On a February afternoon in 2011 in Washington, D.C., Jasper Johns sat still in his chair on the dais in the East Room of the White House alongside notables such as poet Maya Angelou, basketball legend Bill Russell, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffett. Barack Obama had just placed the Presidential Medal of Freedom around the neck of one of his predecessors, George Herbert Walker Bush, to thunderous and sustained applause, when the emcee called Johns to the fore. The artist, smartly dressed in a dark suit and matching polka-dotted tie, rose from his seat and stood next to the blue podium bearing the presidential seal as Obama stood behind him holding the white-enamel, star-shaped medal that would soon be presented to him. Johns—the first painter or sculptor to be awarded the medal in 34 years—smiled as the emcee read aloud: “Bold and iconic, the work of Jasper Johns has left lasting impressions on countless Americans. With nontraditional materials and methods, he has explored themes of identity, perception, and patriotism. By asking us to reexamine the familiar, his work has sparked the minds of creative thinkers around the world. Jasper Johns’ innovative creations helped shape the pop, minimal and conceptual art movements, and the United States honors him for his profound influence on generations of artists.”1
The awarding of the Medal of Freedom to Johns was certainly apt. His influence, especially on American artists, is profound, and his body of work is widely respected. And the reference to his exploration of the theme of patriotism was especially significant. In 1954, he painted his first American flag, and the star-spangled banner became the image with which the artist has become most commonly connected. “One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag,” he recalls, “and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.” He came home with three canvases, plywood for mounting them, newspaper that he cut into strips, and encaustic paint. This choice in pigment gives the painting a texture that, coupled with the barely discernible strips of newsprint, begs for closer inspection by the viewer.2
The painting was completed at a time in Johns’s career during which he was experimenting with universally recognizable symbols: flags, targets, numbers, and letters.3 As Museum of Modern Art curator Anne Umland pointed out, the subject matter was not a statement of blind patriotism or allegiance, but it did carry political overtones: “Underneath the pigment are strips of collaged newspapers. And when you really begin to look at these you can see that there are dates that are recognizable [and] they allow us to locate this painting, this flag, this timeless symbol of our nation within a very particular context, the 1950s in America, which is right in the midst of the McCarthy era and the beginning of the Cold War, when symbols such as the flag would have had a very particular and potent valence.”4 Johns’s own comment on the work supports Umland’s theory. He has said of the painting’s creation, “Well, it certainly wasn’t out of patriotism. It was about something you see from out of the side of your eye and you recognize it as what it is without really seeing it. It is the thing itself, but there’s also something else there.” However, he remains somewhat coy about the true meaning of the work. “I don’t think I want to describe it. . . . It’s probably shifted its meaning over time.”5 Perhaps most fittingly, the Whitney Museum of American Art describes it as a work that “flatters or honors the nation without genuflection.”6 The price tag for the work is undeniably high: a version of Flag offered at auction by Christie’s in the fall of 2014 was listed with an estimate of $15–$20 million, or about $100,000 per square inch.7
Another Flag—this time a sculpture made in 1960 by Johns—led to an earlier connection between the artist and the White House in the 1960s, when gallery owner Leo Castelli, who gave Johns his first one-man show, brought then president John F. Kennedy the bronze on Independence Day. From Johns’s view, the gesture wasn’t consistent with his vision. “I thought it was the tackiest thing I’d ever seen,” Johns recalled.8 The misstep by Castelli did not damage the relationship between the pair. In fact, they would go on to forge a decades-long association.
Clearly, Jasper Johns’s connection to art depicting the American flag is as indelible as Edgar Degas’s connection to ballerinas or Andy Warhol’s to cans of Campbell’s Soup. And regardless of the message of the painting, the image of the most iconic president of the twentieth century posing with one of his sculptures certainly did not hurt the value and importance of Flag.
The original 1960 sculpted metal version of Flag was given by Johns to his partner Robert Rauschenberg upon completion.9 Then, in the early 1960s, Johns had bronze sculptures of the work made by taking a mold of the surface of his painting, pouring plaster into the mold, and then removing the plaster, leaving him with a positive of the painting’s surface. He gave the positive of the surface to a foundry where a process called sand casting was used to make copies. Johns had the foundry create four bronze sculptures of Flag.
