Art
New book revisits 1960s art fraud that stained Canada’s art scene with forgeries
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It was just another rainy Saturday when art historian Jon S. Dellandrea received a phone call from a Toronto art dealer about a box of “mysterious things at the edge of the art world.”
“Here’s this box full of papers and personal writing and clippings from the newspapers, and [a] person’s death certificate and articles from describing the art fraud case — and [I’ve] not the foggiest clue who this person was.,” he told The Current guest host Mark Kelley.
Dellandrea initially turned the box down, but was convinced by his wife to take the project on.
That decision led him down a path to investigate a painter named William Firth MacGregor and his forgeries of paintings by Group of Seven artists, like A.Y. Jackson, and others, that, in part, defined the great Canadian art fraud case of the 1960s.
First identified by Russell Harper, the National Gallery of Canada’s chief curator of Canadian art, the case captured national media attention from 1962 to 1964.
It culminated in a dramatic Toronto court case that saw Haynes Art Gallery owner Leslie W. Lewis and art dealer Neil Sharkey convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison.
Sixty years later, that case is the subject of Dellandrea’s latest book, The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven & Tom Thomson Forgeries.
Many of the forgeries are likely still hanging on someone’s wall today, but their current whereabouts are unknown, Dellandrea said.
“[The forgeries] totally undermined the art market,” he said. “You have no confidence that the A.Y. Jackson painting that you just took your hard-saved money and bought for $1,000 was worth $1,000 or was worth the $20 that the frame cost.”
An unfortunate painter
Although Dellandrea didn’t know who MacGregor was at the time, he found that the painter was one of the key characters in this.
He had immigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1925, and was a “brilliantly trained artist,” according to Dellandrea, and worked at a Vancouver school with Group of Seven member Fred Varley for a period of time.
Dellandrea said he disappeared for a few decades after his initial success, but re-emerged in the 1960s by creating knock-off pieces for an art dealer named Neil Sharkey.
“He thought [they] were just being given away or sold as souvenirs or something,” Dellandrea said. “Then he finds himself at the centre of the art fraud.”
Sharkey had framed some of MacGregor’s earlier original works before the scheme. He would bring the unassuming MacGregor books like A.Y. Jackson’s A Painter’s Country, and get him to make “wonderful little copies of the paintings,” said Dellandrea.
Sharkey would then dress them up with fancy frames and brass plaques, “rub a little dirt on the back to make them look older, and then run them through auction at board price,” he added.
MacGregor didn’t get a fair share either. Dellandrea said Sharkey paid MacGregor $5 for each copy, while the forgery would sell anywhere between $950 and $1,500 at auctions.
The forger was ultimately just a witness in the case. But if there was any consolation, some of the painters he copied saw his forgeries as exceptional work.
“So Jackson, on the stand, seeing one painting after another, he would say, ‘That’s awful. I would never would have painted that, that’s disgusting. Then those little ones over there, those are rather good,'” Dellandrea said.
“Those were the work of William Firth MacGregor.”
The Casson tapes
At the other end of the case were inspector James Erskine and A.J. Casson, the youngest living member of the Group of Seven.
Dellandrea said there’s first-hand evidence of how they got along together, through audio cassette tapes unearthed by Casson’s daughter.
“This was an oral history recollection by Casson of his entire life, and about six of these tapes were specifically about the art fraud,” he said.
In one tape recorded at a dinner party, Erskine tells Casson, their wives and Casson’s artist friend Alan Collier that “he knew absolutely nothing” about the case, and was pointed in the direction of Casson.
The two soon became fast friends. While Erskine, a future commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police, did the sleuthing, Casson helped identify forgeries of paintings belonging to him and other Group of Seven members.
“I went looking for an expert, and I obtained a list of possible experts, and he was head and shoulders over the other persons I considered,” Erskine said of Casson, in a 1979 interview with The Fifth Estate.
In the end, dozens of paintings were used in the trial as evidence, including several made by MacGregor, and many of the paintings seized ended up in Erskine’s basement for a time.
“That was the tip of the iceberg because Casson, in the tape, said that one night, Erskine got a call from the attorney general who’s had enough [of the inspector’s work],” Dallendrea said.
“According to Casson, Erskine was quote unquote mad as hops, and Casson said ‘We could have had 500 paintings in that courtroom rather than the hundreds that were there.’
“So there’s a flood still rolling around the ocean of art.”
Art
Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo – artnet News
This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Photo by Annie Armstrong.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
A lucky passerby collecting a couple of figurative cut-outs by Mary Beth Edelson. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
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Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column.
In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones.
Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole lot more.
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