Recently, a new documentary was released on Netflix, which revisits a shocking scam that took place in New York many years ago. One of the main characters of the story is a Chinese “painter” from Shanghai, Qian Peichen. It is him, the New York group of “art” like the big rich people cheated a turn.
Abstract painting diagram
In the early 1990s in the United States, a couple sold an elaborate imitation of a famous painting to the rich and famous who loved art. And this sale, sold for 20 years, eventually sold into the nation’s largest case of famous painting forgery, the total amount involved in more than $80 million.
And those so-called artworks, are the kind of ordinary people simply can not understand the abstract paintings, these look more like who the children scribble paintings, after the hype, it became a sky-high art.
In the 20 years before the scam was exposed, almost everyone was adamant that the couple was selling the real thing. What’s even more bizarre is that after the scam was uncovered, it was discovered that the fake paintings came from an unknown Chinese painter named Qian Peichen.
Qian Peichen, who made his debut in the Shanghai painting scene in 1979, then went abroad to study painting, and disappeared without a trace. It was not until 30 years later that he returned to the public eye after being involved in a rare case of “overpriced forged paintings”.
In 1981, at the age of 42, Qian Peichen came to New York to begin his study abroad career at a school called the Art Students League of New York.
After coming to the United States, Qian Peichen found that studying in the United States was not generally expensive. At that Time, an art student like Qian Peichen needed at least five or six hundred dollars a month, not counting the money needed to mix with the circle. When he first set foot in the U.S., Qian Peichen only had $1,000 in his hand that his mother had slipped into an envelope when he was leaving. What to do? Work. So, at that time, Qian Peichen worked as a janitor, moved bricks in construction sites, and painted portraits for people in New York’s Greenwich Village.
In this way, several years passed, but Qian Peichen’s Life still had no progress. His art was not recognized by anyone in New York, and his income still depended on his part-time job, and he couldn’t get a green card even though he wanted to bring his wife and daughter here. Old money was depressed. Until one day, in the corridor of the school, he met an old Spanish brother who called himself Carlos.
Qian Peichen, a painter from the United States, destroyed the entire New York art scene with his own efforts.
After looking at Qian Peichen’s paintings, he said “very very good!” and took the initiative to bring Qian to his gallery. Once inside the gallery, there were paintings of Monet, Picasso and Andy Warhol, a small art gallery.
Old Money was shocked while Carlos once again expressed his fondness for his paintings and said, “You are a true artistic genius, and if you want, your works will stand side by side with these European and American masters.”
Here is like the “no double” Zhou Yunfa PUA Guo Fu Cheng and Carlos to Qian Peichen is really interesting – Qian Peichen works, he spent money to buy, Qian Peichen wants to hold an exhibition, he will choose a place to do. One day, Carlos found Qian again and handed him a set of Pollock’s paintings, asking him to imitate a similar painting in this style, and he would pay several times the usual price for it.
Jackson Pollock, the American abstract painter Qian Peichen, was obsessed with the abstract style represented by Pollock when he first came to the United States, so it didn’t take him much effort to decipher the logic of the master’s creation and finish his first imitation. Carlos was so happy about this that he always took old canvases and paints and asked Qian Peichen to imitate the style of various abstract masters. As time went by, Qian felt that something was not right – was Carlos fooling himself into making fake paintings to cheat people? But when he thought about it, for one thing, he did enjoy the process of deciphering the style of the masters’ paintings.
The second is that the money given by the old Spanish brother is really in place. So, Old Money didn’t think blindly, who can refuse a job that can continue to receive money? Carlos’s payment got old money through the hard years and allowed him to gain a little fame in the art scene in New York, and his wife and daughter received the United States and got a firm foothold here. Good days went up.
Until, one day in 2013, Qian Peichen, who had already returned to Shanghai, suddenly received a transatlantic phone call from the FBI in the United States. From then on, the old money had to admit that the Spanish amigo, who helped himself everywhere, was in fact an outright fraud. And he, but is a part of this huge scam.
In the mid-1990s, the rich Americans liked abstract paintings. It was the kind of abstract painting that anyone who looked at it would think it was someone’s child’s crayon scribbles.
American abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock’s paintings, do you understand? If you ask 9.9 out of 10 people say they don’t understand it, and the remaining 0.1 people don’t understand it. But in Sotheby’s auction house, such works can easily fetch ten million dollars.
This abstract painting mania, let a student of art sales see the opportunity, and he is Qian Peichen once good brother Carlos.
