Beyond Provenance: What the Knoedler Case Teaches Us About Due Diligence in the Art World
By: Hannah Lee, Founder of Ravello Advisory
Interior of the Knoedler Gallery, New York, circa 1860–1880. Image courtesy of the Robert N. Dennis Collection, New York Public Library. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Few markets are as susceptible to deception as the art world, in which questions of authenticity are rarely straightforward.
For years, the industry has relied on increasingly sophisticated forensic analysis to authenticate works, from microscopic pigment testing and canvas dating to infrared imaging and, more recently, artificial intelligence trained to detect stylistic anomalies. Alongside these scientific efforts, provenance research has long sought to reconstruct an artwork’s documented history by investigating, among other avenues, its chain of ownership, exhibitions, and archival traces.
The art market has invested heavily in these methods, channeling immense resources toward exposing fraud at the material and historical levels.
For all the industry’s scientific precision and historical rigor, the same scrutiny has rarely been applied to the people and networks behind the sales. In practice, vulnerabilities lie in both the artwork and those who move it. In many cases of fraud, those handling the sales are entangled with the very people producing the forgeries and sometimes, they’re one and the same. So why have we continued to focus so intently on the artwork and not on the people, when doing so means missing half the picture?
Because for decades, the art market has treated the object as the primary site of truth. That, however, is beginning to change. A new form of forensics is redefining the way authenticity is understood. This diligence examines human behavior, the provenance of relationships, and the unseen networks that move art through the market.
Nowhere illustrates the cost of overlooking that human element more clearly than the case of the Knoedler Gallery. For generations, collectors regarded this name as one of the most trusted in American art.
Founded in the 1840s as the successor to the New York branch of the French auction house Goupil & Cie, Knoedler had brokered works for prominent institutions and for the stately families and financiers of America’s Gilded Age: among them the Morgans, Mellons, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. It was a gallery synonymous with pedigree, credibility, and permanence.
But today, Knoedler no longer exists, having quietly shuttered its doors in 2011 amid revelations of its involvement in one of the largest art-forgery scandals in modern history. The gallery had brokered the sale of about $70 million in forged works, all tracing back to a single art dealer: Glafira Rosales.
The gallery’s fall began quietly with a few questions from collectors. Then came the subpoenas, and finally, an FBI investigation involving forged artwork sold by Knoedler. In the end, a 165-year-old institution collapsed and closed.
Its unraveling traces back to three individuals:
Pei-Shen Qian, a self-taught, Chinese-born painter working out of a garage in Queens, masterfully forging a series of paintings attributed to Abstract Expressionist era artists such as Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell;
Glafira Rosales, a little-known Long Island art dealer, who claimed to represent a secret collector with a hidden cache of previously unknown masterpieces;
And her partner, José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, whose name was already tied to a series of art-related fraud.
In the mid-1990s, Glafira Rosales was introduced to Ann Freedman, then president of the Knoedler Gallery. Rosales herself had no standing in the art world, and Freedman had never heard of her before their first meeting. She had no press visibility, no institutional ties, no documented history in high-end art dealing. The introduction came through a mutual acquaintance at the gallery. In an industry particularly built on referrals and trust, this connection did not seem unusual at the time.
During their meeting, Rosales said she represented a mysterious “Mr. X,” a collector who wished to sell a never-before-seen Rothko painting. When later asked about her first encounter with the “Rothko” around 1994, Freedman reflected that she had been immediately captivated:
“I thought it was absolutely beautiful…if one can fall in love with something material, I do fall in love with art…I got genuinely excited about these works of art.”
— Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (dir. Barry Avrich, Melbar Entertainment Group, 2020).
The works were convincing.
They were also entirely forged by Pei-Shen Qian.
Between 1994 and 2009, roughly forty forged paintings passed through Knoedler’s hands, defrauding some of the most sophisticated collectors in the market. Among them was Pierre Lagrange, co-founder of GLG Partners, who paid $17 million for a forged Pollock.
