Megan Swift is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 724-850-1204, mswift@triblive.com or via Twitter .

The French antique furniture expert Bill Pallot is set to face trial on charges of forgery. According to the suit, the furniture collector and dealer allegedly falsely claimed items were from the 18th century, and sold pieces at high prices to buyers, including the Palace of Versailles.

A court northwest of Paris released their conclusions to an more than seven-years-long investigation into the shocking case, allowing proceedings to head to trial at a still-unspecified date.

Pallot, nicknamed “Père La Chaise” (meaning “Father of the chair”) in a pun on the famous Paris cemetery Père Lachaise, stands accused of commissioning dozens of fake Louis XVI gilded seats, some of which were eventually sold to the Palace of Versailles and the Prince Hamad al Thani for millions of dollars between 2008 and 2014.

Pallot reportedly admitted to the fraud but told investigators he had initially only wanted to see whether he could fool other experts. He commissioned the suspect pieces from the trusted carpenter Bruno Desnoues, who regularly completed special restoration projects for the Palace of Versailles.

Together, they allegedly made chairs which they said had decorated the lustrous salons of the likes of Countess du Barry, a favorite mistress of King Louis XV, and Marie-Antoinette. In 2016, as news of the scandal broke, Pallot served four months in prison but has since returned to working in the antique furniture industry in varied capacities, according to French reports.

The Palace of Versailles is the main victim to be listed in the released court ruling, and as a result of its involvement, was subject to a government-commissioned inspection into its acquisition protocols between 2008 and 2012, which had a total a value of €2.7 million ($ 2.9 million). The ensuing report found “malfunctions” and a “lack of vigilance” by the institution, and tasked it with “profoundly revising” their acquisition procedures “as soon as possible.”

For his part, Desnoues, who also admitted to knowingly making and profiting from the swindle, faces charges alongside Pallot, whose lawyer was not able to comment at the time of writing.

Among the others called to trial in the ruling released on November 13 was the respected antique dealer Laurent Kraemer, whose eponymous gallery was founded in 1875. However, charges against Kraemer have been drastically reduced. Initially, he was accused of fraud; he now faces lesser charges of negligence. In 2015 the gallery allegedly sold two fake chairs to Prince Hamad al Thani for €2 million ($2.18 million), which were supposedly commissioned by Marie-Antoinette, but which Desnoues had recently made for Pallot with such historic accuracy. They were declared national treasures by the French state in 2013. The gallery later reimbursed Hamad al Thani.

In written messages and phone conversations, Kraemer’s legal representatives and employees vehemently denied any wrongdoing, and lamented the dealer’s involvement in a scandal that has tarnished his reputation, as well as the French antiquities market.

Since Kraemer was first interrogated, “charges [against him] have melted like snow in the sun,” stated his lawyers, Martin Reynaud and Mauricia Courrégé. “They spoke of fraud, which today, has become an issue of negligence, which we firmly contest,” added the duo. Initially accused of selling four fake chairs, that number has been reduced to two. “The entire investigation demonstrates that the Kraemers did not know that this furniture was fake,” they added. “The Kraemer gallery was fooled, and with it, all the greatest French experts on 18th-century furniture.”

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Collectors from around the world shopping for art in the primary market will soon have a new online avenue to acquire works they want from a reputable source, but this time, they will be required to pledge a donation to a charity along with purchasing a work they desire.

Such is the basis of Access by Art Basel, a new online sales platform by the Swiss fair giant that aims to bridge primary art market activities with philanthropy. Featuring over a dozen works from galleries participating at the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach, the platform will make its debut on Monday (November 27) ahead of next month’s fair, Art Basel announced on Thursday. It is a pilot project and it may be extended to future Art Basel fairs.

Access by Art Basel is developed by Arcual, a technology company launched in 2022 and backed by Art Basel’s parent company MCH Group, as well as the Luma Foundation and BCG X. While Arcual specializes in blockchain solutions for galleries, Access will not run on the blockchain.

