The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (9 page)

Incredibly, RAI head Donald Schupak had also been personally impacted by Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Schupak’s then 94-year-old mother and blind sister were left penniless by Madoff’s audacious fraud.
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Rather than rescuing souls, Salander left widespread devastation in his wake. Making matters even messier, a bankruptcy ruling out of federal court in New York related to the case caused yet more consternation for an owner when it was decided that a painting owned by a private interest but in possession of Salander-O’Reilly could be sold by the bankrupt gallery to pay creditors. But the hurt extended far beyond just finances. Decades-long friends were shocked, even crushed, by Salander’s betrayal, in what many have called New York’s biggest-ever art fraud. Onlookers were left astounded that one man could turn on those who considered him not just a friend but a trusted member of their extended family. And he left many wondering how they could have been so wrong about a person. Perhaps the answer is in the words of Dr. Ellyn Shander: “He is a sly, manipulative sociopath, a con man with no
soul.
”
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Four

The Trusting Artist

On a February afternoon in 2011 in Washington, D.C., Jasper Johns sat still in his chair on the dais in the East Room of the White House alongside notables such as poet Maya Angelou, basketball legend Bill Russell, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett. Barack Obama had just placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of one of his predecessors, George Herbert Walker Bush, to thunderous and sustained applause, when the emcee called Johns to the fore. The artist, smartly dressed in a dark suit and matching polka-dotted tie, rose from his seat and stood next to the blue podium bearing the presidential seal as Obama stood behind him holding the white-enamel, star-shaped medal that would soon be presented to him. Johns—the first painter or sculptor to be awarded the medal in 34 years—smiled as the emcee read aloud: “Bold and iconic, the work of Jasper Johns has left lasting impressions on countless Americans. With nontraditional materials and methods, he has explored themes of identity, perception, and patriotism. By asking us to reexamine the familiar, his work has sparked the minds of creative thinkers around the world. Jasper Johns’ innovative
creations helped shape the pop, minimal and conceptual art movements, and the United States honors him for his profound influence on generations of artists.”
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The awarding of the Medal of Freedom to Johns was certainly apt. His influence, especially on American artists, is profound, and his body of work is widely respected. And the reference to his exploration of the theme of patriotism was especially significant. In 1954, he painted his first American flag, and the star-spangled banner became the image with which the artist has become most commonly connected. “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” he recalls, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” He came home with three canvases, plywood for mounting them, newspaper that he cut into strips, and encaustic paint. This choice in pigment gives the painting a texture that, coupled with the barely discernible strips of newsprint, begs for closer inspection by the viewer.
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The painting was completed at a time in Johns’s career during which he was experimenting with universally recognizable symbols: flags, targets, numbers, and letters.
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As Museum of Modern Art curator Anne Umland pointed out, the subject matter was not a statement of blind patriotism or allegiance, but it did carry political overtones: “Underneath the pigment are strips of collaged newspapers. And when you really begin to look at these you can see that there are dates that are recognizable [and] they allow us to locate this painting, this flag, this timeless symbol of our nation within a very particular context, the 1950s in America, which is right in the midst of the McCarthy era and the beginning of the Cold War, when symbols such as the flag would have had a very particular and potent valence.”
4
Johns’s own comment on the work supports Umland’s theory. He has said of the painting’s creation, “Well, it certainly wasn’t out of patriotism. It was about something you see from out of the side of
your eye and you recognize it as what it is without really seeing it. It is the thing itself, but there’s also something else there.” However, he remains somewhat coy about the true meaning of the work. “I don’t think I want to describe it. . . . It’s probably shifted its meaning over time.”
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Perhaps most fittingly, the Whitney Museum of American Art describes it as a work that “flatters or honors the nation without genuflection.”
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The price tag for the work is undeniably high: a version of
Flag
offered at auction by Christie’s in the fall of 2014 was listed with an estimate of $15–$20 million, or about $100,000 per square inch.
7

Another
Flag
—this time a sculpture made in 1960 by Johns—led to an earlier connection between the artist and the White House in the 1960s, when gallery owner Leo Castelli, who gave Johns his first one-man show, brought then president John F. Kennedy the bronze on Independence Day. From Johns’s view, the gesture wasn’t consistent with his vision. “I thought it was the tackiest thing I’d ever seen,” Johns recalled.
8
The misstep by Castelli did not damage the relationship between the pair. In fact, they would go on to forge a decades-long association.

