The Rothko That Wasn’t: How a $5.5 Million Forgery Fooled the Art World
Knoedler Gallery was a New York institution for over a century. Collectors trusted it. Museums bought from it. The gallery’s reputation carried weight—until it didn’t. Between 1994 and 2011, Knoedler sold nearly 40 forged paintings attributed to major Abstract Expressionist artists, including Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell. The total haul? About $80 million. It wasn’t just collectors who got fooled. Experts, art historians, and even the artists’ own estates believed these works were real. And then they weren’t.
The forgeries came from Pei-Shen Qian, a painter living in Queens, who had an uncanny ability to channel the greats. He used old canvases, aged his paint with tea and dirt, and created works that looked like they had lived through the decades. The scheme ran through art dealer Glafira Rosales, who claimed she had access to an anonymous collector’s secret stash. The story should have raised red flags. Instead, it raised millions of dollars. The paintings were authenticated, celebrated, and sold.
One of the most expensive pieces was a Mark Rothko. The buyer paid $5.5 million. The painting carried the signature expanses of color and soft edges that made Rothko’s work so hypnotic. It passed the eye test. It even convinced Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son, that it might be genuine. Then came the forensic analysis. Modern pigments, the kind that didn’t exist when Rothko was alive, showed up in the paint. The signature was fine. The layering looked right. The surface had been aged carefully. But the chemistry betrayed the forgery.
The fallout from the Knoedler scandal played out over years. Lawsuits piled up. Collectors who had spent millions on these paintings wanted their money back. The gallery’s president, Ann Freedman, claimed she had been just as deceived as the buyers, but courts saw it differently. Case after case ended in settlements, including the final lawsuit over the fake Rothko in 2019.
The whole saga raised uncomfortable questions. If a painting looks like a Rothko, moves like a Rothko, and stirs the same emotions as a Rothko, what makes it not a Rothko? The forgery wasn’t crude. It wasn’t a lazy knockoff. It fooled some of the most knowledgeable people in the art world. It lived as a Rothko for years, until science stripped it of its name.
The art market runs on trust. Collectors want to believe in the narrative behind a painting. A previously unknown Rothko appearing out of nowhere is exactly the kind of discovery that fuels excitement. But excitement can override skepticism, and that’s how a $5.5 million forgery hangs in a collector’s home before anyone asks if the chemistry checks out.
Even now, long after Knoedler shut its doors, some of Qian’s forgeries might still be out there, sitting in private collections, completely accepted as the real thing. If a collector never questions what’s on their wall, does it matter?