movie review made you look

Review: ‘Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art,’ a fascinating $80 million con

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In 1974’s “F for Fake,” the freewheeling Orson Welles documentary that used the exploits of noted art forger Elmyr de Hory as its thematic jumping-off point, the defiant de Hory asks, “Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?”

That mindset proves especially persuasive in the new Netflix documentary “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art,” a fascinating depiction of the various dealers, collectors and gallery owners who found themselves embroiled in the largest art fraud in American history.

At the center of the early-2000s scandal was Ann Freedman, the director of Manhattan’s once-prestigious Knoedler Gallery . Her fateful meeting with Glafira Rosales, a quiet woman who had access to a treasure trove of Abstract Expressionism purportedly by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, eventually would amount to an $80 million con.

Although the works passed muster from respected authenticators, things became a little murkier when it came to the equally important matter of provenance, which was ultimately traced back to Queens, where they were created by an unassuming Chinese math professor named Pei-Shen Qian.

Director Barry Avrich — whose previous documentaries profiled Harvey Weinstein, David Foster and Lew Wasserman — paints an intriguing psychological portrait of a collective of sophisticates (whether easy marks or unwitting accomplices) so seduced by the sought-after art in question, they had become genuinely oblivious to the not-so-subtle flaws.

Accentuating the unrepentant Freedman (who has a distinctly monochromatic fashion sense) and her fellow interview subjects with fittingly artistic camera compositions, gallery-ready lighting and a refined strings-forward score, “Made You Look” makes for an exposé that’s suitable for framing.

‘Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art’

Not rated Running Time: 1 hour, 29 minutes Playing: Available on Netflix

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‘Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art’ Review: The Most Spectacular Art Forgery Ever?

Barry Avrich's documentary captures how art forgery isn't just a scandal but the uncanniest of magic tricks.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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There’s a spectacular contradiction at the heart of art forgery. Forgeries, which pretend to be paintings by timeless artists, hang in museums all over the world; there are more of them than anyone knows, all hiding in plain sight. When a case of forgery comes to light, it tends to be greeted with moral outrage. The act of imitating a famous artist’s work, and profiting off it, is seen as a sleazy low-life con, as well as a major crime (which, of course, it is). Yet art forgery isn’t just about the eye candy of duplicity and profit. As Orson Welles caught in his jump-cut meditation “F for Fake” (1973), there’s a fantasy behind it: What if you had the daring, and the talent, to produce a fake work of art so drop-dead authentic that no one alive could tell it was fake? There’s an audacity to that, a kind of grand illusion. On some level the art lover may be outraged, but on another level he might want to applaud.

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That’s the level that “ Made You Look: A True Story of Fake Art ” taps into. It’s a documentary, directed by Barry Avrich , that’s about nothing less than the most successful forgery scam ever brought off in the high-end art world. In 1995, the Knoedler Gallery, the oldest art gallery in New York (it had been around for 165 years, predating the Civil War and all of the city’s museums), purchased an unknown canvas by Mark Rothko. It was sold to Ann Freedman, the gallery’s director, for $750,000 (a fire-sale price). The person who brought it to her was Glafir Rosales, a woman from Long Island who didn’t have much of an art pedigree but claimed to represent a wealthy anonymous collector, and the story she told about him seemed just plausible enough.

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What really seemed plausible, however, was the painting itself. It was a vintage Rothko, with two fuzzy rectangles (one black, one red) on a muted yellow background, and it was a bedazzling piece. Freedman swooned over it. Yet the painting didn’t have much “provenance” (the paper trail of its history and ownership), and Freedman wasn’t about to take its authenticity on faith. She showed it to an array of experts, including David Anfam, who at the time was the reknowned scholar-guru of Rothko. He called it beautiful, and declared that it was a real Rothko. The painting was sold for $5.5 million at auction.

Not too long after that, Glafir Rosales brought the Knoedler gallery a Jackson Pollock — a 1949 drip painting of red, black, and white with splashes of yellow, called “Untitled.” I’m not an art scholar, but I’ve seen my share of Jackson Pollock forgeries, which have a way of never looking totally like the real thing; they lack that inner spark of kinetic energy. But the work that was brought to Ann Freedman had the Pollock effervescence. We see it, and it’s gorgeous. And once again, she wasn’t shy about having it authenticated by a trove of experts, all of whom gave it their endorsement.