Clearly, Jasper Johns’s connection to art depicting the American flag is as indelible as Edgar Degas’s connection to ballerinas or Andy Warhol’s to cans of Campbell’s Soup. And regardless of the message of the painting, the image of the most iconic president of the twentieth century posing with one of his sculptures certainly did not hurt the value and importance of
Flag.

The original 1960 sculpted metal version of
Flag
was given by Johns to his partner Robert Rauschenberg upon completion.
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Then, in the early 1960s, Johns had bronze sculptures of the work made by taking a mold of the surface of his painting, pouring plaster into the mold, and then removing the plaster, leaving him with a positive of
the painting’s surface. He gave the positive of the surface to a foundry where a process called sand casting was used to make copies. Johns had the foundry create four bronze sculptures of
Flag.

The four sculptures went very separate ways. There was the one given to President Kennedy by Castelli, which remains in the possession of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Johns kept one himself. A third was acquired by financier and art collector Joseph Hirshhorn and is currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—one of the top modern art museums in the United States. The fourth resides with the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to a bequest of Katharine Kuh, the art critic, curator, and author who also owned the eponymous Chicago gallery where she supported a large number of emerging modern artists.

In the 1980s, Johns decided to make additional sculptures based on the original sculpted metal work he gave to Rauschenberg, and for this project he turned to Vanessa Hoheb. Hoheb grew up in her father’s sculpture studio, beginning her formal apprenticeship when she was just 16. In those early years she gained experience working on pieces for Johns and other leading artists, including Willem de Kooning, Frederick Hart, and Isamu Noguchi. Perhaps most notably, at around the time Johns approached her, she was leading the five-member team charged with restoring the skin of the Statue of Liberty.
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Hoheb’s approach was “completely different,” said Johns, because she used a negative mold in which metal was poured to make the positive. In the earlier sand casting process, the positive mold was pressed into earth and the earth filled with metal to make the sculpture.
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One other thing about the Hoheb version that made it different from the earlier sculptures was the fact that hers included the frame that was around the original; earlier versions did not.

Johns’s project was not complete with the Hoheb mold. He then took it to the Polich Tallix fine art foundry in upstate New York
around 1987 to make a silver cast of
Flag.
Polich Tallix has a long tradition of working with the who’s who of artists, including de Kooning, Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alexander Calder—the last sculptor to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom before Johns. Upon completion at Polich Tallix, Johns elected to keep the silver cast in his home in New York.

In 1990, Johns had more plans for
Flag.
This time he turned to Brian Ramnarine, an émigré from Guyana and a trusted artisan with whom he had worked a number of times before, to make a wax positive in his silver mold. Ramnarine, who operated Empire Bronze in New York and whose work was considered by Johns to be excellent, had handled casts for numerous of Johns’s small sculptures in the past. Johns’s instructions to Ramnarine were simple: he told him to make only a wax impression—not an actual metal sculpture—of
Flag.
At the time, Johns thought he might have his sculpture cast in gold, and wanted to investigate how much metal would be needed and how expensive it would be, thus the direction to Ramnarine to make only a wax figure. Ramnarine obliged and produced the 1
×
1
1
⁄
2
–
foot wax sculpture, which Johns refrigerated in his home on upscale East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Though Johns paid him in full, in cash, Ramnarine failed to return the mold from which he made the wax sculpture. Eager to get his important original mold back, Johns directed a longtime member of his staff, James Meyer, to retrieve it from Ramnarine’s foundry. Meyer came back empty-handed.

