Art Historian Named In Rothko Lawsuit
Everybody loves a good forgery — or at least a good story about one. Even the Queen of England once said, “I don’t like having forgeries in my collection, but I like a tale about a magnificent fake.” The latest tale: A respected Swiss art historian and curator has been drawn into the legal tangle surrounding the sale of dozens of high-priced forgeries by the shuttered New York art gallery Knoedler & Company. In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in United States District Court in Manhattan, Frank J. Fertitta III, a major Las Vegas casino operator, reveals he paid $7.2 million for a painting sold as a Mark Rothko but subsequently identified as one of dozens of forgeries created in a Queens garage by a Chinese immigrant. The suit also places some of the blame on a Rothko expert who the gallery commissioned to help sell the painting. The suit accuses Oliver Wick, currently a curator at the Swiss museum Kunsthaus Zurich, of having knowingly participated in the fraud “either intentionally or with willful blindness or reckless disregard for the truth.†No comment yet from Wick.
