Fancy Galleries, Fake Art
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2021
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. |
| 0:06.5 | I'm Al Leedson. |
| 0:08.1 | John Howard lives in an impressive home, a Manhattan brownstone, four stories high, covered in green vines. |
| 0:15.6 | I literally, I 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. |
| 0:22.8 | It's not the house that we're here to see so much as what's in it. John's an art collector. |
| 0:27.8 | I noticed the art right away. Do you have art in all their rooms in this house? |
| 0:32.1 | Pretty much. John's talking to reporter Giselle Rigatow. She's here to see one painting in particular, |
| 0:38.4 | one that hasn't hung in John's house for years. So it's all wrapped in brown paper. Did you wrap it |
| 0:45.0 | yourself? I did not. And it's all tied up very neatly with cord, which I'm now going to cut. |
| 0:52.6 | It has a very prestigious signature, Willem de Kooning. |
| 0:55.9 | He's a famous Dutch-American painter known for his abstract expressionist work. |
| 1:00.2 | So I've probably even seen this in, I don't know, something between five and ten years. |
| 1:06.8 | And there it is. |
| 1:08.4 | The painting has vibrant splashes of blue, black, white, and a peculiar yellow that John just loves. |
| 1:15.4 | It's not a, it's not a chrome yellow. It's a kind of muted yellow. It has more brown in it, so it's an ochre color is what I call it. |
| 1:23.4 | When he bought it back in 2007, it was the most he ever spent on a piece of art. |
| 1:28.3 | $4 million. |
| 1:29.7 | There was a poignance to my buying it. |
| 1:34.6 | John's dad collected art. |
| 1:36.2 | De Kooning was one of his favorites. |
| 1:38.0 | My father could never afford to buy one of his paintings. |
| 1:42.0 | His dad was a Jewish immigrant who escaped from Germany at the beginning of World War II. |
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