Years later, Jasper Johns paid a visit to Paige Tooker at New Foundry New York Inc. and gave her the Ramnarine-made wax mold with a request to make a new cast of
Flag
in white bronze. While Tooker is certainly a very skilled craftsperson, Johns’s reasons for not returning to Ramnarine with the wax mold he had made were based on
ethics rather than aesthetics. In the early 1990s, after Johns had completed his work with Ramnarine, he was approached by an individual claiming to own an original
Flag
sculpture and requesting that Johns authenticate it. At one point, the collector forwarded to Johns’s office a letter he had received from Ramnarine that read in part: “This is to certify that the following bronze sculpture is the contribution by artist Jasper Johns to Brian Ramnarine
Flag
bronze by Jasper Johns. I, Brian Ramnarine, is giving [
sic
] this bronze sculpture to Sewdutt Harpul.
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Please note this bronze sculpture cannot be sold or displayed in any gallery without the authorization of Brian Ramnarine. All profits sold from this sculpture is 50/50 [
sic
] between Brian Ramnarine and Harpul.”
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Ramnarine, who is alleged to be illiterate,
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was the apparent author of this letter, which claims that Ramnarine was gifted an authentic copy
Flag
by Johns.

After numerous increasingly anxious letters from the collector, the sculpture in question was sent to Johns for his review. The artist immediately recognized that the piece’s source was his work, but that he had no hand in completing it. Examining the back of the sculpture, he found that a copy of his signature was affixed to it. He found it much too neat to be his actual signature, which he typically drew into the wax mold and thus was not as smooth as what he observed on this piece. He also found markings on the back that he had ostensibly put there, but which in fact meant nothing to him in relation to this work or any other of his creations. Unhappy with the discovery of a clear forgery, he took it upon himself to cross out the fake signature on the back of the bronze.

Though the phony signature was enough to prove to Johns that the piece was a fake, there were other telltale signs, lest there be any doubt. “It’s finished in a way that I would not have finished it,” he would later say. “One detail is . . . that the frame is smooth along the
outer edges, whereas the original piece . . . more or less imitates wood with a rough grain. That’s been polished off and removed.”
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As a next step, Johns contacted the Art Dealers Association in New York seeking advice as how to proceed with the work. Finding them “extremely unhelpful,” he sent the work back to the collector after writing in ink on the sculpture that it was not his work. Thus ended Johns’s association with Brian Ramnarine.
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This wasn’t the first time that Johns had encountered a counterfeit of one of his works. Art dealer Michael Findlay tells of an incident from 1969 when a friend showed him a large charcoal drawing of a coat hanger signed “J.Johns.” Something about the drawing didn’t seem right to Findlay, and he convinced the owner to allow him to show it to Johns. According to Findlay, “Wordlessly, Johns examined the work then asked if he could remove it from the frame. When he did, and turned it over, we could see that the back was softly scored in pencil horizontally and vertically. A soft ‘Ahh’ escaped from Johns. He explained that what we were looking at was the design for a mailer advertising one of his prints.” The artist was puzzled. “What should I do?” he asked aloud. After a few seconds, Johns found a red pen and across the bottom of the drawing wrote “This is not my work” and signed it with a large and distinctive signature. In a way, Findlay said, it became a work signed by the artist.
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Kenny Scharf is an American modern artist who became a success working in New York in the 1980s. Scharf, a contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, came east from California inspired by the art of Andy Warhol, whom he would eventually meet and appear alongside in a group exhibition called
New York/New Wave.
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A painter and sculptor, his works have consistently sold in a range up to six figures at Christie’s. In around 2000, Scharf created
an edition of four sculptures titled
Bird in Space,
a futuristic bronze piece measuring more than three feet tall by two feet wide and inspired by popular cartoons—a frequent theme for the artist. He chose Brian Ramnarine’s Bronze Foundry and Gallery to cast this work and others because he considered Ramnarine “a great artisan” and had worked with him since 1995.
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Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to Scharf, Ramnarine took it upon himself to make additional copies of Scharf’s work, each of them unauthorized. He then took the illegitimate sculptures and sold them to unsuspecting collectors for the same prices that Scharf’s originals would fetch. Eventually, Scharf was informed by other artists that they had seen separate copies of his works bearing identical edition numbers. It was then that he began to suspect Ramnarine of forgery and confronted him with the information. Dissatisfied with the response he received from Ramnarine, Scharf directed his lawyer to contact the district attorney’s office.
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