A Beacon Diminished

At left, the Skidmore Owings & Merrill design of One World Trade Center with the radome; at right, without it

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 11, 2013

A Beacon Diminished
by James Panero

The 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is the first that will see One World Trade Center, formerly known as Freedom Tower, topping out at a symbolic 1,776 feet. After years of missteps and inaction, the building's completion, now scheduled to take place in early 2014, will be a welcome end to a fraught project that has long weighed on the national consciousness. Yet just as construction costs have ballooned to nearly $4 billion, making this by far the most expensive new office building in the world, its developers—the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with the Durst Organization—have decided to cut one last corner, blunting the building's most prominent and important symbol.

In 2005, once David M. Childs of Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) took over the design of One WTC, he devised a brilliant solution for balancing the building's monumental and memorial demands with its practical and commercial needs. He took a chaotic jumble of ideas left by Daniel Libeskind, the site's quixotic planner, and compressed them into a shimmering crystal, one that reflected the scale and volume of the original Twin Towers while also recalling the tapered facets of the Washington Monument. From a solid, cube-shaped base (regrettably made more bunkerlike over time), the edges of Mr. Childs's One WTC chamfer in so that halfway up it becomes a perfect octagon and, at its top floor, the building faces 45 degrees off its base.

Two of Mr. Libeskind's proposed symbols remained through Mr. Childs's redesign: the building's 1,776 foot total height, and an illuminated beacon at the top to allude both to the torch of the Statue of Liberty and to the soaring skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline. To accomplish this, SOM brought in the sculptor Kenneth Snelson to design what was meant to be the building's most visible element: a spire to rise 408 feet from the center of the building's 1,368-foot-high roof, bringing One WTC to 1,776 feet. Through Mr. Snelson's knowledge of tensegrity structures—designs with "floating compression," where solid forms are suspended in a tensing web—SOM crafted the spire, 40-stories tall and made of a shell of interlocking fiberglass triangles, into an elegant, tapered sculpture known as a radome. Since the radome is transparent to radio waves, it was meant to conceal the broadcast equipment mounted to an antenna mast inside.

The Stuttgart-based engineering firm Schlaich Bergermann & Partner helped turn this complex idea into reality. WTC.com, the website maintained by Silverstein Properties that chronicles the overall site reconstruction, continues to advertise the many benefits of the innovative design: The radome would "resist wind loading, and create a protected maintenance area" for workers attending to the broadcasting equipment contained inside it. Much like the building itself, the radome would serve the building's functional needs while also completing its aesthetic mandates.

Nevertheless, in 2012 the owners of One WTC announced a stunning last-minute design change: They would eliminate the radome and leave exposed the antenna that was meant to be hidden inside. The owners cited the radome's supposed cost—$20 million—to bolster their decision. Inquiries to SOM concerning the spire were referred to their "clients" at the Port Authority, who in turn referred them to Durst.

"The architects wanted more heft," said Jordan Barowitz, a Durst spokesman. "So they proposed the radome to give it more surface area so it could be seen from a greater distance. But it was impossible to maintain"—a claim that its designers have refuted.

This newspaper and other media outlets have reported that since taking an ownership interest in One WTC in 2010, Durst has been agitating for the radome's elimination—a push rejected by the agency's executive director at the time, only to be approved by his successor. "I don't think it will affect the visual appearance," Douglas Durst, the chairman of the Durst Organization, said regarding the radome's elimination. "I try not to get involved with the aesthetics." In fact, the financial incentives of Durst's co-ownership deal, it has been reported, are structured in such a way as to prioritize cost-saving construction over aesthetic concerns.

Much of the controversy over the elimination of the radome has focused on One WTC's final height and whether the exposed antenna would count toward its total. The difference would be between "the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere" (including the antenna) or merely the third-tallest in the U.S. (without it). The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the nonprofit organization recognized internationally as the arbiter of construction height, states that it considers spires in calculating architectural height but not "antennae, signage, flag poles or other functional-technical equipment." In May 2012, shortly after Durst and the Port Authority announced their change order, the council referred to several articles concerning the "questions on One World Trade Center height" on its website and issued an early warning about the 1,776-foot designation if the antenna is left without its radome skin.