Glafira Rosales’ version of provenance was opaque from the start. She offered no documentation – no bills of sales, correspondence, or photographs linking the collectors to the artists. She claimed to represent a reclusive collector who had inherited the works, which were purchased directly from the artists in the 1950s and kept hidden for decades. The collector, she explained, wished to sell discreetly, avoiding the publicity of the auction houses. Over time, inconsistencies appeared in her story (shifting advisers, Mr. X being from the Philippines in one story and from Switzerland in another), yet for fifteen years, Knoedler continued to broker the forged art.
By the late 1990s, unmistakable warning signs had already begun to surface. In addition to Rosales’ murky provenance stories, members of the Diebenkorn family publicly challenged two works attributed to the artist, citing inconsistencies and the absence of documentation. The prices Knoedler paid were also implausible: for example, Knoedler had paid $950,000 for an alleged Rothko and resold it for $8.3 million – a 773% markup in a market where galleries commonly earn commissions in the 30 to 60% range.
Through all of this, Knoedler and the buyers brought in experts to evaluate the art. After numerous expert reviews, the testimonies and opinions remained ambiguous and hedged.
Some experts indicated the works could be consistent with the artists in style or appearance. Meanwhile, the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) – a respected nonprofit that has long conducted provenance research and advised collectors and institutions on authentication, and which, in 2024, announced plans to wind down operations – declined to confirm that an alleged Pollock was by the claimed artist.
In short, there was no clear answer.
Even with the inconclusiveness of the expert opinions, no one stopped to ask the simple question: Who was Glafira Rosales?
What few have examined, even today, are the red flags that would have surfaced had anyone looked more closely at the woman behind the sales.
A diligence review of network and relationship mapping (a service Ravello Advisory provides) would have revealed that Rosales lived with a partner through all of this: a Mr. José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, who had already been entangled in a series of art-world disputes that should have given any reputable gallery pause:
Connection to a prior forgery case: In 1998, over a decade prior to the Knoedler fraud revelation, the family of Spanish surrealist painter Maruja Mallo filed a forgery complaint after seven previously unknown works surfaced in New York at unusually low prices. These works were all traced back to Bergantiños and his brother.
Pattern of misrepresentation: In the early 1990s, gallerist Barbara Braathen purchased six alleged Basquiats from Rosales and Bergantiños, who claimed to have obtained them directly from the artist. When one was rejected by the Basquiat estate’s authentication committee, Braathen sued for fraud.
Credibility issues in the marketplace: By 1996, Christie’s auction house had sued Bergantiños for placing a winning bid on artwork and failing to pay – a public indictment of his reliability in the art world.
Nothing here was hidden, but at the same time, no one thought to examine the human side of the deal before it was too late. Instead, a century-old gallery extended untested trust to a single source. That misplaced confidence, rooted in trust and a lack of verification, ultimately resulted in the gallery’s undoing.
Lessons for a Market Built on Reputation
The art world (like many private domains including family offices, philanthropy, collectibles, and private investments) runs on trust. Relationships, discretion, and reputation shape transactions. Yet the same qualities that make a market feel intimate also make it fragile and create blind spots.
The Knoedler case is not just about forged art. It is about how trust, left unexamined, hardens into assumption. Collectors relied on the gallery’s pedigree; the gallery relied on its intermediary. At no point did anyone apply the same rigor to verifying people as they did to authenticating the paintings.
Rigorous diligence does not undermine trust; it preserves it. The most trusted relationships are those that have been quietly verified. For galleries, collectors, and advisors in trust-driven environments, that means applying the same rigor to understanding people as to authenticating art and asking, who stands behind a transaction? How are they connected? What are their incentives?
Knoedler’s downfall was not inevitable. It was preventable. It is a reminder that when trust becomes assumed rather than earned, even the most established institutions can lose their footing.
