Knoedler

[5] With dealer Charles Carstairs, Knoedler opened branches in Paris (1895), Pittsburgh (1897), and London (1908),[6] and, under Carstairs' influence developed a reputation as a leading dealer of Old Master paintings, with customers including collectors such as Collis P. Huntington, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry O. Havemeyer, William Rockefeller, Walter P. Chrysler Jr., John Jacob Astor, Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Clay Frick, and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Tate Gallery.

Knoedler and Colnaghi were involved in the secret sales by the Soviet government of works from the Russian Imperial collection in the Hermitage in the 1920s and 1930s, along with Matthiesen in Berlin.

[9] In 1970, the firm incurred significant costs in refurbishing new premises in an Italian Renaissance-style town house at 19 East 70th Street.

[11] Knoedler was involved in several high profile lawsuits involving Nazi looted art, including a Matisse confiscated by the Nazis in 1941 from the Rosenberg family which Knoedler acquired in 1954 and which was eventually donated to the Seattle Art Museum in 1996 by Virginia and Prentice Bloedel,[12] and an El Greco seized by the Gestapo in 1944.

The El Greco painting, Portrait of a Gentleman, was listed in exhibition catalogues as being in the collection of New York’s Knoedler & Co, who bought the painting from the Viennese dealer Frederick Mont, a dealer who worked with the Gestapo, according to Anne Webber, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe.

[14] Knoedler was also involved in the long-running Cassirer v Thyssen case concerning a Camille Pissarro painting, Rue St. Honoré, après midi, effet de pluie.

[19][20] It was later discovered that between 1994 and 2011, under Freedman's direction, the gallery had sold almost 40[21] faked Abstract Expressionist paintings of works by Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, among others.

[25] Qian was able to imitate the styles of the masters, and give the paintings an illusion of age by using tea or dirt from a vacuum cleaner, dirtying their appearance.

[27] A statement issued on 28 November 2011 by Knoedler stated simply that it was closing permanently for business reasons,[18] unrelated to the lawsuits it faced over the sale of forged paintings.

[33] In 2017, Rosales was ordered to pay $81 million to the victims of the Knoedler art-fraud scheme,[33] but received leniency in sentencing due to her cooperation with the US government.

[39] In 2020, filmmaker Barry Avrich directed and produced the Netflix film, Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, a documentary on the Knoedler Gallery forgery scandal.

[45] In 2012, Domenico De Sole and his wife Eleanore claimed that the gallery sold them a fake Mark Rothko, Untitled 1956, for $8.3 million in 2004.

[25] Wall Street executive John D. Howard sued Knoedler and its former director Ann Freedman in 2012, claiming that a Willem de Kooning painting that he bought for $4 million in 2007 was a fake.

[52] This material includes over five hundred files which contain correspondence, images and pedigree information concerning approximately four to five thousand works of art, the majority of which passed through Knoedler salerooms.