How a street peddler fooled some of Manhattans biggest art collectors and killed off the citys oldest art gallery

Nestled within the mood light of the Jean-Georges restaurant at the Mark, or seated straight-back against a Turkish pillow in the Gallery at the Carlyle, the denizens of the Upper East Side float in a fish-bowl world.Scandals, like personalities, are magnified.Collisions are inevitable.

Yet even today, more than 15 years after her resignation from Manhattan’s eminent Knoedler gallery and the circus trial that followed, society swims away from Ann Freedman.“She did turn heads when she walked in,” said documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich of his first encounter with Freedman over “a few bottles of expensive Montrachet Chardonnay” at the Mark, followed by dinner at Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue.“And people would talk.

Nobody was rushing like the old days to see her.Obviously, that had to hurt.

She was a pariah.”In 2016, what had been elite gossip exploded into the art fraud trial of the century.Freedman, the former president of Knoedler & Co.

— Manhattan’s then-oldest art gallery, founded in 1846 — was accused of facilitating the sale of $80 million in fake art.The plot, involving a pair of Long Island-based con artists and a math teacher turned master forger named Pei-Shen Qian, was audacious in ambition: Allegedly forging the names of abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Willem de Kooning on at least 70 paintings.Everyone from museum experts and art scholars to the relatives of the artists themselves fell for it.

But the case was settled before Freedman took the stand.She walked.

Was she an avaricious conspirator — or merely another victim of the con, as she maintains? The mystery of her guilt will now never be settled.But for an insular and supercilious cadre of blue-chip collectors, there is no question that Freedman is to blame for their embarrassment.

Perhaps flamboyant financier Pierre Lagrange spoke for the entire neighborhood when, over drinks at the Carlyle, he allegedly screamed ...