These paintings were fakes, and so were more than 60 other Abstract Expressionist canvases that Glafir Rosales brought to Ann Freedman over the next 10 years. The result, once the paintings were sold to collectors, galleries, and museums, was the costliest art scandal in history, with $80 million worth of forged works sold. “Made You Look” is a lively and fascinating stranger-than-fiction art-world doc, and what drives it are two essential mysteries: Who could have created fake paintings that looked this astonishing? And even then, how could all the experts have been fooled?

Freedman, who was ultimately forced out of the Knoedler Gallery in disgrace (that was shortly before the gallery closed its doors in 2011), is the central character in “Made You Look,” and she’s a likably unassuming one, with a sparky officious manner and a mop of gray curls. Early on, M.H. Miller of The New York Times says, “Either she was complicit in it, or she was one of the stupidest people to have worked at an art gallery.” Which seems, more or less, to be the attitude of almost all of the film’s talking-head witnesses.

I’m not sure I agree with them. In a way, Ann Freedman became the fall girl for the art world’s myopia. She was certainly responsible for buying the paintings, so in a way it’s fair to blame her for what happened. Yet the woman we see has a level head and appears honest enough about how badly she was duped; was she supposed to have eyes more perceptive than those of the world’s most venerated art experts? Yes, she let slide the paintings’ relative paucity of paperwork — that and the fact that these previously unknown works, by Rothko and Pollock and Motherwell and Warhol and Franz Kline and Lee Krasner and Clyfford Still, had suddenly popped up. That they were “fresh” works is what made them such tempting potential bonanzas. You could argue that Freedman’s eyes were clouded by greed.

Yet “Made You Look” tells another story just beneath the surface. The canvases in question didn’t only fool Freedman; they fooled the entire art world. And so, in addition to being a scandal, the Knoedler Gallery fakes added up to a profound embarrassment. Avrich interviews some of the people who were duped, like Dominico and Eleanore De Soles, collectors who wound up suing Freedman and the gallery. The trial that resulted was an ordeal for the experts who had authenticated the paintings. They had to take the stand and try to squirm out of the fact that they’d been fooled.

In a sly way, “Made You Look” shows you that to be enthralled by a fake painting is to exist in an innocent state of foolish grace. It’s to believe nothing but your eyes. Many of the people interviewed in the film keep saying of Freedman, She should have known better . She should have researched it more. In a sense, you can’t argue with them. Yet what Freedman was seduced by wasn’t just profit — it was the incandescent thrill of discovering new works, of bringing them into the world.

The great mystery, of course, is: Who could create fake paintings so flawless, and in so many different styles, that they deceived the world? The answer is: Pei-Shen Qian, a Chinese National who was a math professor living in a modest house in Queens. He’d been an accomplished painter in China (where the art of imitation is considered not a scandal but a fine-art specialty), and after arriving in New York he attended the Art Students League, where he was a classmate of Ai Weiwei’s. But his career as a painter never took off in the States, and he did his imitation Rothkos and Pollocks mostly for fun. (It was Glafir Rosales and her grifter boyfriend, José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, who tied themselves in knots to make money from them.) That such a guileless operator could produce forgeries of such inspiration, bringing the art world to its knees, may be a scandal, but it was also some kind of magic trick: proof that a con can have an element of the uncanny.

Reviewed online, Feb. 23, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 89 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release of a Documentary Channel Original, Melbar Entertainment Group production. Producers: Barry Avrich, Caitlin Cheddie. Executive producers: Jay Hennick, Barry Avrich.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Barry Avrich. Camera: Ken Ng. Editor: Tiffany Beaudin.
• With: Ann Freedman, Dr. Jack Flam, Pei-Shen Qian, Carter Ratcliff, M.H. Miller, José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, Charles Schmerler, Patricia Cohen, Michael Shnayerson, Domenico De Sole, Eleanore De Sole, Ronald Spencer, Dr. Jeffrey Taylor.

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Review: 'Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art,' a fascinating $80 million con

In 1974’s “F for Fake,” the freewheeling Orson Welles documentary that used the exploits of noted art forger Elmyr de Hory as its thematic jumping-off point, the defiant de Hory asks, “Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces?”

