Fancy Galleries, Fake Art

Reveal

The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX

News

4.7 • 8K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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•••
In the mid-’90s, two high-end New York art galleries began selling one fake painting after another – works in the style of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and others. It was the largest art fraud in modern U.S. history, totaling more than $80 million. Our first story looks at how it happened and why almost no one ever was punished by authorities.

Our second story revisits an investigation into a painting looted by the Nazis during World War II. More than half a century later, a journalist helped track it down through the Panama Papers.

This episode originally aired January 25, 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Alan. I hope 2022 has been a good year for you. But to be honest, it's been a tough one for us.
0:08.0	This year, Reveal was struck by a financial crisis that jeopardized our very existence.
0:14.0	But we've rallied, and all the while that was happening, our staff forged ahead to produce ambitious investigations
0:22.0	that exposed corruption and abuses that the powerful interests did not want revealed.
0:27.0	Because that's what we do. If we're going to keep telling these kind of stories though, we're going to need support from you.
0:34.0	To support fearless investigative nonprofit journalism, please donate by December 31st.
0:41.0	Just visit revealnews.org slash 2023. Again, to donate to the show and to support our work into the future.
0:48.0	Please visit revealnews.org slash 2023. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
1:02.0	From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is reveal. I'm Al-Letson.
1:08.0	John Howard lives in an impressive home. A man had in Brownstone. Four stories high, covered, and green vines.
1:15.0	I literally walked into this house, and I walked over here, and I said, okay, I'll do it. I'll buy it. I didn't even go upstairs.
1:22.0	It's not the house that we're here to see so much is what's in it. John's an art collector.
1:27.0	And notice the art right away. Do you have art in all their rooms in this house?
1:32.0	Pretty much.
1:33.0	John's talking to reporter, Jaselly Rigatow. She's here to see one painting in particular, one that hasn't hung in John's house for years.
1:42.0	So it's all wrapped in brown paper. Did you wrap it yourself?
1:46.0	I did not. And it's all tied up very neatly with cord, which I'm now going to cut.
1:53.0	It has a very prestigious signature, Willem DeCooning. He's a famous Dutch American painter known for his abstract expressionist work.
2:00.0	So I've probably even seen this in, I don't know, something between five and ten years.
2:06.0	And there it is.
2:09.0	The painting has vibrant splashes of blue, black, white, and a peculiar yellow that John just loves.
2:16.0	It's not a, it's not a chrome yellow, it's a kind of muted yellow. It has more brown, and it has an ochre color, is what I call it.
	...

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