In our Knoedler Gallery Fraud series finale, we discuss the end of the Knoedler Gallery, the arrest of one of the fraudsters, and explore the De Sole lawsuit extravaganza. We ask the question of what authenticity means within the art world and how important it truly is, from the walls of a prestigious gallery in New York to the Chinese village of Dafen where art reproductions were famously made by the hundreds. And of course, we armchair analyze the notorious Ann Freedman. 

“And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.” - Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

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Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/arts/fbi-art-crime-team.html

https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/visual-arts/david-mirvish-acknowledges-fakes-in-new-york-art-fraud-scandal/article_84b3ab29-c05b-5e0d-9a1d-b23b7a80e4fa.html

https://maddoxgallery.com/news/454-what-is-blue-chip-art/

https://itsartlaw.org/art-law/wywh-knoedler-trial-uncut-week-1/

https://www.clm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/7830293_1-1.pdf

Varga, Somogy and Charles Guignon, "Authenticity", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/authenticity/>.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/what-if-readers-like-ai-generated-fiction

https://news.artnet.com/market/knoedler-fraud-trial-jack-flam-martha-parrish-419594

https://brooklynrail.org/2014/03/art/the-held-essays-on-visual-artin-defense-of-faking-it/#_edn1

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-praise-of-art-forgeries.html

https://hyperallergic.com/why-chinas-infamous-copycat-town-now-invests-in-original-artworks/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-chinas-art-market-is-evolving-from-knockoffs-to-new-works

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dafen-village-china-replicas-2672642

This week in The Vanishing Brief, we discuss some recent headlines in the art crime world including the recent Louvre Heist, a Picasso painting gone missing in transit, and a Nazi-looted painting discovered in an Argentine real estate listing.

“I am not murdered, and I am not missing, but parts of me have been disappeared.” - Leanne Simpson 

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Sources

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/world/europe/france-louvre-jewel-heist.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/19/europe/robbery-louvre-paris-france-museum-closure-intl

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/picasso-work-missing-madrid-granada-1234757797/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-tiny-picasso-painting-went-missing-while-traveling-to-an-exhibition-in-spain-180987533/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/world/europe/louvre-heist-items.html

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/louvre-museum-closed-staff-protest-inadequate-security-1234757928/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/18th-century-portrait-stolen-by-nazis-recovered-in-argentina

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/nazi-looted-portrait-real-estate-listing-argentina-2681421

https://hyperallergic.com/1051349/french-museum-reports-theft-one-day-after-louvre-heist/

https://hyperallergic.com/1051113/the-louvre-heist-was-a-colonial-wake-up-call/

In this episode, we continue the story of the Knoedler Gallery as the fourteen year long forgery ring that made the gallery millions began to crumble. We unveil the masterminds behind the fakes, including a man who delivered caviar to Sotheby's in an old ambulance and a master Chinese forger who could easily replicate Rothko's and Diebenkorns. We discuss the alarming red flags that gallery girl boss Ann Freedman somehow overlooked, a millionaire Gucci alum, and misspelled Pollock signatures. 

“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity.”  - The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord

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The Devil Wears Rothko: Inside the Art Scandal that Rocked the World by Barry Avrich

Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. Directed by Barry Avrich, Melbar Entertainment Group, 2020.

https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/3047

https://www.nypl.org/about/divisions/wallach-division/art-architecture-collection/catalogue-raisonne

https://anderson.stanford.edu/collection/ocean-park-60-by-richard-diebenkorn/

In this episode, we introduce the decades-long, $80 million forgery ring that took place within the prestigious Knoedler Gallery in New York City. We discuss the history of the long-standing gallery and its legacy, the calculated gallery director and art maestro Ann Freedman, and the movement at the heart of the story: Abstract Expressionism. Our story winds us through tales of forged Matisses, cannibalism allegations, a Jeffrey Epstein connection, and splatter paintings galore.

 “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent.” - Mark Rothko

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Some references for this episode:

The Devil Wears Rothko: Inside the Art Scandal that Rocked the World by Barry Avrich

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. Directed by Barry Avrich, Melbar Entertainment Group, 2020.

https://theconversation.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-knoedler-new-yorks-most-notorious-art-gallery-53775

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/02/16/archives/the-new-nihilism-art-versus-feeling.html

https://www.artsy.net/gene/abstract-expressionism

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/abstract-expressionism/a-distinctly-american-style

https://sothebysinstitute.com/articles/how-to-series-art-forgery/

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-8-most-prolific-forgers-in-art-history-that-we-know-of

https://www.finance.senate.gov/ranking-members-news/wyden-releases-new-information-on-financing-of-jeffrey-epsteins-operations-by-billionaire-leon-black-seeks-documents-from-trump-administration

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20161004-was-modern-art-a-weapon-of-the-cia

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2000/11/01/knoedler-and-seattle-art-museum-settle-over-matisse-lawsuit

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/05/knoedler-gallery-forgery-scandal-investigation?srsltid=AfmBOoothQybbHMCjb-b_N02mvl5hT1MzL1f9mjuv2cevm_wVWmD9VMJ

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/arts/design/abstract-expressionism-women.html?searchResultPosition=3

In this episode, Emma tells Olivia about the 1961 theft of Francisco Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London. This story takes us through flamboyant ransom letters, the question of television licenses, and of one man's journey as a rebel looking for his cause. 