That mindset proves especially persuasive in the new Netflix documentary “Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art,” a fascinating depiction of the various dealers, collectors and gallery owners who found themselves embroiled in the largest art fraud in American history.

At the center of the early-2000s scandal was Ann Freedman, the director of Manhattan’s once-prestigious Knoedler Gallery . Her fateful meeting with Glafira Rosales, a quiet woman who had access to a treasure trove of Abstract Expressionism purportedly by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, eventually would amount to an $80 million con.

Although the works passed muster from respected authenticators, things became a little murkier when it came to the equally important matter of provenance, which was ultimately traced back to Queens, where they were created by an unassuming Chinese math professor named Pei-Shen Qian.

Director Barry Avrich — whose previous documentaries profiled Harvey Weinstein, David Foster and Lew Wasserman — paints an intriguing psychological portrait of a collective of sophisticates (whether easy marks or unwitting accomplices) so seduced by the sought-after art in question, they had become genuinely oblivious to the not-so-subtle flaws.

Accentuating the unrepentant Freedman (who has a distinctly monochromatic fashion sense) and her fellow interview subjects with fittingly artistic camera compositions, gallery-ready lighting and a refined strings-forward score, “Made You Look” makes for an exposé that’s suitable for framing.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art premiered on 23rd February 2021 on Netflix. Directed by Barry Avrich, the documentary revolves around one of the biggest art scandal’s in history which led to the closing of 165 years old Knoedler gallery.

They Fooled Them All

There are various things that lose their value over time but art is never one of them. Throughout the ages, art has been one of the major collectables and valued items across the globe. With each saved and secured painting selling for billions of dollars, what would you do if you were sold a fake? The Knoedler Art Scandal shook the art world and brought down the famous New York’s Knoedler & Co., one of the country’s oldest and prestigious art galleries.

Made You Look tells us the story of this art scandal with inputs, opinions, and firsthand experiences of lawyers, buyers, experts, and others alongside Ann Freedman, who was the art dealer at the very centre of this entire acquisition and selling. The documentary brings detailed accounts and details of the scandal to the public eye with every piece of information stitched with testimonies and documents. Between 1994 and 2011, under Freedman’s direction, Knoedler had sold faked copies of works by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko majorly, among others.

Which brings us to the question of how could a fraud on such a level continue for more than 10 years and most importantly who fooled the keen-eyed Freedman? The person responsible here is Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer who had, in turn, obtained the fake paintings from the art forger Pei-Shen Qian from China, in which a major role is played by her ex-boyfriend José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz (who by the end of the documentary tries to sell something to the director claiming it’s real, dude, stop!)

“It was credible, to me. I believed what I was told. There was mystery, but there’s often mystery in provenance. I hoped to solve that mystery as time went on.” – Ann Freedman

There were red flags everywhere which somehow Freedman denied seeing like the ever-changing story of Rosales, incorrect name on the painting, scientific and technical evidence, lack of provenance, and more. And while Freedman was ruled as not guilty and it could have been a human error, it is impossible to believe that she was so stringent on the fact that the paintings are real that she ignored every call for authenticity. However, Freedman has always denied playing any part in the fraud.

Made You Look builds itself in an intriguing manner and supports the claim with proof leaving no place for misleading imagination to play. The documentary does not aim to provide an answer for whodunnit but rather provides audiences with facts and figures to understand the entire scandal and dive deeper into it if they wish. The very idea that no one other than Ann was actually ready to accept that were duped is pretty weird to me. It’s not a sin but rather a human error.

The documentary also provides Freedman with a place to voice out her side of the story and the truth as she could not even testify in court (the lawsuit was settled before she could testify). The lawsuit against her, Hammer, and Knoedler was filed by collector Domenico De Sole in early 2016 for a fake Rothko sold by Freedman. Without any preconceived notions about the entire fraud, Avrich brings forth the entire story of the scandal with brilliance and without bias with thorough research.

Stream It or Skip It

STREAM IT! Made You Look is informative, thought-provoking, and a smartly brought forward documentary that carries the potential to question the entire scandal without blindly and blatantly blaming any single person. The documentary has no dull moments and is well mapped with sections that build-up to the finale i.e., the truth of being conned.

Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art is now streaming on Netflix .

Read our other reviews  here .

• Art Scandal
• Knoedler Gallery
• Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art

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