The Devil Wears Rothko by Barry Avrich

Bjørn reviews The Devil Wears Rothko, a standalone true crime novel by Barry Avrich.

An eARC was received by Page Hill Press via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Published on June 24, 2025!

The Devil Wears Rothko charts the explosive demise of Knoedler Gallery, one of New York’s oldest and most prestigious art galleries, with detailed and salacious insight into the art fraud scandal of the century.

The Devil Wears Rothko charts the explosive demise of Knoedler Gallery, one of New York’s oldest and most prestigious art galleries, with detailed and salacious insight into the art fraud scandal of the century.

From the moment an eccentric woman walked into the Knoedler Gallery with a Mark Rothko painting, everyone was fooled. For the next ten years, she ran an $80 million forgery ring, selling or consigning forty expertly crafted counterfeits claimed to be the works of Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others.

Director of the acclaimed documentary Made You Look (2020) streamed on Netflix, Barry Avrich reveals new information, evidence, and inside stories about how a quixotic art dealer, master forger, and two cunning con artists managed to fool billionaire art collectors, journalists, and esteemed art appraisers. By the time the house of cards finally fell, the Knoedler Gallery and a dozen collectors had been tricked into buying over $80 million in fake art.

Could it happen again? The Devil Wears Rothko exposes the art world as a fragile system of relationships vulnerable to manipulation by the most captivating artists of our con artists.

“The profits were obscene and Mirvish was sufficiently seduced to not ask too many questions. Then again, no one had ever asked too many questions.”

I am a fan of true crime documentaries. As a fiction writer myself, I like it when life shows fiction a finger in unbelievable stories and plot twists that I’d get skewered for as simply unrealistic. Here is one: a stranger walks into a renowned gallery carrying something wrapped in brown paper. It turns out to be a missing Mark Rothko painting worth millions. As it turns out, there are more masterpieces, all of them from a private collection of Mr. X (not kidding), who is extremely elusive and only communicates via the means of producing 40 exquisite and very, very expensive works of art. Producing being the key.

The Devil Wears Rothko has it all. A beguiling, somewhat narcissistic heroine. The amazing worldbuilding, where ‘world’ stands for ‘the ultra rich’. People who want to be coddled, reassured, and buy the right things. During the lawsuit portion of the book, the dealer’s lawyer argues that the client should have done their own due diligence. So should have the dealer, who insisted that she believed the works were real. The buyers are unimpressed and so is the jury. And yet, the verdict is…

As for modern art, I’ve never been a fan, so this amuses me: “The art market is now at a nexus where forgeries comprise a large portion of the market. European law enforcement experts suggest “as much as half of the art in circulation is fake.” Thomas Hoving, the former director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, stated that a shocking 40 percent of the pieces at The Met are fake.” Not bad, not bad at all. But when you look at Rothko in particular (and I like Rothko) and read about his work methods in the last years of his life, is there really such a thing as real or fake Rothko? Why does an exquisite (the owner’s word) painting suddenly turn from $18 million to worthless piece of cardboard just because it was made by somebody else? Because it’s not about owning something that speaks to the soul, or something beautiful, it’s about owning a Rothko. “How do people think about a situation where a work of art is being sold for $8 million, for $17 million, and they think that their kid could paint it?”

This may be reality, but it’s not reality as most of us will ever know it, and it’s written like a legal thriller set in the world of art. In short, it’s a damn good, very entertaining book, and I shed a tear or two (LOLOL I do not) for the poor billionaires who must now live with the pain of knowing they bought and loved (and showed to their billionaire friends) paintings that were made in someone’s basement and later aged using sophisticated techniques such as tea bags. As for the… protagonist, let’s say, Ann Freedman? She owns a gallery of her own now, seemingly impervious to whispers behind her back, and supposedly sells real art in there. If ‘real art’ is a thing that exists, anyway.