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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Some references for this episode:

Hirsch, Alan, and Noah Charney. The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped!: The Incredible True Story of the Art Heist That Shocked a Nation. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017. 

Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. 

Postman, Anew, and Neil Postman. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. 

Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington by Lord Alfred Tennyson

https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/dee-wells-h3n83v0kxfw

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2005/03/01/the-national-gallery-purchases-raphaels-madonna-of-the-pinks-what-we-know

https://pricelessblog.squarespace.com/articles/goyas-portrait-of-the-duke-of-wellington-theft

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francisco-Goya

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220221-the-duke-the-bus-driver-a-goya-masterpiece

In this episode, Olivia tells Emma the wild story of the rare book heist that took place at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in 2004. 

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” - Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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Sources

American Animals. Directed by Bart Layton. Film4Productions. 2018

“John J. Audubon’s Birds of America.” Audubon, http://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america.

Falk, John. “The Untold Story of the ‘Transy Book Heist.’” Vanity Fair, 13 Feb. 2015, http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/02/transy-book-heist.

Stegemeyer, Pete. HEIST: An Inside Look at the World’s 100 Greatest Heists, Cons, and Capers (From Burglaries to Bank Jobs and Everything In-Between). Simon and Schuster, 2021.

In our final episode on the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, we catch back up with Picasso and Apollinaire who have just been arrested. We explore the truth of the theft and its perpetrator, growing tensions on the world stage as Europe prepares for war, an Argentine criminal art magnate, a French forger with an unlikely technique, and conspiracies born from the media spectacle of the case. 

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”  - Jean Baudrillard

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Some references for this episode:

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti

Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth by Roy McMullen

The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork by Noah Charney

The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire by Tristan Tzara

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin

 “Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art” by Laura Gonzalez, from Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2013/12/the-mona-lisa-heist/

https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection

https://www.nytimes.com/1941/12/05/archives/karl-decker-dies-correspondent-73-hearst-reporter-many-years.html

In this episode, we travel back in time to Paris in 1911 to the Louvre where one of the most iconic paintings of all time is discovered missing: the Mona Lisa. In the first episode of our two-part series, we explore the inception of the painting and its captivating hold on both kings and museum viewers alike, la Belle Époque and the art movements that arose, the advent of photojournalism and sensationalism in the media, and a dastardly gang of punk artists and poets challenging the status quo of the art world. Thanks for listening!

“The picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing.” - Oscar Wilde

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Some references for this episode:

Sources:

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti

Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth by Roy McMullen

The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork by Noah Charney

Picasso and His Friends by Fernande Olivier 

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-belle-epoque-beautiful-age-1221300

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/guillaume-apollinaire

Today we bring you our first Vanishing Point bonus episode! In this episode, we decided to take a trip down the internet rabbit hole and read some conspiracy theories about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Heist. We explore how conspiracies come to fruition, discuss some favorites, and then explore some theories about Harvard University, FBI agents gone rogue, underwater art vaults, and stolen De Koonings. Thanks for listening!

For even more bonus fun, take a drink every time Emma says "proliferate".

“Those who can make people believe absurdities, can make people commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire

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Some references for this episode:

https://www.wbur.org/lastseen/2018/10/31/bulger-gardner-museum-heist

https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-connolly

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/2020/09/11/medieval-strategy-the-great-leper-conspiracy-of-1321/

In this episode, we introduce the possibility of Irish involvement in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, discussing the IRA, a British heiress turned bomb maker, and the infamous Whitey Bulger.

 We also circle back to Italian mobsters in the Boston crime underworld, where we end our tale, from golden boy mobsters to cocaine rings in auto body shops where stolen art was stashed. Thanks for listening!

“Gangsters and gods do not speak, they nod their heads and all is done” - Mythologies, Roland Barthes

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Some references for this episode:

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft, Ulrich Boser

This is a Robbery: The World's Biggest Art Heist

The Billion Dollar Art Hunt

The Gardner Heist, Ulrich Boser

Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World’s Greatest Art Heist, Stephen Kurkjian 

Ways of Seeing, John Berger

Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell

https://www.bostonherald.com/2008/03/29/meet-the-suspects-mobster-bobby-donati/

https://www.bostonherald.com/2008/04/26/meet-the-suspects-carmello-merlino/

https://www.russborough.ie/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/04/whitey-bulger-linked-to-boston-art-heist-paintings-in-ireland

https://www.essentialvermeer.com/fakes_thefts_school_of_delft_lost_sp/vermeer_theft_04.html

https://youtu.be/4BkzRu4Yuv8?si=kpkjKvgSH_lDggLu

https://www.wbur.org/lastseen/2018/10/15/bobby-guarente-key-to-gardern-heist

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/arts/charles-hill-dead.html

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/charles-hill-art-detective-dead-the-scream-1234584315/