It could be that Durst and the Port Authority have a plan to win the council's approval through a technicality, such as by leaving the very tip of the radome in place while eliminating the rest. But any way you measure it, they plan to rob the skyline of a promised symbol and leave it with a structure that, at its best, resembles a 400-foot umbrella stand. The results of their decision are now apparent, as the spire's internal sections, assembled in Montreal and shipped to New York, have been hoisted atop One WTC.

In a 2012 statement, Mr. Childs called the radome an "integral part" of the building's design. He also offered to find a suitable compromise. "We stand ready to work with the Port on an alternate design that will still mark 1 World Trade Center's place in New York City's skyline." Unfortunately, it appears the owners have chosen to follow the cheapest and worst of all possible routes. Rather than design a new spire, they are instead using the older design, minus the sculptural shell, in a way that was never intended.

Just imagine constructing the Statue of Liberty but then, for cost reasons, forgoing its sculpted copper skin. Of course, as nothing more than an exposed metal skeleton and a spiral staircase, Lady Liberty wouldn't be the same. In certain ways, the current short-changing at Ground Zero is even worse. One WTC rises over hallowed ground, pointing to the heavens from the place where over 2,600 souls lost their lives. The substitution of its graceful spire with a radio antenna reduces the building to the mundane and diminishes its meaning as a monument and memorial.

UPDATE: Douglas Durst responds to the article on the WSJ comments page:

Durst is an advisor, not a developer of 1WTC.and has no decision making authority on construction matters. PANYNJ made the final determination to eliminate the radome not to save money, but because the radome structure could not be maintained. Durst tried for several months to find away to maintain the radome, but the building was nearing completion and it was too late to engineer a new structure. Incidentally, radome is put on after an antennae is installed. The radome structure designed by SOM would have made broadcast antennas infeasible depriving PANYNJ of much needed revenue. 

The Artist is Present in the Bronx

Thomas Hirschorn's Gramsci Monument; image: James Panero 

THE NEW CRITERION
September 2013

The Artist is present in the Bronx
by James Panero

On Gramsci Monument: A Work in Public Space by Thomas Hirschhorn at Forest Houses, the Bronx, New York.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, a temporary public art work sponsored by the Dia Foundation now on view at Forest Houses in the Bronx, reportedly cost $500,000 to construct.1 If you try accounting for its material costs in plywood, nails, tarps, and packing tape, and still come up $490,000 short, you are not alone. The Swiss-born Hirschhorn is the type of Continental sophisticate who traffics in the naive. A regular on the Kunsthalle circuit, he knows how to work the levers of funding while enjoying the representation of a high-rolling Chelsea gallery, all in advancement of his phony patois. As a general contractor, he also deserves to be stripped of his license. Hirschhorn makes things that are worth less than the tape they are wrapped in. As it happens, obsessively wrapping junk in packing tape, thus furthering its decrepitude until it devolves intoHirschhorn junk, is his stock in trade. His shoddy constructions are poststructural manifestations representing the inverse of his own sense of greatness.

Hirschhorn has never shied away from turning global politics into his own personal sleaze. His exhibition some years ago at the Gladstone Gallery called “Superficial Engagement” mixed faux tribal statuary with photographs of corpses in the streets as some kind of commentary on the War on Terror. Or perhaps it was a meditation on the aesthetics of pipe bombs. In either case, the show made a lugubrious fetish out of violence and assaulted the dead by mutilating their bodies a second time in furtherance of a slick Chelsea gallery show.

When Hirschhorn announced his plans to construct, in the courtyard of a Bronx housing project, a “temporary monument” dedicated to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a founder of the Italian Communist party and a patron saint of chic Marxists everywhere, the New York art world let out a collective groan. It does not help that Hirschhorn seems to have learned his English by reading the pages of October magazine. He generally communicates in a self-obsessive hauteur slathered with radicalized special sauce. “I have always understood ‘me’ or ‘I’—which I use often and with no bashfulness,” he writes.

