u/NoDiscussion6413

Share with me your stories about the ones that got away. Do you have a story about an artwork that you were about to acquire and didn't go through with it? An art collecting opportunity that you missed out on? Here is my story...

In 1999 Sotheby's began an online portal for the purchase of artwork. There were some beautiful works of art available by top tier artists. I had my eye on an incredible Larry Poons large vertical drip painting. I ended up purchasing the artwork for $4000. Since the online portal was a relatively new thing for Sotheby's, the experience did not go smoothly. Communication was terrible, and worst of all, it had been 3 months, and they could not find the artwork in their warehouse. They eventually located the artwork, and then it was going to be another few months before they said it would be shipped to me. My frustration grew to a point that I decided to cancel the purchase. Had I just been patient, I would have a beautiful painting valued at well over $50,000+ today. My wife always tell me that the value today doesn't make a difference, because I would never have sold it!

Twenty years ago I was looking to add a work of art by Sol Wilson to my collection. Sol Wilson was a painter of moody New York City and New England coastal subjects working in the middle of the 20th century. My parents had a work by him, and since I admired his work as a child, I regularly searched out his works. I had called a gallery in Provincetown to get some prices, and they were way out of my budget, so I ended up doing regular searches on eBay. There I found a small seascape of his and it was only $300! The frame was terrible, and the scene was not quintessential Sol Wilson, but it was my opportunity to own one of his pieces. I got the work, and it was kind of meh, but I figured I would reframe it and see if that would help. The new frame definitely helped and it hung in my house as part of a gallery wall for a few months. I ended up reconfiguring the gallery wall, and decided to sell the Wilson as it didn't fit the layout any longer. I listed it on eBay, and sold it for $500. It was basically a wash, as the new frame had cost me about $200.

Two months later I received a message through eBay informing me that the artwork I had purchased was actually by a woman artist, and the seller removed her name, darkened the scene and signed it Sol Wilson. The message sender sent me detailed proof, including the original listing where the forger had purchased the woman's artwork on eBay, months before he sold the altered artwork to me. The first thing I did was to contact the person to whom I sold the artwork. Interestingly they wanted to keep the artwork, but I ended up refunding around $300. I contacted the forger through eBay, and he requested that I call him. He told me that he was an old man, and that his son had done the forgery. He refunded me my money, as well as the money that I had spent on the framing. I reported him to eBay, but eBay did nothing. I watched this man (and possibly his son) list artwork after artwork on eBay for years. Most of them were terrible forgeries. They would sometimes forge a bigger name artist, but they tended to stick with the level of artist where the idea of forging that artists work would seem nonsensical. They were scamming to the tune of $200 to $800 per work, and had around 30 to 50 listings at a time.

One artist that they loved to copy was Ludwig Bemelmans. The copies were sloppy (almost as if done by an old, shaky hand), the signatures were way off, and the works were always in terrible frames that did not fit the artwork...but incredulously they all sold. After a number of years, the forgers eBay profile stopped listing. Maybe the old man died, and the "son" didn't want into the family business. I happen to collect Ludwig Bemelmans (of Madeline fame), so I frequently search for his works on Live Auctioneers. In 2018, an auction house listed a number of his works. Maybe one or two were legitimate, but the rest were by the forger. I contacted the auction house and let them know they were selling forged (poorly forged) works. The auction house did not take the listings down, and ended up selling the works for a lot of money (every work sold for over $2000 with the highest selling for $4600). I have seen these terrible fakes in other auctions in Florida and elsewhere.

The great tragedy in this whole mess is that the original work of art by the woman artist was a beautiful painting before it was altered. That her name was removed and her palette was dimmed is something I have not been able to get over.

When collecting art, always be more than well informed. Even then, you may get scammed. An animation art gallery owner once told me when evaluating a fake Peanuts drawing, "Do you think Charles Schulz forgot how to draw Snoopy?" In other words, if it doesn't look right, it's wrong!