According to Mariana Custodio, the biggest art fraud in the United States was committed by Knoedler, one of the most reputable art galleries in New York. They had sold 60 fake artworks in a span of almost 20 years which were supposedly created by artists such as Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, all of which were actually original artworks by the Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian. It is estimated that the artworks’ total value was about $80 million.
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But that sum doesn’t even come close to what may be considered the world’s largest art fraud in history. At the center of it all is Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist, who, in the years before his death, claimed that auctioneers and art galleries were selling fakes. Although he filed affidavits identifying the forgeries, Morrisseau was not able to pursue any lawsuits due to his death in 2007 from complications with Parkinson’s disease.
Now, over 16 years after his death, investigators have finally discovered the sheer scale and magnitude of the art fraud. And it took an unlikely group of individuals to get down to the bottom of the scheme, which included Scottish Canadian singer John McDermott, the rock star keyboardist Kevin Hearn, an acquaintance of Morrisseau’s relatives Dallas Thompson, and the Canadian homicide detective Jason Rybak.
In 2013, McDermott filed a lawsuit claiming that a supposed Morrisseau painting he bought was a fake after conducting an investigation on the matter. This led him to identify Gary Lamont and David Voss as the ringleaders of the Thunder Bay fraud ring. However, McDermott dropped his claim for unknown reasons. Thankfully, another buyer of an alleged Morrisseau also went to court regarding the fraud. And that was Kevin Hearn.
Hearn, a member of the band Barenaked Ladies, had bought his first Morrisseau painting called Spirit Energy of Mother Earth in 2005 for CA$20,000, which he lent to the Art Gallery of Ontario for a show in 2010. A few days after lending it, he learned that the painting was a fake.
So, he sued the Toronto gallery from which he bought the painting in 2012, but the judge ruled in 2018 that the fake was merely contested, and there was no conclusive evidence that indicated that the painting which Hearn bought was indeed a fake. This was despite Thompson’s testimony revealing that a fraud ring existed in Thunder Bay which created thousands of Morrisseau paintings, as well as expert testimony saying that the painting was a fraud.
Hearn, determined to get down to the bottom of the Morrisseau fraud scandal, continued with his investigation and tapped a filmmaker friend, Jamie Kastner, to make a documentary about the Morrisseau fakes titled There Are No Fakes, which was released in 2019. It was this documentary that brought Jason Rybak to the case.
At the time, Rybak was investigating the murder of Scott Dove, and one of the suspects of the murder was none other than Gary Lamont. On the suggestion of Dove’s mother, Rybak watched the documentary made by Hearn’s friend, and immediately, he contacted Hearn. Rybak spent the next four years working on the case, looking into Morrisseau’s life and all the information available on the lawsuits of fraud victims.
It was only in March 2023 when officials announced that they had arrested eight people involved in the fraud rings, which included Lamont and Voss. Rybak also discovered that Voss started the scheme in 1996 which was then copied by Lamont in 2002, creating two separate fraud rings. Later on, a third came about when a friend of Lamont and Voss began making forgeries in southern Ontario.
Just last December, Lamont pled guilty to one count of forgery and fraud. Police filed 40 charges against him and his other accomplices, and more trials will be conducted this year and the next.
(Image credit: Joanne Clifford/Wikimedia Commons)
Source: neatorama