Hirschhorn does not make just “art.” He creates capital-A “Art.” Similarly, his Bronx audiences are not merely other people. They are “the Other.” “I love to encounter the Other through an Idea,” he writes in the Gramsciexhibition brochure. “I love to do it through a mission I give myself and I love to do it through Art.” All of these statements are repeated on the Monument’s website (gramsci-monument.com), which continues the faux-naif schtick by looking as though it was designed in Geo-Cities circa 1995.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013; Forest Houses, Bronx, New York; Courtesy Dia Art Foundation; Photo: Romain Lopez

Hirschhorn has a thing for placing “monuments” dedicated to esoteric theorists in underclass locales. Gramsci is the fourth in a series that has included Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille. One gets the sense that the expeditionary vectors of these comp-lit colonizations are, to him, arbitrary. The residents of “Nychaland,” as some call the project islands of the New York City Housing Authority, are to him interchangeable with the residents of the Red Light District in Amsterdam or with the residents of a French banlieue—all of whom have now received Hirschhorn specials. They are all “the Other.”

In selecting Forest Houses, a project in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Hirschhorn seems to have deployed all of the top-down metrics of Le Corbusier astride a cement mixer. Hirschhorn knew he wanted to doGramsci in the Bronx. Naturally. What won Hirschhorn over to Forest Houses after a thorough canvassing of the borough’s housing projects, however, was Erik Farmer, the wheelchair-bound President of the Forest Houses Resident Association, who, after hearing the artist’s presentation, asked Hirschhorn if he could borrow a book on Gramsci. That was a tough break for Castle Hill Houses, Soundview Houses, Monroe Houses, Patterson Houses, Bronx River Houses, and Claremont Rehab, the other finalists for the project—or perhaps that should be “the Other” finalists.

It was the book that got Forest Houses the monument, according to Hirschhorn. Farmer also won the golden ticket as the grandee to dole out the many $12-an-hour jobs that Dia commissioned for the Monument’s construction and security (Hispanics complained that only black residents got the gigs, an issue that Dia has now reportedly resolved).

"The point of modernity is to live without illusions, while not becoming disillusioned."—Antonio Gramsci; image: James Panero

What these residents have built, under Hirschhorn’s hard-driving direction, is a shantytown of plywood in the middle of the Forest Houses central green. The structure consists of a spongy, water-logged platform in two sections, accessible by ramps and stairs and connected by a rickety bridge (it is surprising that Dia doesn’t have you sign a liability waiver when setting foot in this accident-deliberately-waiting-to-happen).

Atop the platform are plywood rooms with tarpaulin roofs and signs that indicate each of their functions—a “Radio Studio,” a “Newspaper,” an “Internet Corner,” the “Antonio Lounge,” the “Gramsci Bar.” A Gramsci Museum features relics from Gramsci’s internment at the hands of Italian Fascists, a period of time from 1926 to his death in 1937 that turned out to be incredibly productive for the Communist theorist, resulting in over three-thousand pages of letters and notes that were collected and published soon after the war. A comb, a brush, and a pair of Gramsci’s prison slippers, on loan from the Casa Museo di Antonio Gramsci in Ghilarza and the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome, are displayed in Plexiglas cases alongside books on Communism, sofas wrapped in packing tape, and a looping film that, at least when I looked at it, featured the face of Joseph Stalin.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013; Gramsci Archive and Library; Forest Houses, Bronx, New York; Courtesy Dia Art Foundation; Photo: Romain Lopez

The entire structure, meanwhile, is covered with an accretion of spray-painted agitprop and stapled-up flyers. One poster I saw on arrival featured the cover of the recent Gramsci Monument Newspaper, the project’s paper of record: “<QUOTE OF THE DAY>” it read. “‘The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbrinding [sic], forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating.’ Karl Marx.”

Similar signs are plastered throughout the structure and generally feature Gramsci’s esoteric Marxist exhortations. “I LIVE, I AM A PARTISAN. THAT IS WHY I HATE THE ONES THAT DON’T TAKE SIDES. I HATE THE INDIFFERENT,” reads one example, spray-painted on a bed sheet by the Monument’s entrance. Here is another: “This distinction between form and content is just heuristic because material forces would be historically inconceivable without form and ideologies would be individual fantasies without material forces.’ (Prison Notebook 7) A.G.” Also prominently displayed are statements from Marcus Steinweg, a German philosopher-in-residence who has been giving daily lectures at the Monument on “Adorno,” “Ontological Poverty,” and “The Uncanny (Heidegger) – The Real (Lacan) – The Outside (Blanchot).” In “What is Art,” Steinweg muses, “Art is pointing out the ontological inconsistency of the world of established consistencies. . . . As transcendence of ontological narcissism art applies the experience of the uncanny. . . . As the experience of the lack of subjectivity art affirms itself as affirmation of a world without beyond.”

