twenty century art. Its fortunes had risen and sometimes dipped, but its reputation remained intact, and the employees who chose to work there

for modest salaries were personally devoted to it. They would find in Ann Friedman a very different kind of gallerists, one much more focused on money that art. Over a fourteen year period, and Freedman oversaw the selling of more than sixty disputed paintings, reaping eighty million dollars for the gallery, a trio of forgers, and Freedman herself to the shock

and scorn of the entire contemporary art market. She even managed to open a new gallery, Friedman Arts, on the third floor of a townhouse on East seventy third Street, next door to the chik Via Quadrono restaurant. She goes up and down those stairs every day, a free woman, but a shunned presence in this neighborhood of world renowned dealers. We're coming back from Frank Stella's studio and you got a call, and now he's boiling. He wants to kill her.

That's next time on art Fraud. Come with me I'm you know, world of pure imagineation. Mhm. Take coll and you see into your imagination. Art Fraud is brought to you by iHeart Radio and Cavalry Audio. Our executive producers are Matt del Piano, Keegan Rosenberger, Andy Turner, myself, and Michael Snayerson. We're produced by Brandon Morgan and Zach McNeice. Zach also edited and mixed this episode. Lindsay Hoffman is

our managing producer. Our writer is Michael Schneerson. If you want to view paradized, simply look around and fu you think you want. I want to change the world. There's nothing O, there is no life. I go to