Documentary Recommendation: Made You Look: A True Story about Fake Art (2020)

Posted on 03/13/2021 by Pisaries Creator

What does Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko have in common besides being abstract expressionist painters? Their paintings were all bought by the Knoedler gallery in New York by Ann Freedman and sold for millions of dollars. The only problem was they were fake paintings that led to the discovery of the team of Glafira Rosales as art dealer and Pei-Shen Qian as the painter. It eventually leads to a trial where the major players come into the spotlight including Michael Hammer, Domenico De Sole, José Carlos Bergantiños Díaz, Patty Cohen, Jack Flam, etc., but not everyone is equally to blame in the court system and in the art world. Most everyone was duped by these paintings including family members of the famous painters. Made You Look is directed by Barry Avrich and is one hour and 29 minutes running time. It’s engaging down to the last fake brushstroke and as this documentary shows it takes a special kind of art collector to debate with others how to hang a fake abstract expressionist painting. You can’t make this stuff up even if you tried.