The “David Herbert collection” was said to be one of the great troves of unknown Abstract Expressionist masterpieces—Pollocks, de Koonings, Rothkos, etc. But is it? The reputations of New York’s once venerable Knoedler gallery and of art-world doyenne Ann Freedman hang on the answer
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Eight years after Larry Rivers’s death, both his pioneering art and his hypersexual private life are getting fresh attention. In the 70s, he filmed his adolescent daughters topless for a documentary, Growing, that the younger one, Emma Rivers Tamburlini, says is nothing less than child pornography. With battle lines drawn between Emma and those who guard Rivers’s legacy, the author asks whether the artist was shattering taboos or destroying innocence.
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Signed by the artist, certified by his estate—it's got to be an original Andy Warhol, right? Not unless the Warhol authentication board says so. But dealers and collectors are crying foul over the four-member board's perplexing verdicts, which have turned high-priced art into wall decoration
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Eight years after his death, Francis Bacon, perhaps England’s most acclaimed painter since Turner, is at the center of a major scandal. John Edwards, a former pub manager who is the painter’s heir, has sued Bacon’s longtime dealer, Marlborough Fine Art. Examining charges that the gallery cheated both the artist and Edwards, its chicanery shielded by a token Liechtenstein branch, Michael Shnayerson finds that all the parties in this scandal may have had hidden motives, including Bacon himself.
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