The four sculptures went very separate ways. There was the one given to President Kennedy by Castelli, which remains in the possession of Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, and Johns kept one himself. A third was acquired by financier and art collector Joseph Hirshhorn and is currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.—one of the top modern art museums in the United States. The fourth resides with the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to a bequest of Katharine Kuh, the art critic, curator, and author who also owned the eponymous Chicago gallery where she supported a large number of emerging modern artists.
In the 1980s, Johns decided to make additional sculptures based on the original sculpted metal work he gave to Rauschenberg, and for this project he turned to Vanessa Hoheb. Hoheb grew up in her father’s sculpture studio, beginning her formal apprenticeship when she was just 16. In those early years she gained experience working on pieces for Johns and other leading artists, including Willem de Kooning, Frederick Hart, and Isamu Noguchi. Perhaps most notably, at around the time Johns approached her, she was leading the five-member team charged with restoring the skin of the Statue of Liberty.10 Hoheb’s approach was “completely different,” said Johns, because she used a negative mold in which metal was poured to make the positive. In the earlier sand casting process, the positive mold was pressed into earth and the earth filled with metal to make the sculpture.11 One other thing about the Hoheb version that made it different from the earlier sculptures was the fact that hers included the frame that was around the original; earlier versions did not.
Johns’s project was not complete with the Hoheb mold. He then took it to the Polich Tallix fine art foundry in upstate New York around 1987 to make a silver cast of Flag. Polich Tallix has a long tradition of working with the who’s who of artists, including de Kooning, Urs Fischer, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and Alexander Calder—the last sculptor to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom before Johns. Upon completion at Polich Tallix, Johns elected to keep the silver cast in his home in New York.
In 1990, Johns had more plans for Flag. This time he turned to Brian Ramnarine, an émigré from Guyana and a trusted artisan with whom he had worked a number of times before, to make a wax positive in his silver mold. Ramnarine, who operated Empire Bronze in New York and whose work was considered by Johns to be excellent, had handled casts for numerous of Johns’s small sculptures in the past. Johns’s instructions to Ramnarine were simple: he told him to make only a wax impression—not an actual metal sculpture—of Flag. At the time, Johns thought he might have his sculpture cast in gold, and wanted to investigate how much metal would be needed and how expensive it would be, thus the direction to Ramnarine to make only a wax figure. Ramnarine obliged and produced the 1 × 11⁄2–foot wax sculpture, which Johns refrigerated in his home on upscale East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Though Johns paid him in full, in cash, Ramnarine failed to return the mold from which he made the wax sculpture. Eager to get his important original mold back, Johns directed a longtime member of his staff, James Meyer, to retrieve it from Ramnarine’s foundry. Meyer came back empty-handed.
Years later, Jasper Johns paid a visit to Paige Tooker at New Foundry New York Inc. and gave her the Ramnarine-made wax mold with a request to make a new cast of Flag in white bronze. While Tooker is certainly a very skilled craftsperson, Johns’s reasons for not returning to Ramnarine with the wax mold he had made were based on ethics rather than aesthetics. In the early 1990s, after Johns had completed his work with Ramnarine, he was approached by an individual claiming to own an original Flag sculpture and requesting that Johns authenticate it. At one point, the collector forwarded to Johns’s office a letter he had received from Ramnarine that read in part: “This is to certify that the following bronze sculpture is the contribution by artist Jasper Johns to Brian Ramnarine Flag bronze by Jasper Johns. I, Brian Ramnarine, is giving [sic] this bronze sculpture to Sewdutt Harpul.12 Please note this bronze sculpture cannot be sold or displayed in any gallery without the authorization of Brian Ramnarine. All profits sold from this sculpture is 50/50 [sic] between Brian Ramnarine and Harpul.”13 Ramnarine, who is alleged to be illiterate,14 was the apparent author of this letter, which claims that Ramnarine was gifted an authentic copy Flag by Johns.
After numerous increasingly anxious letters from the collector, the sculpture in question was sent to Johns for his review. The artist immediately recognized that the piece’s source was his work, but that he had no hand in completing it. Examining the back of the sculpture, he found that a copy of his signature was affixed to it. He found it much too neat to be his actual signature, which he typically drew into the wax mold and thus was not as smooth as what he observed on this piece. He also found markings on the back that he had ostensibly put there, but which in fact meant nothing to him in relation to this work or any other of his creations. Unhappy with the discovery of a clear forgery, he took it upon himself to cross out the fake signature on the back of the bronze.
