Latest news with #Warhols
New York Times
11-04-2025
- New York Times
Miami Art Dealer Is Charged With Selling Fraudulent Warhols
A Miami art dealer was indicted on charges that he sold fraudulent Andy Warhols to collectors and provided them with fake invoices and forged authentication documents to make them appear legitimate. The indictment accuses the dealer, Leslie Roberts of Miami Fine Art Gallery, of going to elaborate lengths to convince buyers that the works were legitimate Warhols, including by using fake stamps and fraudulent identification numbers. 'To make the fraudulent art appear to be authentic pieces created by Andy Warhol, Leslie Howard Roberts utilized forged authentication documents that were purportedly provided by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, Inc.,' the indictment read. (The board ceased operations over a decade ago.) Two other defendants were also charged with taking part in Mr. Roberts's scheme by posing as employees of a New York auction house 'to fraudulently authenticate artwork in order to conceal that the artwork was not created by Andy Warhol.' Mr. Roberts, who was arrested on wire fraud and money laundering charges on Wednesday and released on bond, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The details of the indictment, which was filed in Federal District Court in Miami and unsealed on Thursday, align with a lawsuit filed last year against Mr. Roberts. The civil suit was filed by a family of art collectors who accused Mr. Roberts of duping them into paying millions of dollars for fraudulent Warhols, including the artist's famous colorful portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Marilyn Monroe. At the time the suit was filed, Mr. Roberts denied selling the family forgeries, and he and his lawyers have been fighting the case in civil court. 'I don't believe anything was a forgery — everything looked good to me,' Mr. Roberts said in an interview with The New York Times in August. He added: 'I don't know where the authority is they say it's fake.' But last week, a grand jury indicted Mr. Roberts on criminal charges related to the case. The same day, Mr. Roberts filed for bankruptcy. Another defendant, Carlos Miguel Rodriguez Melendez, was accused of posing as an employee of a New York auction house and charged with wire fraud conspiracy. His lawyer, Nayib Hassan, said in an email that his client 'vehemently maintains his innocence and looks forward to the opportunity to present the full facts in a court of law.' A third defendant's name is redacted from court papers. Mr. Roberts has faced criminal charges related to forged artworks before. In 2015, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud and served a prison sentence after acknowledging to prosecutors that he and his children had defrauded customers by selling them forged paintings, according to court documents. And in 1987, when he was in his 20s, Mr. Roberts was sentenced to prison time for defrauding a family member of millions of dollars when he was a young stockbroker. The new criminal inquiry into Mr. Roberts became apparent this week when the local news captured the F.B.I. raiding his art gallery in the upscale Coconut Grove neighborhood of Miami. In the civil suit, filed last August, a family of art collectors — Matthew, Judy and Richard Perlman — accused Mr. Roberts of duping them into paying more than $6 million for fraudulent Warhols. The lawsuit claimed that Mr. Roberts told the Perlmans that he could get them Warhols at a discount through his relationship with the Warhol foundation, and the family began buying works it thought were by Warhol. An amended version of the lawsuit lists more than 250 works that the Perlmans purchased, including original canvases (John Lennon and Albert Einstein for about $30,000 each) and silk-screens (John Wayne for $75,000; a collection of Maos for $325,000). The partnership began to fall apart later when Richard Perlman and his wife approached Christie's to sell some of the works, and the auction house raised doubts about their authenticity. The suit said that two people then came to the family's Florida home with business cards claiming that they were appraisers from a rival auction house, Phillips, and declared the works to be authentic Warhols. 'Les Roberts betrayed the Perlmans' trust and went to great lengths to cover up his fraud,' Luke Nikas, a lawyer representing the family, said in a statement on Thursday. In the interview in August, Mr. Roberts denied the lawsuit's version of events. He said Matthew Perlman had been an active partner in a joint venture they had arranged to purchase Warhols, saying that Mr. Perlman worked alongside him for 'every single one' of the art purchases. He claimed that all of the artworks had come from legitimate sources. 'I try to be more cautious than ever,' he said at the time, 'because of my past.'
