R. C. Kemper Charitable Trust
A drawing said to be by Richard Diebenkorn that is in dispute.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: May 6, 2012
A few months after the abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 his family visited Knoedler & Company, the gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that had long been his dealer. His wife, Phyllis; his daughter, Gretchen; and an art scholar went to see two gouache drawings that the gallery had recently acquired and that it hoped to sell as works from Diebenkorn’s celebrated Ocean Park series.
What happened at the meeting nearly two decades ago is now a matter of dispute, one that has only grown in significance as the gallery, once venerable and now closed, battles accusations that it sold many works of modern art that were actually sophisticated forgeries.
The Diebenkorn family says it made it plain that day, before the drawings were sold, that it suspected the drawings were fakes.
“They didn’t look quite right, and we said, ‘The provenance is wacky and the story behind the provenance makes no sense,’ ” said Richard Grant, the artist’s son-in-law and the executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation.
The gallery and its former president, Ann Freedman, say the family embraced the drawings as legitimate.
“We have definitive documentary evidence,” said Nicholas Gravante Jr., Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, including a copy of a 1995 letter from the gallery to the family members “confirming that they had viewed and authenticated the works Ms. Freedman showed them as being by Diebenkorn.”
For months Knoedler has been buffeted by accusations that it failed to check sufficiently the authenticity of more than 20 paintings it promoted as the work of Modernist masters. Now, in the matter of these Diebenkorn works, Mr. Grant said that Knoedler intentionally overlooked adverse information in order to sell the two drawings, and perhaps eight others, that he says it wrongly attributed to Diebenkorn. Most of them were not shown to the family, he said.
While the gallery and Ms. Freedman deny the accusations, the art scholar who accompanied the Diebenkorn family that day in 1993 said he could confirm the family’s account. “This was a long time ago, but I can remember standing in the room at Knoedler, particularly Phyllis and I looking at them,” said the scholar, John Elderfield, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art who still assists the family in reviewing artworks. “We did express doubt.”
The drawings in question were two of five sold by Knoedler as Diebenkorns that came from a man who would not say where he had gotten them, Mr. Grant said. The family also disputes the authenticity of another five drawings that Knoedler sold in the 1990s as part of the Ocean Park series and were said to have come from a second source, a Madrid gallery called Vijande, now shuttered.
Knoedler and Ms. Freedman declined to discuss the Diebenkorn matter, including the provenance of the drawings or how many were sold.
Disputes have been piling up for Knoedler since it closed five months ago. Two former clients who bought paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have sued the gallery separately, saying that the works are fakes that did not pass forensic analyses they commissioned, and that they have cloudy provenances. The clients are seeking $42 million.
Those paintings and about 20 others attributed to Modernist artists were brought to the gallery by a little-known Long Island dealer, Glafira Rosales, whose transactions are now the subject of an F.B.I. investigation. Ms. Rosales has said through her lawyer that she never knowingly defrauded anyone.
Ms. Freedman has said that Ms. Rosales told her the paintings came from a previously unknown cache acquired by a secret collector in the 1950s. No paperwork from these transactions has surfaced.
Ms. Freedman has testified in court that she continues to believe the Rosales paintings are authentic. Her lawyer, Mr. Gravante, said they have spoken to experts who will back that assertion at trial.
“Just last week we received another expert opinion confirming the authenticity of those works,” he said. He declined to provide the expert’s name.
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