Given the barnstorming excitement of these statements, it may be surprising to learn that the Gramsci Monument has not turned into the sleeper hit of the summer. It has also not become a rallying point for Communards or the relics of Occupy Wall Street, even as it presents the Disneyfied version of a radical occupation—a combination of grad-school treehouse and Mr. Toad’s Wild Encampment.

Signage at the Gramsci Monument; image: James Panero

Hirschhorn claims to be a Gramsci fanatic: “My love includes everything coming from him, without exception. I am a ‘Gramsci-Fan.’ As a fan—as every fan—there is no criticism, no distancing, and there is no limit.” Yet one feels that the subject matter of the Gramsci Monument is ancillary, icing on the cake, a good source for quotes and spray-painted murals but, like “the Other,” interchangeable with any number of other subjects and only as important, for Hirschhorn, as the next big public commission. Documenta, Manifesta, Mocumenta, here we come. Even Hirschhorn himself admits: “As with my other monuments to Spinoza, Deleuze, and Bataille, my competence to do the Gramsci Monument in the Bronx does not come from my understanding of Gramsci, but from my understanding of Art in Public Space today.”

The monument’s reduction of Gramsci to sloganeering is regrettable, in that it fails to engage, for or against in any meaningful way, with the profound if not profoundly unsettling ideas that Gramsci put forward. Leszek Kolakowski, in Volume III of Main Currents of Marxism (“The Breakdown”), his masterful 1978 atomization of socialist ideology, calls Gramsci “probably the most original political writer among the post-Lenin generation of Communists.” Through his prison writings, Gramsci articulated “an independent attempt to formulate a Communist ideology” that was not “merely an adaptation of the Leninist schema.” His writings contained a powerful if not altogether coherent “attempt at a Marxist philosophy of culture whose originality and breadth of view cannot be denied.”

Although Gramsci rejected the term, he was also a relativist. “The rightness of an idea is confirmed by, or perhaps actually consists in, the fact that it prevails historically,” Kolakowski explains, “a view irreconcilable with the usual one that truth is truth no matter whether or when it is known, or who regards it as true and in what way . . . it is not clear how he can be acquitted of being a historical relativist.”

What Gramsci’s theory of cultural relativity meant was that, in short, ultimate Revolution could not happen in the Soviet model from the top down. It had to emerge, culturally, from the bottom up. In this formulation, “Workers could only win if they achieved cultural ‘hegemony’ before attaining political power.” Gramsci therefore set about arguing for a “new proletarian culture” that might radicalize at the grassroots level. For this reason, the Gramsci name has been associated with everything from “community organization” to the tenured radicalization of the Academy. The Gramsci strategy has been to Revolutionize culture from within, to influence, if not infect, traditional democratic culture and faith, in his famous phrase, with a “long march through the institutions.”

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, 2013; Gramsci Bar; Forest Houses, Bronx, New York; Courtesy Dia Art Foundation; Photo: Romain Lopez

Hirschhorn also gets his Gramsci Monument wrong in another profound way. With typical peacockery, he goes out of his way to claim solitary credit for the communally built structure. “I, the artist, am the author of the ‘Gramsci monument.’ I am entirely and completely the author, regarding everything about my work. As author—in Unshared Authorship—I don’t share the responsibility of my own work nor my own understanding of it, that’s why I use the term: ‘Unshared.’ ”

He refuses to see the monument outside of his own world view of “Me” and “Other.” “I never use the terms ‘educational art’ or ‘community art,’ and my work has never had anything to do with ‘relational aesthetics.’ The Other has no specific ties with aesthetics. To address a ‘non-exclusive’ audience means to face reality, failure, unsuccessfulness, the cruelty of disinterest, and the incommensurability of a complex situation. Participation cannot be a goal, participation cannot be an aim, participation can only be a lucky outcome.” In another place, he says, “I am an artist, not a social worker.”