Though the phony signature was enough to prove to Johns that the piece was a fake, there were other telltale signs, lest there be any doubt. “It’s finished in a way that I would not have finished it,” he would later say. “One detail is . . . that the frame is smooth along the outer edges, whereas the original piece . . . more or less imitates wood with a rough grain. That’s been polished off and removed.”15
As a next step, Johns contacted the Art Dealers Association in New York seeking advice as how to proceed with the work. Finding them “extremely unhelpful,” he sent the work back to the collector after writing in ink on the sculpture that it was not his work. Thus ended Johns’s association with Brian Ramnarine.16
This wasn’t the first time that Johns had encountered a counterfeit of one of his works. Art dealer Michael Findlay tells of an incident from 1969 when a friend showed him a large charcoal drawing of a coat hanger signed “J.Johns.” Something about the drawing didn’t seem right to Findlay, and he convinced the owner to allow him to show it to Johns. According to Findlay, “Wordlessly, Johns examined the work then asked if he could remove it from the frame. When he did, and turned it over, we could see that the back was softly scored in pencil horizontally and vertically. A soft ‘Ahh’ escaped from Johns. He explained that what we were looking at was the design for a mailer advertising one of his prints.” The artist was puzzled. “What should I do?” he asked aloud. After a few seconds, Johns found a red pen and across the bottom of the drawing wrote “This is not my work” and signed it with a large and distinctive signature. In a way, Findlay said, it became a work signed by the artist.17
Kenny Scharf is an American modern artist who became a success working in New York in the 1980s. Scharf, a contemporary of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, came east from California inspired by the art of Andy Warhol, whom he would eventually meet and appear alongside in a group exhibition called New York/New Wave.18 A painter and sculptor, his works have consistently sold in a range up to six figures at Christie’s. In around 2000, Scharf created an edition of four sculptures titled Bird in Space, a futuristic bronze piece measuring more than three feet tall by two feet wide and inspired by popular cartoons—a frequent theme for the artist. He chose Brian Ramnarine’s Bronze Foundry and Gallery to cast this work and others because he considered Ramnarine “a great artisan” and had worked with him since 1995.19
Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to Scharf, Ramnarine took it upon himself to make additional copies of Scharf’s work, each of them unauthorized. He then took the illegitimate sculptures and sold them to unsuspecting collectors for the same prices that Scharf’s originals would fetch. Eventually, Scharf was informed by other artists that they had seen separate copies of his works bearing identical edition numbers. It was then that he began to suspect Ramnarine of forgery and confronted him with the information. Dissatisfied with the response he received from Ramnarine, Scharf directed his lawyer to contact the district attorney’s office.20
Producing unauthorized sculptures using the methods of Brian Ramnarine presents an especially difficult scenario to the investigation and uncovering of forgery. Whereas in most cases involving forgeries of drawings and paintings the forger has no access to the actual artist’s canvas, brushes, and paints, Ramnarine’s copies involved the use of molds willingly handed over to him by the artist himself. So when he made additional copies of Scharf’s work, the key difference between the real sculptures and the forged sculptures was merely the artist’s authorization to produce the piece.
Take for example yet another victim of Ramnarine’s during the early 2000s, the Brazilian-born sculptor Saint Clair Cemin. Cemin preferred that his sculptures be made using the lost wax process, in which a mold is made of a sculpture in rubber and plaster. The mold is then filled with wax, which takes the exact shape of the original sculpture. The wax is put into a ceramic that hardens, at which point it is placed into an oven to vaporize the wax, leaving a ceramic shell whose cavity is filled with molten bronze. The ceramic is then broken, and the result is a bronze sculpture.
Cemin preferred to be very involved in the process of casting his bronze sculptures: inspecting the wax mold, choosing the metals, deciding which items to cast and when, and prescribing the exact number he wanted produced. This last part is key. “The more rare a piece is, the more valuable it is. Also, in my personal case I don’t like to make too many of all a single piece. I don’t think that is necessary or there is any value to it. It devalues the work.”21 As a last step, Cemin would oversee the application of the patina to the final work by the foundry.
