A Seattle artist and the auction frenzy that sparked an FBI tip

Red flags 

Back again at the castle, Kucera scrutinized the painting peering back again at him from the notebook display in his darkened bed room. ABC Gallery was attempting to move off this painting as a real Burpee, he figured. They’d even given it a plausible identify, he imagined: “Soft Cradle,” penned in all caps on the back of the canvas along with Mason’s “signature” in naive cursive and the words “mix oil.” (“Soft Cradle” is the name of a muted Burpee painting Mason produced in 1974.)

For Kucera, there have been as well lots of pink flags. The dimension wasn’t suitable: Mason wouldn’t have utilised canvases sized in fifty percent-inches. The painting seemed unprimed, but Mason greatly well prepared his canvases with levels of white gesso (a chalky paint) so that his paint mixture wouldn’t soak in but somewhat floated on the surface area. And Mason would have hardly ever stretched a canvas like this, with stretcher bars and tacks somewhat than staples — Kucera would know: He’d labored as Mason’s studio assistant for four a long time before starting to be his gallerist. 

But there ended up additional intangible clues, way too. “The paint locations just have no spontaneity to them,” Kucera wrote in an email. “There’s no music to the arrangement no jazz to the aspects. It’s a analyzed portray by a person who’s striving to recreate what Mason did just by on the lookout at electronic photographs.” 

Fellow Alden connoisseurs Huang, Braseth and Cascadia Artwork Museum curator and Pacific Northwest artwork historian David F. Martin concur. “It’s a terrible portray,” Martin wrote in an email, “no way that Alden painted that mess.” 

Kucera thought so, too. So he emailed ABC Gallery. Wherever experienced they gotten this painting? “Provenance: From a distinguished company collection, Washington,” anyone named “Julissa” wrote again to Kucera in early December. “Hope you want to get this painting. Pls let’s know,” Julissa additional. Kucera adopted up. Which corporation? “Diane Gilson Gallery in Seattle,” Julissa responded a number of hours afterwards. 

Odd. That was the identify of a gallery that closed in 1983, not a single of the lots of corporations that experienced basically procured Mason’s function for the duration of his lifetime. Kucera pressed all over again — and yet again the tale altered. Now it was staffers who’d presented Julissa incorrect information. The next working day, she emailed yet again: The portray was in fact painted in the model of the artist. 

“Definitely this painting was not acquired in the gallery that was indicated, but relaxation assured that an artist with delicacy and fantastic style captured this portray in the best way and likeness, an artist who has the needed knowledge to be capable to transmit what the authentic artist needed to do,” Julissa wrote.

Kucera does not know when exactly the description of “Soft Cradle” adjusted on the net, but at some position “in the model of”’ appeared at the end of the listing, he claims. “Which indicates that we don’t know for certain the origin of the painting, considering the fact that we do not have certifiers of these is effective of art in my country,” the accompanying textual content reads. But the “Alden Mason” signature was even now on the again of the portray. 

In the meantime, Huang, from her Seattle gallery, had alerted the FBI’s Artwork Crime unit. “I question if this is of desire, a bogus Alden Mason portray listed for auction,” she wrote. “His more mature paintings, Burpee Backyard garden Collection operates, have been obtaining amazing prices at auction recently.” 

Requested whether the FBI’s Art Crime Unit experienced opened an investigation, a spokesperson for the FBI responded: “In preserving with DOJ normal exercise, we neither affirm nor deny the existence of an investigation.” Spanish police did not answer to issues about the existence of an investigation.