Carlos was a man who, in a word, “dared to think and do”. When he was young, he drove to deliver seafood to customers, and felt that traffic delayed the money, so he bought a second-hand ambulance, the alarm is turned on, in the streets of New York City unimpeded. Later, he began to engage in art, see the rich people are playing abstract play to the top, so he decided to sell them some fakes. So Carlos called her girlfriend at the time, Graciela Rosales, and started the plan.
First, the two made up a story – they created a fictitious folk collector, “Mr. X”. “Mr. X had paintings by abstract masters that had never before been made public in the art world.
This has two advantages: First, it is not easy to trace the origin of the paintings that appeared out of nowhere. Second, the most important thing is that such paintings perfectly meet the psychology of rich people who are curious and eager to be unique. Imagine if you have a painting of Leonardo da Vinci, then you have to be more powerful. But if you have a painting of Leonardo da Vinci, and this painting has never appeared in art history since the Renaissance to now, but you have it. Then you’re a bull bomb.
The story was made up, and the couple went about their business.
Rosales, a waiter at a restaurant, has become a prominent art dealer in New York, peddling the story of Mr. X at auction houses and galleries in the city. Carlos, on the other hand, went to the art school to find a painter, and he saw Qian Peichen’s ability to paint and made the latter the maker of the imitation painting without his knowledge. And what happened later proved that Carlos had a really tough eye for picking people. With the imitation painting in hand, Rosales visited the 160-year old Nordel Gallery. Ann Friedman is the head of the gallery. The old lady has been working here for more than 30 years and has read all the artworks in the world, but when she saw the imitation made by Qian Peichen in a few days, she was completely shocked and exclaimed, “It’s so beautiful.
Ann Friedman Rosales took the opportunity to tell Ann the story of “Mr. X.” The old lady instantly felt that she had found a treasure, and she called the authoritative expert who had identified the painting. Cautiously, Mrs. An went to the National Art Museum and top art administrators to identify the painting, and the feedback was also “genuine”. So, with a hundred hearts at ease, Mrs. An began to buy the painting from Rosales at a high price, and then double the price to sell it to the rich collectors at a higher price.
The paintings received for $750,000 were sold by the gallery for $5.5 million, and when the collectors saw that the paintings were complete and guaranteed by the gallery, they naturally believed in them and paid a lot of money to buy Qian Peichen’s forgeries and frame them at Home, exclaiming that they were “so beautiful”. The scam worked, and it was 20 years in the making. During this time, the Nordel Gallery alone sold more than 60 of Qian Peichen’s forgeries, from which the gallery, Mrs. An, and Carlos and Rosales profited to the tune of ten million dollars. As for Qian Peichen, he forged one painting and earned $7,000, which was more than enough for a proper worker. Until 2011, the paper finally could not cover the fire.
In 2011, because of the divorce to divide the property, a financier named Pierre La Grange, took his own paintings bought from the Nordel Gallery to do the Appraisal.
As a result, the appraiser told him, “We found a 1970’s paint in your painting, however, the creator of this painting died in a car accident in 1956. Pierre had been playing with people in the financial world all his life, but never thought that he would one day be played with, so he immediately took the Nordel Gallery to court. At this juncture, Nodler urgently announced that they were going out of business permanently.
A stone stirred up a thousand waves, the Nordler Gallery was more prosecutions, the FBI intervened in the investigation, the unprecedented huge painting forgery case finally surfaced, the day of trial has finally come.
The FBI was worried because Carlos had run back to Spain before the incident and could not be extradited.
The same goes for Qian Peichen, who returned to China long ago. More importantly, the FBI could not prove that the old man was involved in the huge scam that Carlos had concocted. In the end, the gallery settled out of court with the defrauded collectors, and Rosales, the only one of the counterfeiters (three in total) to be caught, was sentenced to nine months of home detention. The curtain came down on a painting forgery case involving a total of over $80 million.
A forged painting received for $750,000 could be sold for $2 million after his imprisonment ended, and Rosales returned to being a restaurant waiter. Carlos is still doing well in Spain. The Nordel Gallery, which had survived for 165 years, closed its doors for good. Rich collectors complained briefly before moving on to the next wave of art frenzy. As for Qian Peichen, when the forgery case first broke out, he was thrust into the limelight by the media in his 70s and had so many Nightmares that he lost sleep, but nowadays he is quite downhearted.
Facing the interview, he said, “I manufacture a knife for cutting fruits, but others use this knife to kill people, and it is unfair to blame me.” After the incident, many curious collectors came to ask the “master of imitation painting” Qian Peichen to paint them a copy of the original work.
In response, the 70-year-old painter did not refuse, except that this time he signed his own name after the painting was done. After all, his real creations have never been accepted by the American art world, while his forgeries are treasured by it. What exactly is the value of artwork? Perhaps even Old Money himself did not know.
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