Collectors will be able to browse the works available for sale via Access from Monday onwards. They can submit a request to purchase a work they desire through December 10, the last day of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Works are sold at a fixed price, but there is a bidding aspect to the sale in that collectors will be required to pledge a donation to a charity of their choice between the Miami Foundation or the International Committee of the Red Cross, with a minimum amount of donation beginning 10 percent of the listing price of the artwork. However, it will be up to the gallery to decide to whom a work to be sold, and the donation won’t come into effect until the sale takes place.

Art Basel Miami Beach 2022. Image courtesy of Art Basel.

“We wanted to deliver a platform that meaningfully and effectively supports the causes that matter to our galleries and their artists, while allowing them to remain the beneficiaries of 100 percent of the sale on artworks,” noted Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, in a statement.

During his previous tenure at Sotheby’s, Horowitz launched a similar platform called Artist’s Choice that ran alongside the Contemporary Curated sale in New York in September 2022; for each lot sold, a 15 percent donation was made to a charity or institution selected by the artist.

Over a dozen galleries will take part in the pilot edition of Access by Art Basel by invitation, including Pace and François Ghebaly. Featured works include those by the Miami-based Herman Bas at Fredric Snitzer, New York-based Katherine Bradford at Kaufmann Repetto, Taipei-based Wu Chi-Tsung at Sean Kelly, American artist Rafael Delacruz at Michel-Innes & Nash. Mendes Wood DM will be offering works by Jaider Esbell, Sprüth Magers will feature Jenny Holzer, alongside works by Mark Handforth at Luhring Augustine, Angel Otero at Hauser & Wirth, Chelsea Ryoko Wong at Jessica Silverman, and Maja Ruznic at Karma.

Galleries are not required to pay a fee to take part, and Art Basel is not taking any share in sales. These works will also be shown at the fair from December 6 onwards but they will be sold exclusively only on Access.

“This is a great development for Art Basel. To me it seems like green shoots of responsible and sustainable collecting that aligns artists and collector values, because this is necessary right now. I think this is what as a business they have also identified as necessary,” noted art advisor Janna Lang. “The world is not well.” Art Basel will be making a $25,000 donation on the occasion of the launch of Access, with the amount to be split evenly between the Miami Foundation and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

While some in the art world are skeptical about the new platform, Lang did not see this as another tool for sales. “I see this as a tool to make sales that would be made anyway, but with the addition of some impactful investing.”

Some dealers have reflected that collectors and art buyers have become increasingly aggressive asking for discounts for primary sales recently as the market is getting softer. While discounts are not uncommon, a sales initiative that requires the buyer to make a charitable donation on top of the sale of an artwork can make people do more when the world is clouded by uncertainties and warfares, noted one advisor who does not wish to be named. “At the end of the day, there’s some money,” the art advisor said.

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At the top of the art market pyramid, 44 artworks fetched $10 million or more each during the two weeks of marquee sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. This elite group totaled $1.1 billion—accounting for a half of the season’s $2.2 billion tally. Just six female artists were part of the cohort, including two living ones: Julie Mehretu and Jenny Saville.

This was no small feat: Artnet Price Database lists 1,854 lots offered at the three auction houses in New York from November 6 to 17. The top lot of the season, Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la montre (1932), sold for $139.4 million. Saville ranked 41st and Mehretu 42nd, surpassing major artists whose works sold for less, including Willem de Kooning, Donald Judd, and David Hockney.

You go, girls! (In addition, Joan Mitchell’s paintings ranked 14th and 15th, Agnes Martin ranked 26th, Tamara de Lempicka 29th, and Barbara Hepworth 38th).  

While personally I am always rooting for amazing female artists who’ve been undervalued for centuries, there was something else  about these two works that intrigued me. They came up for sale within minutes of each other at “The Now” auction at Sotheby’s on November 15. I covered this sale for Artnet’s “By the Numbers” column, which required tracking down hammer prices and final prices as well as all kinds of other revealing yet geeky data.

Jenny Saville, Shift (1996-97). Image courtesy Sotheby’s.

Saville’s massive Shift depicts six naked female bodies claustrophobically squashed together, right-side-up and upside-down. Measuring almost 11-feet-high and 11-feet-wide, the canvas is mesmerizing, at once glorious and revolting. The effect of its full-frontal nudity is disquieting and oddly dehumanizing.

