‘The Devil Wears Rothko’: Inside one of the art world’s biggest scandals

For about a decade, one of the most reputable art galleries in the world, the Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan, New York, trafficked $80 million in fake art — works purportedly by abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Chinese mathematician Pei-Shen Qian created them in his garage in Queens. This became a sordid detective story involving an international ring of con artists who duped the world’s most knowledgeable art dealers and wealthy collectors. Barry Avrich followed this story for years, and his new book is The Devil Wears Rothko , which expands on his 2020 documentary, Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art. Avrich explains that the Knoedler Gallery came to New York City to take advantage of the area’s extraordinary wealth, when copper/mi