In 1987, Cemin used Brian Ramnarine’s foundry to cast some sculptures for him. Cemin was directly involved in the work, as was typically his wont. Once the work was complete, he had the sculptures made by Ramnarine transported to his studio or directly to galleries. Cemin would sometimes pay Ramnarine for his work by giving him sculptures, including his works Zeno and Homage to Darwin. During this period of collaboration, Cemin worked out of a small studio and lacked adequate space to store his molds, so he left them at Ramnarine’s foundry until 1993, when Cemin moved to a larger studio.
Two years later, unhappy with the work Ramnarine did for an exhibition in Milan, Italy, Cemin broke ties with him. When he and an assistant went to Ramnarine’s foundry to retrieve the molds that he had stored there, they found that some were missing. He approached Ramnarine, who explained that he was looking for them and might have lost or discarded them. Busy with many other projects, Cemin moved forward and gave the missing molds little further thought.
A few years later, despite the problems with the Milan exhibition, Cemin could not find a foundry whose work was as high quality as Ramnarine’s, and he reestablished a working relationship with the foundry. Apparently pleased this time with Ramnarine’s work, Cemin gifted him two candleholders from a work he called Tree of Light. It seemed things were going well between Ramnarine and Cemin.
Meanwhile, things were not so grand for another popular sculptor who had also employed the work of Ramnarine. In the early 1990s, Robert Indiana, the legendary Pop artist, discovered that Ramnarine had sold unauthorized sculptures he falsely attributed to him. Indiana, best known for his widely recognizable and iconic sculpture of the word LOVE (in red with the LO stacked atop the VE), took immediate action, sending associates to Ramnarine’s foundry where they seized any Indiana-related molds, sculptures, and casts.22
Then in the spring of 2001, Saint Clair Cemin’s secretary received what seemed like troubling news. The two went to the home of collector Dr. Neil Kolsky, where the artist was shown sculptures that resembled his works, including Lady and Lion, II and Chimera. Cemin instantly recognized that these were unauthorized copies. “There was something strange about the patina that I didn’t like,” he recalled. “There was something strange about the finish. It was . . . too shiny. There was something that I wouldn’t like—I didn’t like. It made me very uneasy.”23 Further, he noticed that Dr. Kolsky’s version of Lady and Lion, II bore the same number as the copy he had given to a collector in Mexico who he knew well. Cemin also discovered that Dr. Kolsky’s two candleholders from Tree of Light were also fakes. All of the pieces came from molds that had been in the possession of Brian Ramnarine.
Clearly disturbed by what he found, Cemin gave Kolsky an original sculpture that he had brought with him in exchange for the forgeries. He packed the bad copies into his car, took them to his studio, and destroyed them. Some months later, Cemin found another unauthorized copy of one of his works—this time a table—in Ramnarine’s foundry. Upset by what he had discovered, he confronted Ramnarine, who, remarkably, told Cemin he could take the table home if he paid for the cost of making it. Cemin responded by smashing the table to pieces right there in the workshop and left.
As it turned out, Ramnarine had made a large number of unauthorized copies of Cemin’s work, some of which the fraudster dated before Cemin even began sculpting, and this amounted to criminal acts that impacted the artist greatly. “When pieces appear on the market with duplicate numbers, false dates, wrong names, no provenance, completely different finish . . . it is devastating to me, to my career, and to my credibility,” said Cemin. “I think the worst part is the misrepresentation of my work. I work very hard to have . . . pieces that correspond to my vision . . . I am a very well known artist and all of a sudden you have [a] minor gallery that sells the work for a very low price that doesn’t correspond to the reality of my prices with the wrong name, wrong date, and the sculpture is not authorized.” He added, “This is devastating for my profession.”24
On October 10, 2002, based on information provided by lawyers for Kenny Scharf, Saint Clair Cemin, and others, Brian Ramnarine was indicted by a Queens grand jury and charged with defrauding two art collectors of $140,000 by selling them what were essentially worthless unauthorized copies of sculptures. Five months later he avoided time in jail by pleading guilty to the charges. The 48-year-old artisan was sentenced to five years probation and was ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution.
Ramnarine’s reputation took another hit after his guilty plea. At the time of his sentencing, the Queens Chronicle reported, a pair of his former foundry employees came forward with claims that Ramnarine hadn’t paid them fully for years and was deeply in debt. Joseph and Miro Krizek, who made mold castings for him for five years, claimed that their paychecks often bounced and that he had borrowed tens of thousands of dollars from them. In all, the Krizeks claimed that Ramnarine owed them more than $80,000. “He’s a tremendously mean person,” Miro said. “He has absolutely no shame.”25 Ramnarine’s subsequent behavior would prove her right.