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dig! XX review – amazing film of battling 90s psych rockers revisited two decades on
After 20 years, Ondi Timoner has rereleased her riveting and colossal documentary study of two psych rock bands, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their epic dual story of success and failure. There is about 40 minutes of extra material and a present-day coda that reveals, among other things, that each band has a member who now sells real estate. That ending, brutally and suddenly visiting grey-haired middle age on these gorgeous rock'n'roll exquisites, reminded me of the Fellini-esque dream opening to Woody Allen's Stardust Memories in which two trains, one carrying life's winners and the other with hapless losers, wind up at the same dusty rubbish heap. Dig! XX, which took years to shoot, is alternately narrated by the Warhols' frontman, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, and the BJM's relentlessly goofy tambourine player, Joel Gion, and it shows the complex 'frenmity' of the two bands. Almost from the outset, it seemed as if the Dandy Warhols were destined for commercial success tainted by feelings of selling out, and their pals the Brian Jonestown Massacre were heading for failure redeemed by a magnificent and self-destructive kind of integrity. All of them were devoted to the traditional excesses and entitlements of rock'n'roll and enamoured of their 1960s image; the BJM's guitarist Matt Hollywood even affected John Lennon specs. But it is quite late on in the film that someone makes a very good point: 'Sixties bands got into drugs. But they were famous first.' Nowhere in the film does any band-member reflect on the self-fulfilling prophecy of success and failure in their joke-names: Andy Warhol, triumphant and world-famous in the depthless world of celebrity for a lot longer than 15 minutes, and Brian Jones, dying young (or living for ever) after a mysterious accident in his swimming pool. The undisputed star of the film is surely the BJM's leader, Anton Newcombe, a snake-hipped and bedraggled Adonis who provides pure on-camera gold with his outrageous behaviour, motormouthed self-pity and disdain for everyone else; the tone is set when he blows the band's entire tour budget on sitars. The BJM suspect, with good reason, that the Warhols are jealous of their authentic rock'n'roll chaos; they live in the real thing which the prissier Warhols can only fabricate in their photoshoots, one of which takes place without permission in the BJM's squalid shared apartment. The bands both tour endlessly, an ordeal of hardship and frustration, chasing the breakout success that only happens to the Dandy Warhols because they are the ones with discipline and don't have full-on fistfights on stage. (Amazingly, gloriously, and also tragically, the ageing and reunited BJM have a public punch-up in 2023.) But does the rock'n'roll world camouflage the truth about Newcombe's mental state and drug abuse? Do we confer the ironised title of damaged genius on him by not seeing his pain and unhappiness? He goes in and out of rehab, something the film can't really show. And, for me, Gion is the other enigma: always smirking, gurning, wise-cracking – always on. Is there a hidden truth he is not showing us? A gripping and desperately sad story. Dig! XX is in UK cinemas on 25 March for one night, then on limited release in cinemas from 28 March.
Washington Post
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Extreme weather is testing the notoriously secretive art world
On the morning of Jan. 7, as a windstorm fanned the flames of wildfires tearing through Los Angeles, art collector Ron Rivlin watched the destruction from his rooftop in the Pacific Palisades. 'I got the first alert at 10:45 a.m., it said that there was a fire 1.1 miles from me, but I didn't think the fire would jump Sunset Boulevard,' he recalls. 'That was a common belief among our neighbors.' He watched, FaceTimed with friends and filmed the destruction in disbelief, but without fear that the home he custom-designed to display his vast collection of art would be affected. When it was finally clear that he would have to flee, around 3:30 p.m., it was too late. 'I stuck around as long as I could, but the smoke shifted,' he says. Then, he did what thousands of other Angelenos had to do that day: decide what was worth saving. He selected just three canvases from his collection — which included dozens of artists such as Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol and Keith Haring — as well as an antique gold pocket watch that belonged to Warhol. 'I chose a tomato soup can canvas that was a holy grail, one of my bucket list Warhols; a self portrait that Warhol did in 1979; and the other one is 'Four Hearts,'' he says of the 1983 Warhol painting of four pink hearts made with diamond dust. 'To me, it represented my family, my wife and my two kids.' The paintings he chose were as sentimental as they were valuable, but ultimately they represent only a fraction of the collection of 340 fine artworks — including 30 Warhols and an early 7-foot 'spin' painting by Hirst — that were destroyed when his home, like some 16,000 others, was finally engulfed in flame. The works were chosen at least in part simply because they fit into his car. Rivlin, who deals Warhol paintings via his Revolver Gallery, is an outspoken exception among the art collectors who became victims of the Los Angeles blaze. While many artists — ranging from Paul McCarthy to Hunter Biden — have been vocal about the destruction of their studios and life's work, collectors remain closemouthed as to the extent and specifics of their multimillion dollar losses. Now, nearly three months after the devastation, we still have no clear picture of how many artworks by which artists, owned by which collectors, were lost. And it's entirely possible that the public, and even museums, will not know for many years to come — if ever. What we do know is that the L.A. fires destroyed thousands of homes owned by some of the nation's wealthiest people, people who were known to collect art of heritage importance. Because of the number of collections that were destroyed, it's very likely that this disaster amounts to the largest mass extinction event of fine art since World War II — with losses in the billions. How many billions? Even the insurers find it hard to say. 