The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World

by Anthony M. Amore

  The four sculptures went very separate ways. There was the one given to President Kennedy by Castelli, which remains in the possession of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Johns kept one himself. A third was acquired by financier and art collector Joseph Hirshhorn and is currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—one of the top modern art museums in the United States. The fourth resides with the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to a bequest of Katharine Kuh, the art critic, curator, and author who also owned the eponymous Chicago gallery where she supported a large number of emerging modern artists.

  In the 1980s, Johns decided to make additional sculptures based on the original sculpted metal work he gave to Rauschenberg, and for this project he turned to Vanessa Hoheb. Hoheb grew up in her father’s sculpture studio, beginning her formal apprenticeship when she was just 16. In those early years she gained experience working on pieces for Johns and other leading artists, including Willem de Kooning, Frederick Hart, and Isamu Noguchi. Perhaps most notably, at around the time Johns approached her, she was leading the five-member team charged with restoring the skin of the Statue of Liberty.10 Hoheb’s approach was “completely different,” said Johns, because she used a negative mold in which metal was poured to make the positive. In the earlier sand casting process, the positive mold was pressed into earth and the earth filled with metal to make the sculpture.11 One other thing about the Hoheb version that made it different from the earlier sculptures was the fact that hers included the frame that was around the original; earlier versions did not.

  Johns’s project was not complete with the Hoheb mold. He then took it to the Polich Tallix fine art foundry in upstate New York around 1987 to make a silver cast of Flag. Polich Tallix has a long tradition of working with the who’s who of artists, including de Kooning, Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alexander Calder—the last sculptor to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom before Johns. Upon completion at Polich Tallix, Johns elected to keep the silver cast in his home in New York.

  In 1990, Johns had more plans for Flag. This time he turned to Brian Ramnarine, an émigré from Guyana and a trusted artisan with whom he had worked a number of times before, to make a wax positive in his silver mold. Ramnarine, who operated Empire Bronze in New York and whose work was considered by Johns to be excellent, had handled casts for numerous of Johns’s small sculptures in the past. Johns’s instructions to Ramnarine were simple: he told him to make only a wax impression—not an actual metal sculpture—of Flag. At the time, Johns thought he might have his sculpture cast in gold, and wanted to investigate how much metal would be needed and how expensive it would be, thus the direction to Ramnarine to make only a wax figure. Ramnarine obliged and produced the 1 × 11⁄2–foot wax sculpture, which Johns refrigerated in his home on upscale East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Though Johns paid him in full, in cash, Ramnarine failed to return the mold from which he made the wax sculpture. Eager to get his important original mold back, Johns directed a longtime member of his staff, James Meyer, to retrieve it from Ramnarine’s foundry. Meyer came back empty-handed.

  Years later, Jasper Johns paid a visit to Paige Tooker at New Foundry New York Inc. and gave her the Ramnarine-made wax mold with a request to make a new cast of Flag in white bronze. While Tooker is certainly a very skilled craftsperson, Johns’s reasons for not returning to Ramnarine with the wax mold he had made were based on ethics rather than aesthetics. In the early 1990s, after Johns had completed his work with Ramnarine, he was approached by an individual claiming to own an original Flag sculpture and requesting that Johns authenticate it. At one point, the collector forwarded to Johns’s office a letter he had received from Ramnarine that read in part: “This is to certify that the following bronze sculpture is the contribution by artist Jasper Johns to Brian Ramnarine Flag bronze by Jasper Johns. I, Brian Ramnarine, is giving [sic] this bronze sculpture to Sewdutt Harpul.12 Please note this bronze sculpture cannot be sold or displayed in any gallery without the authorization of Brian Ramnarine. All profits sold from this sculpture is 50/50 [sic] between Brian Ramnarine and Harpul.”13 Ramnarine, who is alleged to be illiterate,14 was the apparent author of this letter, which claims that Ramnarine was gifted an authentic copy Flag by Johns.

