The owner of a well-known New York art gallery has plead guilty to selling forgeries of paintings by Renoir, Chagall, Modigliani and Gaugin. Ely Sakhai, owner of New York's Exclusive Art gallery, faces several years in jail, must forfeit 11 original artworks and pay back $12.5 million.
For 15 years, he and his office manager bought authentic paintings then hired artists to make highly detailed copies. The forgeries were then sold to private buyers and galleries as authentic. The claim that these were authentic works was made possible by replicating markings on the backs of canvases, forged certificates of identity and frames made to look older.
The gallery made copies of works including Renoir's Jeune Femme S'Essuyant and Chagall's Les Maries au Bouquet de Fleurs, which were sold to galleries in Tokyo and Taipei.
Eventually, some of the originals were sold off. The fraud came to light after one painting was put on sale at two different auction houses twice in one month.
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