It appeared in the Royal Academy of Art’s famous 1998 exhibition, “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” which later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, igniting the ire of mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

In 2016, Shift came up for sale at another turbulent moment: the Brexit vote in London. Estimated at £1.5 million to £2 million, it soared to £6.8 million ($9 million), setting a record for the British painter. The buyer was Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian, who was on a spree in those years to fill up a private museum in Shanghai.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Yocks (1975). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

This fall, Yiqian emerged as a major seller, with whispers about the Long Museum’s financial troubles and uncertain plans. Liu has unloaded about $100 million worth of art in the past two months. Most were designated as “A Long Journey: A Selection From The Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei Collection.” But some—like Yocks by Barkley L. Hendricks ($8.7 million)—were sold anonymously, a move that raised a few eyebrows in the trade.

Back to Saville. Like the rest of Liu’s collection, Shift was guaranteed by Sotheby’s. Estimated at $9 million to $12 million, the lot carried an irrevocable bid, ensuring it would sell. Bidding started at $7 million and hammered for $9.2 million.  After the fees, the final price was recorded as $10.9 million. The buyer was Lisa Dennison, Sotheby’s chairman of the Americas, wielding Paddle 8 on behalf of an anonymous client.

Julie Mehretu, Walkers With the Dawn and Morning (2008). Courtesy Sotheby’s.

Two lots later came Mehretu’s monumental 2008 abstraction, Walkers With the Dawn and Morning. Measuring almost 8 by 12, the painting is a tour de force of linework and calligraphy, intersected by red strips that activate the mostly grisaille composition. Created in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it was exhibited at the original Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, as a celebration of black community’s survival and resilience.

The painting was consigned anonymously by mega-collector Michael Ovitz along with several other works. It was estimated at $7 million to $10 million. Bidding started at $5.5 million and progressed quickly to $9.5 million. As with Saville, the painting was guaranteed by Sotheby’s and backed with an irrevocable bid. And as with Saville, the winning bid came from the client represented by Dennison’s Paddle 8.

When the final results of “The Now” sale came in from Sotheby’s, Saville’s Shift was listed as the top lot, at $10.9 million, followed by Mehretu’s painting, at $10.7 million.

This seemed confusing. A painting that hammered at a lower number ($9.2 million) ended up with a higher final price than the work that hammered at a higher number ($9.5 million).

I went back to Sotheby’s to double check. A representative confirmed the pricing and clarified that Sotheby’s reports final prices as net of fees paid to third-party guarantors. On top of a regular Buyer’s Premium, Sotheby’s takes another 1 percent of the hammer price as its Overhead Premium. According to my calculations, after these additional fees added to the hammer price of $9.5 million, Mehretu’s Walkers With the Dawn and Morning should have totaled $11.25 million. Logically, it should have been the top lot of “The Now” auction, not Saville’s Shift.

Yet because Sotheby’s accounted for a $500,000 fee to the backer, the lot’s final price ended up being less.

The same scenario would have yielded a totally different outcome at Christie’s and Phillips, which report final prices as the Hammer Price plus Buyer’s Premium, following last year’s change in New York City Council’s auction industry regulations.

(For five years starting in 2017, the houses were required to report prices net of fixed fees on guaranteed lots sold to the third-party guarantors.)

This whole situation made me wonder: Do we even care about the final prices? And why?

Mehretu’s result, net of fees, set a new record for an African-born artist and became a new personal auction high. The artist, of course, won’t see a penny from this transaction. This metric will mostly benefit the auction houses in their spin campaigns and future consignment wins. (Although auction records indirectly affect primary prices and demand.)

If anything, the incident is a sign of the further financialization of the art market. It underscores how little the public knows what’s really happening in these high-stakes, staged and heavily managed public extravaganzas, transmitted around the world.

I reached out to Belgian collector Alain Servais, an astute and often irreverent market observer and my go-to source for geeky deep-dives. “What is the final price?” Servais asked rhetorically. “There isn’t one.”

That’s because there are all kinds of invisible fees baked into these prices that get split between the auction houses, consignors, buyers, and backers depending on a myriad of factors.