Yet while Hirschhorn professes to see nothing but “Other” when he looks out over the Forest Houses courtyard, his work is much closer to the “relational aesthetics” of Marina Abramovi? or Tino Sehgal than he professes to admit.

Through her trumpeted connections with the pop star Lady Gaga and the rapper Jay Z, Abramovi? has emerged victorious from her MOMA staring contest and grown into an international cultural conglomerate wholly in the service of the celebrity police state. Abramovi? gave us “The Artist is Present.” Now, with Hirschhorn, we have “The Artist is Present in the Bronx,” and the result is ultimately—and entirely in spite of itself—compelling.

Artist Thomas Hirschhorn (left), creator of the Gramsci Monument, sitting at the Gramsci Bar speaking with residents and visitors; image: James Panero

Where the Gramsci Monument succeeds is not in bringing Gramsci to “the Other.” Instead it is in bringing “the Other” to the Bronx. In his interview with The New York Times, Erik Farmer offers a clear explanation of the Monument’s appeal: “There’s nothing cultural here at all. It’s like we’re in a box here, in this neighborhood. We need to get out and find out some things about the world. This is kind of like the world coming to us for a little while.” For Hirschhorn, Farmer says, “this is a work of art. For me, it’s a man-made community center. And if it changes something here, even slightly, well, you know, that’s going in the right direction.”

It is ironic that in this island of a housing project—a city-destroying idea imported from Europe—another European import has re-
introduced a cultural spectacle to reseed some life on the ground. Hirschhorn wants the results all to himself: “I am doing it because I authorize myself to do it. . . . Universality of Art is the condition granting to touch the Other, the Reality and the ‘Truth.’ As an artist, Universality is my belief and my will.” But the Monument works precisely because it no longer belongs to Hirschhorn. On one wall, Hirschhorn has stapled an article from the Village Voice stating the “Top 10 Reasons Why So Few Black Folk Appear Down to Occupy Wall Street.” Yet here, no one seems to care. TheGramsci Monument has not become an international attraction or an agent of radicalization. It has instead become something that the residents of Forest Houses can lay their hands on and call their own.

At the entryway to the “Internet Corner” there is a sign that warns “No Facebook!! If seen on Facebook, you’re getting off the computer.” But the children inside whom I observed were doing just that, if not playing computer games, and they seemed to be enjoying it. The same goes for the kids in the art studio, the busiest room in the facility. Their enjoyment mixed with the laughing of the children playing in the project playground outside, all giving the monument a decidedly homey feel.

The Gramsci Monument has not radicalized the residents of Forest Houses. The residents of Forest Houses have domesticated the Gramsci Monument. This seems especially true for the artist himself. Despite his own off-putting personality, Hirschhorn has clearly been taken by the residents of Forest Houses, and they have been taken by him. This fact gets reflected in the “Resident of the Day” wall and the resident photos that are reproduced in the Gramsci Monument Newspaper. It is also apparent in the way Hirschhorn can be seen interacting with the Monument’s visitors. To his credit, Hirschhorn has been present at the Monument throughout its run, updating the signage on the structure, chatting with visitors at the bar, and, of course, unrolling more packing tape on a regular basis. He is present even as few people show up for his talks. What if you gave a lecture called “Art school by Thomas Hirschhorn 11am to 3pm today. Energy=Yes! Quality=No!,” and nobody came? This is now Hirschhorn’s daily experience.

It may not be art, it certainly is not the art the artist intended, but theGramsci Monument has nevertheless found a place at Forest Houses—in particular for bringing a rich, theory-laced European with a Quixotic, hand-built habitat to these residents’ backyards.

1 Gramsci Monument: A Work in Public Space by Thomas Hirschhorn is on view at Forest Houses, the Bronx, from July 1 through September 15, 2013.

'I Am the Central Victim'

NEW YORK MAGAZINE
August 27, 2013

‘I Am the Central Victim’: Art Dealer Ann Freedman on Selling $63 Million in Fake Paintings
by James Panero

“I am as shocked as everybody, more shocked, as I am the central victim,” Ann Freedman, the gallerist at the center of an $80 million art forgery scandal, told me earlier this month. “Fifteen years. In my head, these paintings have been right up until five days ago. Horrible.”