  After numerous increasingly anxious letters from the collector, the sculpture in question was sent to Johns for his review. The artist immediately recognized that the piece’s source was his work, but that he had no hand in completing it. Examining the back of the sculpture, he found that a copy of his signature was affixed to it. He found it much too neat to be his actual signature, which he typically drew into the wax mold and thus was not as smooth as what he observed on this piece. He also found markings on the back that he had ostensibly put there, but which in fact meant nothing to him in relation to this work or any other of his creations. Unhappy with the discovery of a clear forgery, he took it upon himself to cross out the fake signature on the back of the bronze.

  Though the phony signature was enough to prove to Johns that the piece was a fake, there were other telltale signs, lest there be any doubt. “It’s finished in a way that I would not have finished it,” he would later say. “One detail is . . . that the frame is smooth along the outer edges, whereas the original piece . . . more or less imitates wood with a rough grain. That’s been polished off and removed.”15

  As a next step, Johns contacted the Art Dealers Association in New York seeking advice as how to proceed with the work. Finding them “extremely unhelpful,” he sent the work back to the collector after writing in ink on the sculpture that it was not his work. Thus ended Johns’s association with Brian Ramnarine.16

  This wasn’t the first time that Johns had encountered a counterfeit of one of his works. Art dealer Michael Findlay tells of an incident from 1969 when a friend showed him a large charcoal drawing of a coat hanger signed “J.Johns.” Something about the drawing didn’t seem right to Findlay, and he convinced the owner to allow him to show it to Johns. According to Findlay, “Wordlessly, Johns examined the work then asked if he could remove it from the frame. When he did, and turned it over, we could see that the back was softly scored in pencil horizontally and vertically. A soft ‘Ahh’ escaped from Johns. He explained that what we were looking at was the design for a mailer advertising one of his prints.” The artist was puzzled. “What should I do?” he asked aloud. After a few seconds, Johns found a red pen and across the bottom of the drawing wrote “This is not my work” and signed it with a large and distinctive signature. In a way, Findlay said, it became a work signed by the artist.17

  Kenny Scharf is an American modern artist who became a success working in New York in the 1980s. Scharf, a contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, came east from California inspired by the art of Andy Warhol, whom he would eventually meet and appear alongside in a group exhibition called New York/New Wave.18 A painter and sculptor, his works have consistently sold in a range up to six figures at Christie’s. In around 2000, Scharf created an edition of four sculptures titled Bird in Space, a futuristic bronze piece measuring more than three feet tall by two feet wide and inspired by popular cartoons—a frequent theme for the artist. He chose Brian Ramnarine’s Bronze Foundry and Gallery to cast this work and others because he considered Ramnarine “a great artisan” and had worked with him since 1995.19

  Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to Scharf, Ramnarine took it upon himself to make additional copies of Scharf’s work, each of them unauthorized. He then took the illegitimate sculptures and sold them to unsuspecting collectors for the same prices that Scharf’s originals would fetch. Eventually, Scharf was informed by other artists that they had seen separate copies of his works bearing identical edition numbers. It was then that he began to suspect Ramnarine of forgery and confronted him with the information. Dissatisfied with the response he received from Ramnarine, Scharf directed his lawyer to contact the district attorney’s office.20


  Producing unauthorized sculptures using the methods of Brian Ramnarine presents an especially difficult scenario to the investigation and uncovering of forgery. Whereas in most cases involving forgeries of drawings and paintings the forger has no access to the actual artist’s canvas, brushes, and paints, Ramnarine’s copies involved the use of molds willingly handed over to him by the artist himself. So when he made additional copies of Scharf’s work, the key difference between the real sculptures and the forged sculptures was merely the artist’s authorization to produce the piece.

  Take for example yet another victim of Ramnarine’s during the early 2000s, the Brazilian-born sculptor Saint Clair Cemin. Cemin preferred that his sculptures be made using the lost wax process, in which a mold is made of a sculpture in rubber and plaster. The mold is then filled with wax, which takes the exact shape of the original sculpture. The wax is put into a ceramic that hardens, at which point it is placed into an oven to vaporize the wax, leaving a ceramic shell whose cavity is filled with molten bronze. The ceramic is then broken, and the result is a bronze sculpture.

