#Jumpcut scam trial

In a sly way, “Made You Look” shows you that to be enthralled by a fake painting is to exist in an innocent state of foolish grace. They had to take the stand and try to squirm out of the fact that they’d been fooled.

#Jumpcut scam trial

The trial that resulted was an ordeal for the experts who had authenticated the paintings. Avrich interviews some of the people who were duped, like Dominico and Eleanore De Soles, collectors who wound up suing Freedman and the gallery. And so, in addition to being a scandal, the Knoedler Gallery fakes added up to a profound embarrassment. The canvases in question didn’t only fool Freedman they fooled the entire art world. Yet “Made You Look” tells another story just beneath the surface. You could argue that Freedman’s eyes were clouded by greed. That they were “fresh” works is what made them such tempting potential bonanzas. Yet the woman we see has a level head and appears honest enough about how badly she was duped was she supposed to have eyes more perceptive than those of the world’s most venerated art experts? Yes, she let slide the paintings’ relative paucity of paperwork - that and the fact that these previously unknown works, by Rothko and Pollock and Motherwell and Warhol and Franz Kline and Lee Krasner and Clyfford Still, had suddenly popped up. She was certainly responsible for buying the paintings, so in a way it’s fair to blame her for what happened. In a way, Ann Freedman became the fall girl for the art world’s myopia. Miller of The New York Times says, “Either she was complicit in it, or she was one of the stupidest people to have worked at an art gallery.” Which seems, more or less, to be the attitude of almost all of the film’s talking-head witnesses. “Made You Look” is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?įreedman, who was ultimately forced out of the Knoedler Gallery in disgrace (that was shortly before the gallery closed its doors in 2011), is the central character in “Made You Look,” and she’s a likably unassuming one, with a sparky officious manner and a mop of gray curls. The result, once the paintings were sold to collectors, galleries, and museums, was the costliest art scandal in history, with $80 million worth of forged works sold. These paintings were fakes, and so were more than 60 other Abstract Expressionist canvases that Glafir Rosales brought to Ann Freedman over the next 10 years. And once again, she wasn’t shy about having it authenticated by a trove of experts, all of whom gave it their endorsement. But the work that was brought to Ann Freedman had the Pollock effervescence. Not too long after that, Glafir Rosales brought the Knoedler gallery a Jackson Pollock - a 1949 drip painting of red, black, and white with splashes of yellow, called “Untitled.” I’m not an art scholar, but I’ve seen my share of Jackson Pollock forgeries, which have a way of never looking totally like the real thing they lack that inner spark of kinetic energy. The painting was sold for $5.5 million at auction. He called it beautiful, and declared that it was a real Rothko. She showed it to an array of experts, including David Anfam, who at the time was the reknowned scholar-guru of Rothko.

Yet the painting didn’t have much “provenance” (the paper trail of its history and ownership), and Freedman wasn’t about to take its authenticity on faith. It was a vintage Rothko, with two fuzzy rectangles (one black, one red) on a muted yellow background, and it was a bedazzling piece. What really seemed plausible, however, was the painting itself. The person who brought it to her was Glafir Rosales, a woman from Long Island who didn’t have much of an art pedigree but claimed to represent a wealthy anonymous collector, and the story she told about him seemed just plausible enough.

It was sold to Ann Freedman, the gallery’s director, for $750,000 (a fire-sale price). In 1995, the Knoedler Gallery, the oldest art gallery in New York (it had been around for 165 years, predating the Civil War and all of the city’s museums), purchased an unknown canvas by Mark Rothko.

It’s a documentary, directed by Barry Avrich, that’s about nothing less than the most successful forgery scam ever brought off in the high-end art world. That’s the level that “ Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art” taps into.