The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World (10 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”

Little more was needed to convince Ramnarine and his attorneys that their prospects were dim. Facing a maximum term of 80 years in prison (including 20 for the crimes he committed after his arrest), he pleaded guilty just days after Johns’s testimony, admitting to three counts of fraud. As part of the plea deal, he also agreed not to challenge any sentence of ten years or less in prison administered by District Court judge John G. Koeltl. In their sentencing recommendation to the judge, prosecutors sought a severe sentence, departing from the opinion of federal probation recommendations and arguing that Ramnarine’s pattern of behavior warranted stiff punishment. “Here, the defendant pled guilty on the fifth day of trial, only after six witnesses had powerfully testified against him,” assistant United States attorney Daniel Tehrani wrote. Arguing against the prospect of Ramnarine receiving a lesser sentence because he pleaded guilty, Tehrani continued, “Because the defendant did not admit to his criminal conduct until after the Government had compellingly begun to prove its case (including presenting virtually all of the evidence of the Cemin fraud), [an] acceptance of responsibility reduction is not merited.”
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Before his guilty plea, Ramnarine and his attorneys gave indications to Judge Koeltl that they intended to introduce an argument involving one of Jasper Johns’s assistants as part of their defense. That assistant, James Meyer, was the man who had originally and unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve the mold for
Flag
back in 1990. Incredibly, Meyer had appeared in federal district court related to the theft of Johns’s works within just days of the artist’s testimony in
US v. Ramnarine.
But Meyer’s appearance was not related to Ramnarine’s
crimes. Instead, he was also arrested by federal agents in an unrelated investigation for selling works by Jasper Johns that he claimed were gifts from the artist.

James Meyer is an artist in his own right, albeit not in the same stratosphere as Johns. He has received some critical acclaim for his work, much of which addresses perceptions of suburban America. His love of creating art extends back to his grade school days, and he has said that school was where he “saw that drawing was the only thing [he] did well.”
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Soon, he would be asked to create murals while still a student and would eventually move to Washington, D.C., as a young man to begin his career as a professional artist. By the early 1980s, however, he had moved back to New York, where he would occasionally see his paintings shown at local galleries.
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At 22, he was earning $6 an hour selling copies of other artists’ masterworks to restaurants.
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But soon he would win praise for his paintings and ultimately saw his works included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. By 2014 his work would appear in more than 50 group shows.
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Undoubtedly, his work under Jasper Johns had a great influence on his career and would prove to be the key to his rise in standing as an American artist.