Painter of American Modern Forgeries Identified

The New York Times is doing an excellent job of mapping the entire story of the fraudulent American Modern works that were sold by Glafira Rosales. Today a team of reporters identified the man who made the paintings, Pei-Shen Qian, a 73-year-old Chinese artist who fled to the US after the Cultural Revolution:

Long before Mr. Qian settled in Queens, he worked as an artist. He grew up in the island city of Zhoushan and in Shanghai, according to a 2004 interview with a Chinese television station. When he was in his 30s, Mr. Qian took part in a daring experimental art movement in Shanghai in the late 1970s as the Cultural Revolution was ending.

Abstract art was considered a symbol of bourgeois decadence, but Mr. Qian and his fellow artists organized their own unofficial exhibition with work that employed abstracted forms. A 1987 exhibition at the Community Folk Art Gallery in Syracuse revisited that period with a show of six artists that included Mr. Qian.

In 1981, Mr. Qian came to New York, where he and his friend Mr. Zhang took art classes together at the Art Students League on West 57th Street. […] By the 1990s, Mr. Qian was becoming increasingly disenchanted with his own work. A fellow artist, Chen Danqing, recalled that period in an article he wrote for a Chinese art magazine in 2006. “The things we had done before became like dust in the wind,” he wrote. He described his friend, then in his 40s, as “homesick” and “lost.”