How did a famous New York gallery sell about forty fake Rothkos and Pollocks?

A famous gallery could sell about forty fake paintings because the fakes arrived with a believable story from a trusted seller, and a respected name made buyers stop asking questions. Knoedler closed in 2011 amid lawsuits for fraud, after 165 years in operation as one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US.

The paintings came through one supplier. Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales brought in about 40 paintings she claimed were genuine and sold them to gallery president Ann Freedman. Claimed to be by the likes of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, the paintings were all in fact forgeries by Pei-Shen Qian, an unknown Chinese artist and mathematician living in Queens. He reportedly received less than $9,000 per painting; Rosales sold them to Knoedler for millions of dollars.

Between 1994 and 2008, Knoedler sold an estimated $80 million of fake works claimed to be by Abstract Expressionist artists. Freedman resigned in October 2009 amid rumours of forged paintings, and in 2013 Rosales pleaded guilty to selling over 60 fake works to two New York galleries, along with money laundering, tax evasion and wire fraud. She was later ordered to pay $81 million to the victims.

Evidence kept piling up from the paint itself. Tests on a work Knoedler attributed to Pollock showed that some of its paint was not available until some years after Pollock's death.