John D. Re: Art Expert?
Here we go again, likely the title is someone you’ve never heard of but he has been lauded by some as an art expert who helped them purchase incredible pieces for absolute steals. However, as I’m sure you’re realizing, nothing is ever that simple here.
John D. Re
Let’s just jump right into who this man is, shall we? Re is from East Hampton, New York where he lives his entire life. I’ll give you a bit of his background, his first brush (and it was more than a brush) with the law came in September, 1995 when he was arrested, along with two other men and charged with printing stacks of $20 bills. The men said they were never planning to pass the bills off as real but sell them for 25ȼ on the dollar……sure. One of their first customers was an undercover agent who agreed to buy $10,000 of the fake bills for $2,000 in real cash and after the deal went down the next day the men were arrested on possession of forged instrument charges. The Secret Service rated the forged bills “6 on a 10-point scale, in a Times article, calling them passable” (McMorrow, 2014). Re was sentenced to two and a half to seven years and ended up serving two years in prison.
He was released from prison in 1997 and immediately began looking for work. One of the places where he applied was an art gallery in East Hampton who promptly turned him down. A few months after the rejection, Re returned to the gallery asking if they bought paintings, explaining that he had a Picasso. He brought the painting in and the gallery owner said “I don’t know where you got this, but take it back; it is not real” (McMorrow, 2014). Re insisted it was authentic but eventually left the gallery. But, a few weeks later he was back again with two other men and an allegedly authentic Winslow Homer painting to sell, this too was deemed fake and not purchased by the gallery owner. Re seemingly decided that trying to sell in person was too difficult and limiting so he turned to another avenue, the internet.
In 2000, Re made an eBay account. In the early days of eBay there was no differentiation between reviews left by sellers or buyers on an individual's page so Re built up a bunch of glowing reviews by purchasing things from others, making it seem, to prospective buyers from him, that he was reputable and trustworthy. In 2001 he began to sell artwork on the online bidding platform. As pieces by Pollock and Willem de Kooning, that Re said he had purchased from an elderly couple who had been in the antiques business, sold he was left with many glowing reviews from buyers:
“We love you Jon, The Picasso is great. You have integrity & honesty. You’re #1.”
“A lovely painting! Best packing ever!! First-rate seller!!! Thank you!!!!”
“Spectacular work of art!”
“Outstanding piece, great price, full providence, lightning ship. $21K+ trans” (McMorrow, 2014)
The more reviews he got, the more he sold and was making a pretty nice income.
However, this all started to crumble when Re’s key clients (known in court documents as Collector 1, Collector 2, and Collector 3) started to show their newly purchased masterpieces to other people. In 2007, Collector 1 showed one of the Pollocks he had purchased to an art expert and discovered that the materials used to create the painting were not available during Pollock’s lifetime. Collector 2 went to the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR) in 2011 for authentication help, despite Re trying to dissuade them from doing this. The IFAR examined 45 paintings in total and determined they were all fake, noting “the paintings were remarkably, and disturbingly, analogous to each other in palette, composition, and overall execution, much more similar, in fact, than any of Pollock’s authentic works are to each other” (Cascone, 2014). Collector 3 also discovered that their purchases were forgeries when they licked their finger and tried to wipe away a smudge of dirt and some paint came off.
This is when the FBI got involved, specifically their Art Theft & Fraud division. Agent Meredith Savona estimates that between 2005 and 2014 Re sold around 60 Pollock paintings through eBay, making close to $2 million from those sales alone. He was also selling de Koonings during this period so he likely made much more than that.
The FBI tapped Re’s phone and monitored his email correspondence while building their case against him. Through this they learned that he had letters of authenticity for the Pollock paintings from the original owners (the elderly couple who he had allegedly purchased them from) and that he thought the FBI’s case was weak.
Agent Savona also noted the low (compared to other de Koonings and Pollocks) prices that Re was charging for these pieces saying “the prices for the paintings are many multiples below the market prices realized for authentic works by Pollock” (McMorrow, 2014). Re, however, had an answer for this. He said that the couple who originally owned the paintings tried to have them authenticated in the 1980s but was turned away by an art expert at the time which led to a deep distrust of the established process for authenticating art and especially of the IFAR, which Re says is too secretive. “He believes there are probably many works by artists of de Kooning’s and Pollock’s stature that are authentic, but will never be treated as such. You have to remember, these guys gave their stuff away, for bar bills, for hookers” (McMorrow, 2014). Therefore, Re sees two art markets; one with the blue-chip formally authenticated pieces that sell for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and one with works that have not been authenticated but are real that are much cheaper.
Re was arrested in 2014 and charged with wire fraud and failure to pay income tax. In December 2014, he pled guilty to one count of wire fraud. (I wasn’t able to find anything about his sentencing easily). Some still defend him as a legitimate art dealer to this day and some write him off as a fraudster just out to make money.
As a fun fact, after this all happened, in 2004, he purchased a submarine from eBay from a back lot at Universal Studios and called it the U.S.S. Deep Quest. He claimed it was built in 1967 by Lockheed and used in the US Navy, even planting an American flag on the floor of the Pacific Ocean. That is the real history of the U.S.S. Deep Quest but many believe that the vessel that Re has is a replica of the real thing, even though he insists it’s real. A reporter even did some digging and found out that Re had contacted the Exhibits Chief at a Navy Museum in Washington several times to see if he wanted to purchase the submarine and was turned down since it was a “movie prop” according to the Exhibits Chief. Apparently, the real Deep Quest has been on display at an underwater exhibit at Navy Museums Northwest since the mid-1990s.
So I’ll let you decide what you think about Re. Misunderstood art dealer or master grifter?
Works Cited
Cascone, Sarah. “Hamptonite Arrested for Peddling Fake Jackson Pollocks on eBay”. ArtNet. 2014. https://news.artnet.com/market/hamptonite-arrested-for-peddling-fake-jackson-pollocks-on-ebay-51025
McMorrow, T.E. “A Tale Forged in Paint and Steel”. The East Hampton Star. 2014. https://www.easthamptonstar.com/archive/tale-forged-paint-and-steel