You may recall how art dealer Leo Koenig backed Gerhard Richter’s 36-foot-wide painting Strip at $1 million, half the low estimate. He didn’t get any fee for this lowball bid.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait as a Heel (Part Two) (1982). Image courtesy Sotheby’s

On the other hand, the backer of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cover lot Self-portrait as a Heel (Part Two) at Sotheby’s got a $3.1 million fee for offering a $39 million bid on the work that had been estimated at $40 million to $60 million. (The final price, inclusive to the Buyer’s Premium, should have been $45.1 million, but was reported at $42 million.)

These are just a couple of lots I spotted and deconstructed. I am sure there are countless others.

We tend to think about the auctions as a public stage, auction prices as monolithic markers, and guarantees as uniform deals. But dig a little, and you’ll feel the ground shifting under your feet. Nothing is what it seems.

“Everybody’s got different arrangements,” Servais said. “All is negotiable.”

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Thursday, November 23, 2023–10:05 p.m.

-News Release-

The Georgia’s Rome Welcome Center and Gift Shop invites the public to the 2023 Georgia’s Rome Winter Art Market held December 2-3 at the Rome Civic Center. The market will be open from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

The annual holiday event offers one-of-a-kind gifts featuring over 60 local artisans and vendors. Shop a large variety of local art including woodworking, jewelry, apparel, pottery, handmade soaps, photography, and more. Food vendors will also be on-site offering delicious lunches, jellies and jams, coffee, baked goods, and more. 

 “We always strive to support the talented local artists in our hometown, Rome, Georgia,” said Charlene Mathis, Georgia’s Rome Welcome Center and Gift Shop Manager. Admission and parking are free. The Rome Civic Center is located on Jackson Hill across from Applebee’s at 402 Civic Center Drive. 

For questions, contact the Georgia’s Rome Welcome Center and Gift Shop at 706-295-5576.

Shepherd University senior Margaret Orlando, left, chats with Art Market sellers Elliana Blevins and Kimberly Workman, right, in Evolve on Friday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — The Shepherd University Department of Contemporary Art and Theater’s annual Art Market came back to life last week, as students who took Professor of Art Sonya Evanisko’s Art Market class filled Evolve with a vibrant array of artistic designs.

For graphic design student Japheth Whitmore, participating in the class and market was an opportunity to learn how to create unique art and market it to a paying audience.

“The idea behind this, is that in the graphic design student group that I’m with, I used to bring up Mothman a couple times,” Whitmore said, referring to one of a number of cryptids that he had featured on laser-engraved wooden ornaments and coasters. “When Art Market came around, I thought, ‘How I could market this?’ Selling cryptid merchandise is a fun thing to do. I ended up expanding it into a bunch of cryptid designs, so that I have two from each state in the surrounding area.”

Whitmore said that, after receiving an overwhelmingly positive response at the market to his cryptids, which also included characters like Bigfoot, Snallygaster, the Flatwoods monster and Chessie, he plans to open up an Etsy shop selling similar merchandise.

Many other Art Market sellers had similar plans to use what they had learned through this class to sell art, both at in-person events similar to the Art Market and on online platforms.

Shepherd University Professor of Art Sonya Evanisko, left, chats with Assistant Professor of Business Administration James Dovel and College of Business Dean Ben Martz outside of the Art Market on Friday afternoon. Tabitha Johnston

“I’ve enjoyed this so much, I think I’m going to continue it as a business — at least during the summers, when I’m not in school 24/7,” said painting major Elliana Blevins, noting “BookTok” or book-related TikToks, inspired her multi-media art in the market. “Sonya encouraged me to take the class. It’s been very stressful, but once everything started coming together, it’s been really cool!”

The students in the Art Market may be getting a helping hand in actualizing their art business dreams from their fellow students in the College of Business, according to College of Business Dean Ben Martz.

“We have embedded in the business program, a capstone class. We usually bundle three or four or five students into a capstone project together every semester, who then create a business plan for an actual business. The possibility exists to have an artist ask for a capstone project to be focused on their business idea,” Martz said, after taking a walk through the Art Market on Friday afternoon.

Community members gaze at the work of Shepherd University art students in this year’s Art Market at Evolve on Friday. Tabitha Johnston