This is very much a rich people problems kind of film but you do have to admit that the story is fascinating. It is about the forgery scandal that rocked the art world some years ago when dozens of paintings were found to have been made by a Chinese painter Pei-Shen Qian. This film focuses particularly on the role of the Knoedler & Co gallery in facilitating the sale of the forgeries to rich collectors. It is extraordinary how filmmaker Barry Avrich was able to obtain the cooperation of many different parties, including the ones implicated in the fraud, to speak on camera and hence capture opposing perspectives.

As the film tells it, Knoedler is an art gallery in Manhattan with a storied history and an impeccable reputation. One day a woman Glafira Rosales walks in with a trove of paintings seemingly by famous artists including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell to sell. Ann Freedman, the gallery’s director, accepts these as authentic after consulting some experts and resells them to the gallery’s very wealthy clientele. Rosales’ explanation for where they came from is that an anonymous collector in Mexico bought them cheaply back when the artists were relatively unknown. Over the next twenty years, Freedman would buy and resell art from Rosales worth some US$80 million. The case only falls apart when an expert, Jack Flam, who Freedman had cited as one of those who had authenticated the paintings for her, becomes concerned that she is too dismissive about his worries and contacts the FBI. Forensic analysis of some of the painters confirms that they use paints that were not available to the real artist at the time and the authorities eventually discover that the real artist is Pei-Shen Qian and the scheme was concocted by Rosales with her boyfriend José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz.

This documentary features interviews with numerous art experts, some journalists who covered the case, but also notably Freedman herself, the lawyer representing Knoedler, Bergantiños in Spain and the prosecutor on the case. Rosales’ guilt is unquestionable as she eventually confessed and Qian in China maintains that he made the paintings in the style of famous artists even intending to deceive anyone though this claim is belied by him also faking their signatures. This film itself largely concerns itself with how complicit Freedman and Knoedler was and to a lesser extent how much responsibility is borne by the experts who authenticated the paintings for her. She maintains that she was deceived by Rosales along with everyone else and indeed the prosecutor declined to charge her as he believed he would be unable to prove the case to a jury. But as others point out, even as Rosales changed the story of where the paintings came from multiple times, Freedman went along and she personally earned hefty commissions for each sale. It is also shocking that Knoedler resold the paintings for about ten times the price they paid to Rosales which is apparently far above the norm for art dealers. Given all this, it’s pretty difficult to believe that they thought everything was above board. It’s likely that at best they chose to close their eyes and tried their best to keep a good thing going without prying too deeply.

The film’s focus is really too insular for me to get too excited about and the main generalizable lesson I draw from it is how easily rich and legally-minded people can get away with a clear case of fraud. Then again the primary injured parties are the wealthy collectors who presumably settled with Knoedler’s owner for respectable sums of money out of the view of the general public. For me it would be fascinating to investigate how widespread this kind of forgery is. The film mentions how the team discovered a workshop in China specializing in art forgeries but doesn’t delve deeply into them and so we don’t know whether or not they are sold as if they are sold as the originals but it seems unlikely. The interviewees talk about how insane it is that Freedman is still running an art gallery of her own but I don’t think that is too surprising as notoriety is valuable and she was never even charged of a crime. While the respectable and prestigious institutions will avoid her, there are plenty more who I suspect will be willing to buy from here.

This is still a quite interesting case and the documentary is excellent but for me at least it might not be much better than just reading up on it. I do like how the film shows the responses of the presumed guilty parties and of course the things that they say are exactly what they must say to avoid admitting to wrongdoing. So Bergantiños’ response to Rosales’ confession is to deny that he broke any laws but add that he understands and forgives it because he knows that it is legally necessary for her to make such claims to protect herself. Many people have the fantasy that if they can corner some criminal and get him to talk about his crimes, they can eventually get some kind of confession that provides closure but in reality people are well able to fudge and evade when it is in their interests to do so, no matter how obvious their guilt is.