'The problem with this loss is that it's very different than, say, Hurricane Sandy, which hit certain big galleries and you could actually get a clearer view,' says Simon de Burgh Codrington, the managing director of Risk Strategies, one of the largest specialist fine art insurance brokerages in the United States. 'Because this has hit so many individual residences who are insured with so many different people, or not insured at all — and I'm not even touching on the artists who lost their studios — it's very difficult to get a handle on.' According to Codrington, the insurance industry still has no data, no sense of scale, no price tag for the losses. 'If you find it, send it to me,' he says. 'Even on the internal channels with insurers, I'm getting anecdotal comments. The losses are still developing.' This lack of transparency is a troubling outcome for anyone who values art as something more than an asset. There is no centralized register of art in the U.S., and that severely limits the ability to protect particularly precious pieces held in private hands, whether it be at the community, government or individual level. And while an artist's catalogue raisonné — the definitive register of an artist's oeuvre — does contain details of provenance, it can be only as up-to-date at its latest edition and offers little help in establishing the current location of a given work. In an age of increasing insecurity and environmental disaster, even institutions still track art the long way around. 'Let's say a museum wants to do a retrospective on a certain artist,' says Isabelle Bscher, proprietor of Zurich-based Galerie Gmurzynska. 'They'll look at the catalogue raisonné where it sometimes will say which collection it is in. Then they will see which gallery it was sold by or which auction house. That's how they'll find the owner of a certain work.' It means that if you at some point moved the Picasso from your apartment on Park Avenue to your home in the Palisades, where it was subsequently burned, the matter is between you, your insurer and no one else, until, perhaps, a museum comes knocking. But should it be that way? If the law requires us to register our cars when we move states, shouldn't we have to register an Old Master, too? Aren't some items of such cultural significance that they deserve their own evacuation plans? Is it ethical for a collector to keep important pieces in a fire zone, a floodplain or in the path of a hurricane? And, most importantly of all, who decides what is worth preserving? These are the niggling questions that the closemouthed and insular world of art is now wrestling with as rebuilding begins. 'I had a Campbell Soup can set that burned in the fire. Warhol created 276 of those,' says Rivlin, noting that his set of 'Campbell's Soup Cans II,' with matching edition numbers, was rarer. 'And Damien Hirst was super prolific. He probably produced a thousand spin paintings, if not more. Not to give them less value but I think there are different levels. If it was a Van Gogh, I think it would have a different impact. It's more of a cultural loss.' Rivlin believes that some kind of art registry that would allow works of particular importance to be located, identified and rescued if called for in the aftermath of the fires, but adds that preserving the privacy of collectors is equally paramount. It's a common sentiment among his peers. 'Rich people don't want to register their assets. I mean that seems frankly sort of un-American,' says Jim Hedges, a Los Angeles-based art dealer who specializes in Warhol's photography and has been affiliated with institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art. 'Who wants to create a cultural police? We are doing the opposite of that in our government right now,' Hedges adds, referring to deregulation. 'I think that feels like a slippery slope.' Hedges believes that the onus of stewarding art for the next generation will continue to be placed on the backs of individuals whose ability to amass collections in disaster-prone areas will be limited only by appetite for risk and the fresh demands of insurers. 'People are talking about having proper evacuation plans, or even working with some of the well-known shippers and packers to have a sort of ready-made evacuation,' says Codrington of the new insurance policy stipulations he sees coming to high-risk areas in the future. 'Which for certain types of collections is incredibly easy, and for other types of collections that are physically large, is actually quite technically difficult. Art works have special handling needs, which can be challenging in a rush.' For instance, imagine the darkly comical logistics that would be involved in extricating, say, Hirst's controversial shark-in-a-vitrine sculpture 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' — which is 17 feet by 7 feet of teeth and formaldehyde — in the middle of blazing calamity where human life is at stake? Some things surely cannot be saved. Some things surely will no longer be insured. 'I'm not expecting to see there be 'one rule fits all,' but I certainly expect there to be a lot more conversations,' adds Codrington. 