Jay Grimm is an appraiser and he’s been spending time at the de Sole-Freedman trial downtown. He caught Dedalus Foundation head Jack Flam’s testimony on Wednesday about the Robert Motherwell paintings he deemed “looked more like the Elegies than the Elegies themselves.”

According to Grimm’s report, Flam is the first witness to have had a sustained and oppositional relationship with Freedman. He got involved with the Knoedler fakes rather late, long after Freedman had sold numerous works and was deeply invested in her story of David Herbert and his supposed relationship with a collector who lived in Mexico and Switzerland:

Flam’s testimony today was that starting in 2007, he repeatedly warned Freedman that these works were likely fake but she rebuffed him every time, obstinately clinging to the fantasy of their mysterious provenance. […] Flam started expressing his doubts to Freedman around then, and ever more so as time went on as his inquiries yielded worrying results. Freedman for her part maintained all along that they were authentic.  At an impasse, they mutually decided to submit the works to forensic testing in early 2008 but Freedman was not forthcoming about the outcome of this testing.  By November, 2008, after repeated nagging from Flam, Freedman finally showed him some of the results of this scientific examination, which was damning.  Freedman nevertheless persisted in requesting additional research, which Flam/Daedalus did and which again seemed to prove that the works were fake.  Finally Freedman stopped returning his calls.

Extraordinary Assumptions