Over the course of most of those fifteen years, Freedman had put all of her influence and credibility as the president of Knoedler & Company, until recently one of New York’s oldest and most respected art galleries, behind what she believed to be a treasure trove of newly discovered modern art by the biggest names in Abstract Expressionism. In May, federal authorities announced that the paintings — 63 in all — were fakes and charged Glafira Rosales, the obscure art dealer who supplied Knoedler and at least one other gallery with the paintings, with tax evasion. Earlier this month (five days before Freedman spoke those words), the feds spelled out the details of the long-running scheme in a follow-up indictment, charging that Rosales had never, as she claimed, represented the son of a mysterious anonymous collector. Rather, she allegedly paid an artist in Queens  (73-year-old Chinese-American painter Pei-Shen Qian,according to reports) as little as $5,000 each to create the counterfeit masterpieces. 

Freedman, who spoke publicly about the scandal for the first time in a series of recent conversations with New York, says that the results of the federal investigation prove she was an unwitting agent in the scheme. Under her leadership, Knoedler sold 40 of the fakes for an alleged $63 million. Before shutting down abruptly in late 2011, the gallery made a $20 million payment to Rosales.

This "Pollock" sold for $17 million

According to the indictment, the saga began in the early nineties when Rosales approached Freedman with a fabulous tale. She claimed to represent a foreign collector who “was of Eastern European descent, maintained residences in Switzerland and Mexico, wished to remain anonymous, and had inherited the works ... from a relative.” Based on this account, Freedman came to call the relative “Mr. X” and the anonymous seller “Mr. X, Jr” — of course, neither existed.

“The story was credible,” said Freedman, who is tall with tightly curled silver hair and a controlled, energetic manner. “Dealers often do not know the specifics of origin or background, or how the art left the artist’s studio. You cannot turn the pages of an auction catalogue or museum publication without seeing a majority of the works labeled ‘private collection.’ The chain of ownership is often out of order and incomplete.”

With time, the story of how Rosales obtained the paintings became more complex: The married Mr. X and David Herbert, a real-life gallery employee and owner who died in 1995, knew each other in the fifties; they were lovers, and Herbert offered Mr. X access to the studios of the Abstract Expressionists, through whom he could purchase paintings off the books; these works were hidden away until Herbert’s death to protect Mr. X’s secret. (Herbert, of course, had nothing do with any Mr. X or secret stash of paintings — since neither existed.)

Freedman says that she did her best to get answers from Rosales. “I went to Glafira and pushed and pushed to get more information, relentlessly,” Freedman said. "My ongoing diligence met more than the gold standard; there is plenty of evidence of that.”

Speaking with Daily Intelligencer last month, Freedman listed some markers that led her to believe that the paintings were genuine. “They were very credible in so many respects,” says Freedman. “I had the best conservation studio examine them. One of the Rothkos had a Sgroi stretcher. He made the stretchers for Rothko. They clearly had the right materials. I got a consensus. Some of the paintings were featured on museum walls,” she continued. “The Rothko went to the Beyeler [Foundation], and the Newman went to Guggenheim Bilbao for the tenth anniversary exhibition. The most knowledgeable in the art establishment gave me no reason to doubt the paintings.”

Experts seem to have been convinced, by and large, that the individualistic quality of the Abstract Expressionist paintings Rosales obtained could only have been achieved by the artists themselves. “The fact is that the entire Eastern establishment believed in them. I saw the paintings,” said Stephen Polcari, a scholar of Abstract Expressionism and author of Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. “And they were very good. You wouldn’t think twice about them for a second. Ann did everything she could possibly do.”

But others in the art world see a pattern of lax, self-interested behavior on Freedman's part. “This has ruined one of the greatest galleries in the world. It has trashed a lot of people’s money. It seems to me Ms. Freedman was totally irresponsible, and it went on for years,” said Marco Grassi, owner of Grassi Studios gallery on the Upper East Side and a well-known expert on Old Master paintings. “Imagine people coming to someone and saying every painting you sold me is a fake. It is an unthinkable situation. It is completely insane. A gallery person has an absolute responsibility to do due diligence, and I don’t think she did it. The story of the paintings is so totally kooky. I mean, really. It was a great story and she just said, ‘this is great.’”

