The story of an amazing art fraud

Driven to Abstraction
It's doubtful that anyone will see Driven to Abstraction -- the story of an amazing, 15-year art fraud -- as a groundbreaking documentary. Heavily reliant on talking heads, director Daria  Price's movie nonetheless opens a fascinating window into the story in which the masterminds of the fraud found a Chinese immigrant who lived in Queens, NY, who was able to create fraudulent paintings that were sold by New York's oldest gallery for a total of $80 million. As it turned out, the painter of the fakes was almost irrelevant in a scheme that mostly benefited those involved in selling works that too few questioned when they were brought to market by The Knoedler Gallery. Art journalists, lawyers, and denizens of the art world tell us how this massive deception occurred and why it succeeded for so many years. Wisely, the movie leaves enough questions about the motivation of the major players to make the story tantalizing. We also learn what happened to those impacted, notably Ann Freedman, who ran the prestigious Knoedler Gallery until it closed in 2011, and Glafira Rosales, the woman who acted as an intermediary for a mystery owner, selling fake work to Knoedler as if it had been made by such renowned artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, and Lee Krasner. We're left to wonder whether Pei-Shen Qian, the Chinese student who made all the convincing fakes, understood the scope of a scheme that led to his return to China. The details of the case are too intricate to recount here, but Price lays them out in a clear, fascinating way. And beyond the story’s legal complexities, there's a telling tale of greed and gullibility in a world accustomed to operating without much public scrutiny.

Bob's Cinema Diary: July 22 — ‘Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful’

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful

Whatever You think of the iconic photographer Helmut Newton, you'd be hard-pressed to say that the adventurous -- some would say outrageous -- Newton didn't have fun. As Grace Jones, one of Newton's subjects, aptly puts it in the documentary Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful, "He was a little perverse, but so am I." As a photographer, Newton was attracted to nudity, eroticism, and outre poses. A rarefied group of bold-faced names discusses the late photographer's work. Included are Anna Wintour, Charlotte Rampling, Claudia Schiffer, Isabella Rosellini, and most revealingly, Marianne Faithful. Director Gero von Boehm also provides bits of interviews with Newton himself, a devoted husband whose wife June turns up, as well. A Jew who left Germany for China prior to World War II, Helmut expresses no bitterness toward his home country. His work was influenced by the free-flying liberalism of the Weimar Republic in Berlin and by its controlled opposite, Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, a chronicle of the 1936 Olympics. I wish the film had done more to explore this strange split. Boehm doesn't include much by way of negative criticism, although he does show a clip in which Susan Sontag accuses Newton of misogyny. Others, it should be noted, see the women in Newton's photograph as domineering and even defiant. Mostly, the film's interviewees present Newton as more committed to putting his stamp on his images. That's a commendable stance for a photographer whose work often reached the level of art but I wondered whether the movie had gotten deep enough into Newton's psyche to be considered the last word on a man who set his own standards and whose work defied convention. Newton died in a car crash in Los Angeles in 2004.