  Cemin preferred to be very involved in the process of casting his bronze sculptures: inspecting the wax mold, choosing the metals, deciding which items to cast and when, and prescribing the exact number he wanted produced. This last part is key. “The more rare a piece is, the more valuable it is. Also, in my personal case I don’t like to make too many of all a single piece. I don’t think that is necessary or there is any value to it. It devalues the work.”21 As a last step, Cemin would oversee the application of the patina to the final work by the foundry.

  In 1987, Cemin used Brian Ramnarine’s foundry to cast some sculptures for him. Cemin was directly involved in the work, as was typically his wont. Once the work was complete, he had the sculptures made by Ramnarine transported to his studio or directly to galleries. Cemin would sometimes pay Ramnarine for his work by giving him sculptures, including his works Zeno and Homage to Darwin. During this period of collaboration, Cemin worked out of a small studio and lacked adequate space to store his molds, so he left them at Ramnarine’s foundry until 1993, when Cemin moved to a larger studio.

  Two years later, unhappy with the work Ramnarine did for an exhibition in Milan, Italy, Cemin broke ties with him. When he and an assistant went to Ramnarine’s foundry to retrieve the molds that he had stored there, they found that some were missing. He approached Ramnarine, who explained that he was looking for them and might have lost or discarded them. Busy with many other projects, Cemin moved forward and gave the missing molds little further thought.

  A few years later, despite the problems with the Milan exhibition, Cemin could not find a foundry whose work was as high quality as Ramnarine’s, and he reestablished a working relationship with the foundry. Apparently pleased this time with Ramnarine’s work, Cemin gifted him two candleholders from a work he called Tree of Light. It seemed things were going well between Ramnarine and Cemin.

  Meanwhile, things were not so grand for another popular sculptor who had also employed the work of Ramnarine. In the early 1990s, Robert Indiana, the legendary Pop artist, discovered that Ramnarine had sold unauthorized sculptures he falsely attributed to him. Indiana, best known for his widely recognizable and iconic sculpture of the word LOVE (in red with the LO stacked atop the VE), took immediate action, sending associates to Ramnarine’s foundry where they seized any Indiana-related molds, sculptures, and casts.22

  Then in the spring of 2001, Saint Clair Cemin’s secretary received what seemed like troubling news. The two went to the home of collector Dr. Neil Kolsky, where the artist was shown sculptures that resembled his works, including Lady and Lion, II and Chimera. Cemin instantly recognized that these were unauthorized copies. “There was something strange about the patina that I didn’t like,” he recalled. “There was something strange about the finish. It was . . . too shiny. There was something that I wouldn’t like—I didn’t like. It made me very uneasy.”23 Further, he noticed that Dr. Kolsky’s version of Lady and Lion, II bore the same number as the copy he had given to a collector in Mexico who he knew well. Cemin also discovered that Dr. Kolsky’s two candleholders from Tree of Light were also fakes. All of the pieces came from molds that had been in the possession of Brian Ramnarine.

  Clearly disturbed by what he found, Cemin gave Kolsky an original sculpture that he had brought with him in exchange for the forgeries. He packed the bad copies into his car, took them to his studio, and destroyed them. Some months later, Cemin found another unauthorized copy of one of his works—this time a table—in Ramnarine’s foundry. Upset by what he had discovered, he confronted Ramnarine, who, remarkably, told Cemin he could take the table home if he paid for the cost of making it. Cemin responded by smashing the table to pieces right there in the workshop and left.

  As it turned out, Ramnarine had made a large number of unauthorized copies of Cemin’s work, some of which the fraudster dated before Cemin even began sculpting, and this amounted to criminal acts that impacted the artist greatly. “When pieces appear on the market with duplicate numbers, false dates, wrong names, no provenance, completely different finish . . . it is devastating to me, to my career, and to my credibility,” said Cemin. “I think the worst part is the misrepresentation of my work. I work very hard to have . . . pieces that correspond to my vision . . . I am a very well known artist and all of a sudden you have [a] minor gallery that sells the work for a very low price that doesn’t correspond to the reality of my prices with the wrong name, wrong date, and the sculpture is not authorized.” He added, “This is devastating for my profession.”24

  On October 10, 2002, based on information provided by lawyers for Kenny Scharf, Saint Clair Cemin, and others, Brian Ramnarine was indicted by a Queens grand jury and charged with defrauding two art collectors of $140,000 by selling them what were essentially worthless unauthorized copies of sculptures. Five months later he avoided time in jail by pleading guilty to the charges. The 48-year-old artisan was sentenced to five years probation and was ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution.

