Butler's Cinema Scene

Aside from guns and drugs, the world of fine arts may be the biggest unregulated industry on earth.

“Driven to Abstraction,” Daria Price’s documentary about the fall of the nation’s oldest continuously operating commercial art gallery, makes it pretty clear that for all the high-falutin’ airs of the art world, on the business end it’s a Wild West show as often as not run by riverboat gamblers and con artists.

In 2011 New York’s Knoedler Gallery — in operation since 1846 — abruptly closed.  Speculation soon turned to disbelief — the Knoedler’s operator, Ann Freedman, one of the most reputable dealers in the biz,  was being sued for having sold forgeries as genuine works  by Mark Rotko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Stella, among others.

Turns out that for at least 20 years Freedman had been selling modern “masterpieces” ostensibly plucked from the vast private holdings of a European collector.  Oddly enough, there was no record of these particular paintings; Freedman said she had been told the collector bought them directly from the artists before they went on the market or were even photographed for posterity.

But there were  red flags.  Scientific analysis showed that in some instances the paint used  was not available until years after the death of the artists involved.  And then there’s the little issue of the Jackson Pollock painting in which the artist misspelled his own last name in signing the work.

“Driven to Abstraction” chronicles the saga of the Knoedler Gallery and the biggest scandal in the history of art in such labyrinthine detail that a flow chart would come in handy.

Freedman claimed that she was a victim here, too,  that the works in question were sold to her by  Glafira Rosales, operator of a small-time gallery on Long Island. Rosales claimed to be the agent of the mysterious European collector unloading these masterpieces. Freedman maintains she never doubted the paintings were genuine.

Eventually it was determined these paintings — works so accomplished that many fooled the experts — were created in the Brooklyn studio of Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese immigrant.  He was paid for his work by Rosales and her Spanish boyfriend (Rosales claimed in court that she feared for her life if she didn’t go along with the scam).

Qian claimed he had no idea his paintings were being sold for millions as masterpieces of modern abstraction.

Now, there’s probably an entire movie to be made about this unknown artist who could so perfectly imitate the styles of the 20th century’s greatest painters.  This isn’t that movie.  As soon as the shit hit the fan, Qian moved back to China.  This doc could really use an in-depth interview with him.

“Driven to Abstraction” is further handicapped by the absence of Ann Freedman. One assumes that Price approached the woman at the center of it all for comments and was rebuffed.  If so, it would have been nice if the film made that point. As it is, we learn that Freedman is now running a gallery under her name, but we never get inside the establishment or hear directly from her. She is shown only in archival photos and footage.

Moreover, while it’s a heck of a yarn, “Driven…” is anti-cinematic.  Basically it’s one talking head after another — many of them heavy hitters in the art and media worlds. These individuals all contribute bits and snatches to the story, but none of them are terribly compelling in their own right. They don’ have a horse in the race, legally or professionally speaking.

And when you’re done you’re still not entirely sure what  you’re looking at.