Over time, Freedman came to see the paintings’ lack of provenance as a challenge to overcome. What they were missing in the past, she would make up for in the present. By placing them in the best collections, she would give them a footing. Freedman saw a mandate to sell — and sell she did.

“The point is that I believed that these paintings were genuine, that it was my responsibility to place them into the best of collections,” she said. Once the paintings were out there and established, she hoped “to get many of these works to come back together for a major museum exhibition that Knoedler would take part in.” Establishing these discoveries as accepted works, she believed, would in fact be among her greatest accomplishments at the gallery. “I felt that I was going to create a legacy for Knoedler with these newly discovered paintings, a treasure trove of paintings to bring out into the world,” she said.

At Knoedler, getting paintings out into the world was Freedman’s speciality. She had started her art career as a receptionist of the André Emmerich Gallery in the early seventies but quickly discovered her natural talent for sales. “My enthusiasm for the art was contagious and won people over. André started seeing more and more invoices on his desk that he could not have imagined,” she said. “There was a sense of some disbelief, if not resentment — no one paved the way for me to sell, but I sought out the opportunity and never looked back.”

In 1977, at age 29, Freedman took a job at Knoedler — at the time, the oldest continuously operating gallery in New York. She continued to outperform and eventually took over the palatial central office of the gallery’s gilded-age Upper East Side mansion.

The paintings from Rosales proved to be enormously lucrative for the gallery. Among the sales were a “de Kooning” that went for $4 million, a “Rothko” for $8.3 million, and a “Pollock” for $17 million. She successfully built up a market for each of the paintings as they came in. “If something had been off or wrong on any one of the paintings, I would have put on the brakes,” she said.

She was so convincing, and so convinced, about the paintings that she even bought three herself — a “Rothko,” a “Motherwell,” and a “Pollock.” “I was a believer. Not to be stubborn, but I lived with three of those paintings,” she said. “I lived with them, and in the context of my personal collection.”

For over a decade as they emerged, the paintings were the envy of the art world. Art experts, conservators, and museum professionals praised what appeared to be a newly discovered collection of masterworks. But in 2009, forensic testing on two paintings supposedly by Robert Motherwell revealed paint chemicals that were historically inconsistent. Suspicion descended on the lot, and multi-million-dollar buyers agitated for their refunds. Meanwhile, the FBI began circling Rosales.

Freedman, coming off a battle with lung cancer, left Knoedler just as these suspicions began to emerge. (She describes her departure as a management dispute.) Two years later, the 165-year-old business closed up shop, with no warning, the very same week the buyer of the $17 million Pollock sued both the gallery and Freedman.

Even in cases of a forgery, art buyers don’t necessarily have a lifetime money-back guarantee (the Pollock sale was settled out of court). Owing to statutes of limitations, legal experts say, some buyers of Rosales’s 63 works may have limited recourse in recovering their money — a fact that may also insulate Knoedler and Freedman from additional litigation. “Purchasers of artwork in New York must be diligent and act quickly, otherwise they may lose important remedies,” says Raymond Dowd, a partner and art law specialist at Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller. “In essence, a purchaser who has been defrauded may have no civil remedies against the gallery.”

Robert K. Wittman, a former FBI agent who founded and led the Bureau's National Art Crime Team, told Daily Intelligencer that the buyers were taking a foreseeable risk. "With Abstract Expressionist and modern paintings, there was never any real cataloguing when the artists were alive, so things can pop up on the market that turn out to be legitimate," he said. "The problem is that because these paintings are modern, it is harder to authenticate them. What this does is put the buyers on notice. Unless a piece has really good provenance, forensics, and connoisseurship — the three-legged stool — the buyer shouldn’t buy on someone else’s word."

Freedman has continued to be an active dealer despite the scrutiny of the Rosales case. She recently opened her own gallery, FreedmanArt, on East 73th Street, where she now represents Frank Stella, Lee Bontecou, and the estate of Jules Olitski, among others.

With the revelation of the crime, even though she says she finds relief in knowing the truth of where the paintings came from, she feels most betrayed by the paintings themselves. “I am so angry and upset. It is shattering, as if a trusted friend deserted you.” She says the money she spent on her own three paintings is “a loss. It is a big loss.”

“How can we know the truth? You not only believe in your own instincts. You believe in others who believe.”