  Ramnarine’s reputation took another hit after his guilty plea. At the time of his sentencing, the Queens Chronicle reported, a pair of his former foundry employees came forward with claims that Ramnarine hadn’t paid them fully for years and was deeply in debt. Joseph and Miro Krizek, who made mold castings for him for five years, claimed that their paychecks often bounced and that he had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from them. In all, the Krizeks claimed that Ramnarine owed them more than $80,000. “He’s a tremendously mean person,” Miro said. “He has absolutely no shame.”25 Ramnarine’s subsequent behavior would prove her right.

  A criminal conviction for fraud based on the creation of forgeries should have ended Brian Ramnarine’s career as an owner of a fine art foundry. “It’s a golden rule,” Kenny Scharf said. “If you ever want to work again, you just can’t do that.”26 But Ramnarine went back to work not long after his term of probation had expired. And the work he chose was again the peddling of unauthorized sculptures by famous artists.

  In 2010, with the memory of earning illicit income selling forged works apparently more enticing than the prospect of another indictment and conviction, Ramnarine endeavored to sell an unauthorized version of Flag by Jasper Johns. According to a federal indictment, this time he asked an associate to contact an auction house regarding what he said was a bronze Flag created in 1989. He also utilized several art brokers who were in frequent contact with an art collector who lived in the western United States. Ramnarine, whose motive in his prior frauds was alleged to be an effort to overcome his debts, was looking for a big score. His asking price for the purported bronze Flag: $10 million. With that sort of money on the table, the West Coast collector understandably raised questions about the provenance of the sculpture. In response, Ramnarine provided his broker with a fictitious letter dated August 23, 1989, stating that the sculpture was a gift from Johns to Ramnarine.
Ultimately, Ramnarine showed the potential buyer’s representative the sculpture. He even falsely stated that he had an ongoing relationship with Johns and could facilitate a meeting between the two. In fact, Johns stated that at the time he hadn’t been in contact with Ramnarine in 20 years.27

  As a result of his attempt to bilk the West Coast collector out of millions with a forged sculpture, Brian Ramnarine was indicted for fraud on November 14, 2012, this time by a federal grand jury. The next day, FBI agents arrested the foundry owner, now 58 years old, at his home in Queens. At his arraignment, Ramnarine pleaded not guilty to the charges and was granted bail by the federal magistrate. Incredibly, while out on bail, Ramnarine continued his criminal ways, undertaking efforts to defraud an online gallery located in Queens by selling them two fake sculptures—Two and Orb—that he fraudulently claimed were made and authorized by Robert Indiana. He also again sold fakes attributed to Saint Clair Cemin to the gallery. In all, he swindled his victim out of $30,000.28

  In January 2014, his case went to trial in federal criminal court in the Southern District of New York, with the subsequent crimes involving the online gallery added to the charges against him. The trial quickly gained national headlines when it was revealed that Jasper Johns, arguably America’s greatest living artist, was set to testify as a government witness. In a remarkable—if not surreal—day of testimony, Johns and Cemin both took the stand and testified at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Manhattan. Cemin told of the wide-ranging fraud that Ramnarine had committed involving the unauthorized reproduction of his works. And later in the day, after his secretary Sarah Taggart had testified, Johns took the stand.

  Johns is notoriously terse, and the prospect of hearing the octogenarian artist answer direct and cross-examination was a rare opportunity for those in the courtroom (federal trials are not televised). But if the defense was hoping that Johns’s legendary laconic nature and his status as a contemporary artist might make him difficult to discern for a jury, their hopes were dashed when he took the stand. Johns described the process of making sculptures, his activity surrounding the iconic sculpture, and the way in which Ramnarine had betrayed him in clear and understandable terms. When asked by a prosecutor if he had given Ramnarine the multimillion-dollar painting as a gift, Johns replied with a chuckle, “No.”