'Whether it's setbacks or managing the brush area. I think there are positives from this. Look at the Getty.' Both insurers and homeowners in Los Angeles are. On Jan. 7, the grounds surrounding the Getty Villa on the Malibu Coast — a museum whose collection include Monet, Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Rubens, as well as thousands of priceless Greek and Roman antiquities — burned. But thanks to proactive management, including extensive and consistent brush-clearing, irrigation and the tireless work of an emergency response task force, the museum and its art was spared. Its procedures now serve as a model for affected communities. Still: 'We did get lucky in some ways,' Katherine E. Fleming, president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, told the Los Angeles Times. The Getty declined to comment for this story. Thousands of others, who obeyed and exceeded the prevailing wisdom, however, saw their luck run out. In building his first home, Rivlin already believed that he had taken all of the necessary precautions to protect his art. His house met all of the local fire codes and while his insurance company only required an alarm system to be in place to issue a policy on his art collection, he went the extra mile, installing more sprinklers than necessary. He protected some pieces with plexiglass. He had fire extinguishers throughout the house and smoke alarms on two different systems. His large 25-foot window was programmed to dim at certain times of the day to stave off harmful UV rays. Now, as he rebuilds his angular, glass-filled modern home — complete with a nightclub, movie theater and 'disco elevator' — he will go even further to protect the collection he's already planning to re-amass. He's researching fire retardants, more advanced sprinkler systems and ways to pump water directly from the ocean. But even he is reconsidering storing such a large and valuable collection in his California home going forward. 'I mean, I'm a little once bitten twice shy about what art I'm going to put in my house,' he says. Even if fine art remains insurable in the toniest L.A. zips, a mass exodus of art is already on the move as works are shuttled to areas less inclined to calamity. 'It's a thought process that already happens,' says Hedges. ''Do I keep my photography collection in my home in Aspen, Colorado, where there's glaring sunshine 360 days of the year. Or do I keep it in New York City in my apartment.' Will art collectors be more aware of that thought process now? Very possibly.' And if the art isn't in L.A. to begin with, how is it to find its way into its local galleries and museums, in front of the public? After all, if a collection is now housed in Arizona, shouldn't it be loaned locally? Less art in the community will inevitably mean less beauty for city residents to feast on. Or, there is the worst case scenario — that the art disappears altogether. Back in 2016, after revelations from the leaked Panama Papers, which shined a light on the offshore tax havens of the elite, it was estimated that more than 1.2 million works of art — roughly 1,000 works by Picasso alone — were hidden away at the Geneva Free Port, according to the New York Times. That number has likely grown over the last decade as fine art prices continue to rise and the ultrarich seek the enormous tax savings free ports offer. And although free ports have drawn criticism for locking art away from view, often for decades at a time, from a collector standpoint it makes sense. How comfortable can you really be with something worth $10 million, $50 million or $100 million dangling from a picture hook in your lounge? Certainly anyone living with that level of art who lost their home in the fires would have preferred it stored away safely in a climate controlled facility. Bscher says that for her clients, tolerance for risk in displaying their art investments runs the gamut from utterly blasé to highly precious with climate-controlled environments, oodles of security and protective glass. However, increasingly she says the world's wealthiest opt for a compromise. 'People that own important works like that like to have copies made for their household,' says Bscher. 'They'll have the copies in their house, and the real paintings are somewhere in storage.' She recalls a yachting trip where a member of the Picasso family pointed at the onboard art collection, correctly calling out each painting supposedly by her famed ancestor that was an imitation. It was a feat that impressed, rather than embarrassed, the owner, who was confident in his knowledge that somewhere far away he owned the real things. Others, like Bill Gates, hang screens on the walls in lieu of frames that display and rotate virtual facsimiles of works from their vast collections. This new, apprehensive way of living with art, perhaps isn't so new either. It recalls a story of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who after purchasing Gustave Courbet's provocative 1866 masterpiece 'L'Origine du monde' ('The origin of the world,' a realistic portrait of a woman's vulva) tasked the artist André Masson to build a wooden box for the oil. On the lid, Masson limned a surrealist approximation of the piece, and for decades it was the representation, not the work itself, that was on display. Or maybe it really is just about guarding your cold hard mammon, which just happens to look like Marilyn Monroe, a plane of color or a stack of hay. Hedges claims that whatever happens in the aftermath of Los Angeles's worst disaster, the way wealthy art collectors think will be forever changed. 'Do you know what a prepper is?' asks Hedges, referring to the cult of pessimists among the ultrarich who are readying for doomsday with bunkers in New Zealand and private jets on standby. 'I think the prepper mentality just grew. The definition of what it means to be safe, to be secure, and to have your property and your home safeguarded just ratcheted upward. Because if it happens in a neighborhood like Pacific Palisades, it will happen anywhere.'
