When I spoke up
REPRINT OF AN ARTICLE THAT APPEARED IN THE CHICAGO READER IN 2008 by Deanna Isaacs
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/buyer-beware/
The usually zipped-up local art world got a jolt two weeks ago when federal agents raided the Kass/Meridian Gallery at 325 W. Superior. It was a surreal scene, with a platoon of U.S. Postal Service police and the FBI lugging framed works by the likes of Chagall and Dalí out into the snowy street. The official explanation, courtesy of an FBI spokesman, is that the agents executed a search warrant as part of an ongoing investigation—there were no arrests made and no charges filed, and documents have been sealed. Kass/Meridian owners Alan and Grace Kass did not return calls; other gallery owners I talked to in the River North district, where Kass/Meridian has been around for 22 years, expressed surprise.
But one longtime local dealer says it was about time someone got on the problem of fakes. Peter Bartlow of Peter Bartlow Gallery, which like Kass/Meridian deals in prints by modern masters, was quoted in the Sun-Times the day after the raid saying he’d told federal investigators a year and a half ago that he thought Kass/Meridian was selling fakes. Over the next few days Bartlow, who has a sideline in authentication, stepped up to talk about fakery in art sales as a widespread problem that has largely gone unaddressed. As for Kass/Meridian: “Over the years,” he told me, “clients have brought things in to show me that they bought from Kass that appeared to me to be fake.”
Bartlow says he’s known Alan Kass since 1973, when Kass sold him some prints for a gallery he had in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio. He says that “Kass has consistently given people their money back if they had a complaint,” and nothing more would be heard about it. That’s human nature, Bartlow says: “When you get duped, do you want everybody to know? Or do you just want your money back?”
“Everybody wants to think they outsmarted the dealer,” Bartlow adds. “And dealers rely on that.” The same folly is at work in parts of the auction market, he says. “You’ll see these ads in the paper: ‘Doctor’s Estate for Sale’—they show a picture of a mansion and list the names of the artists. It’ll be Pissarro, Miró, Chagall—and then in fine print it’ll say the majority of items are from another source. Smart people, clients of mine, will call me all excited. I’ll say, ‘It’s not what you think,’ but they want to believe it. They want it to be what they want it to be.”
Dealers say the last time a sweep of this magnitude occurred was in 1993, when Donald Austin, a former barber who built a Chicago-based national chain of 30 galleries, was charged with fraud for selling hundreds of fake modern masters’ prints. Austin blamed his suppliers, and his lawyer argued that he was just trying to make art affordable for the masses, but he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Forgeries are so prevalent, claims Bartlow, that “I think virtually anybody who sells this stuff has sold fakes”—wittingly or unwittingly. Some people in the business “don’t want to know enough to identify the phony work,” and some don’t do their homework. “The attitude is ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ If they can buy something for two or three thousand dollars and sell it for ten or twelve or fifteen, that’s all they want to know.” He says several years ago he asked Natalie van Straaten, the executive director of the Chicago Art Dealers Association at the time, if the group would “help do something about the people who are selling fakes,” but nothing came of it. (Bartlow is a former CADA member; neither he nor Kass/Meridian is a member now.) Van Straaten couldn’t be reached for comment, but former CADA president Roy Boyd says, “Even big museums have bought fakes. I think it’s a problem beyond the scope of a small organization like this.”