A criminal conviction for fraud based on the creation of forgeries should have ended Brian Ramnarine’s career as an owner of a fine art foundry. “It’s a golden rule,” Kenny Scharf said. “If you ever want to work again, you just can’t do that.”26 But Ramnarine went back to work not long after his term of probation had expired. And the work he chose was again the peddling of unauthorized sculptures by famous artists.
In 2010, with the memory of earning illicit income selling forged works apparently more enticing than the prospect of another indictment and conviction, Ramnarine endeavored to sell an unauthorized version of Flag by Jasper Johns. According to a federal indictment, this time he asked an associate to contact an auction house regarding what he said was a bronze Flag created in 1989. He also utilized several art brokers who were in frequent contact with an art collector who lived in the western United States. Ramnarine, whose motive in his prior frauds was alleged to be an effort to overcome his debts, was looking for a big score. His asking price for the purported bronze Flag: $10 million. With that sort of money on the table, the West Coast collector understandably raised questions about the provenance of the sculpture. In response, Ramnarine provided his broker with a fictitious letter dated August 23, 1989, stating that the sculpture was a gift from Johns to Ramnarine. Ultimately, Ramnarine showed the potential buyer’s representative the sculpture. He even falsely stated that he had an ongoing relationship with Johns and could facilitate a meeting between the two. In fact, Johns stated that at the time he hadn’t been in contact with Ramnarine in 20 years.27
As a result of his attempt to bilk the West Coast collector out of millions with a forged sculpture, Brian Ramnarine was indicted for fraud on November 14, 2012, this time by a federal grand jury. The next day, FBI agents arrested the foundry owner, now 58 years old, at his home in Queens. At his arraignment, Ramnarine pleaded not guilty to the charges and was granted bail by the federal magistrate. Incredibly, while out on bail, Ramnarine continued his criminal ways, undertaking efforts to defraud an online gallery located in Queens by selling them two fake sculptures—Two and Orb—that he fraudulently claimed were made and authorized by Robert Indiana. He also again sold fakes attributed to Saint Clair Cemin to the gallery. In all, he swindled his victim out of $30,000.28
In January 2014, his case went to trial in federal criminal court in the Southern District of New York, with the subsequent crimes involving the online gallery added to the charges against him. The trial quickly gained national headlines when it was revealed that Jasper Johns, arguably America’s greatest living artist, was set to testify as a government witness. In a remarkable—if not surreal—day of testimony, Johns and Cemin both took the stand and testified at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse in Manhattan. Cemin told of the wide-ranging fraud that Ramnarine had committed involving the unauthorized reproduction of his works. And later in the day, after his secretary Sarah Taggart had testified, Johns took the stand.
Johns is notoriously terse, and the prospect of hearing the octogenarian artist answer direct and cross-examination was a rare opportunity for those in the courtroom (federal trials are not televised). But if the defense was hoping that Johns’s legendary laconic nature and his status as a contemporary artist might make him difficult to discern for a jury, their hopes were dashed when he took the stand. Johns described the process of making sculptures, his activity surrounding the iconic sculpture, and the way in which Ramnarine had betrayed him in clear and understandable terms. When asked by a prosecutor if he had given Ramnarine the multimillion-dollar painting as a gift, Johns replied with a chuckle, “No.”
Little more was needed to convince Ramnarine and his attorneys that their prospects were dim. Facing a maximum term of 80 years in prison (including 20 for the crimes he committed after his arrest), he pleaded guilty just days after Johns’s testimony, admitting to three counts of fraud. As part of the plea deal, he also agreed not to challenge any sentence of ten years or less in prison administered by District Court judge John G. Koeltl. In their sentencing recommendation to the judge, prosecutors sought a severe sentence, departing from the opinion of federal probation recommendations and arguing that Ramnarine’s pattern of behavior warranted stiff punishment. “Here, the defendant pled guilty on the fifth day of trial, only after six witnesses had powerfully testified against him,” assistant United States attorney Daniel Tehrani wrote. Arguing against the prospect of Ramnarine receiving a lesser sentence because he pleaded guilty, Tehrani continued, “Because the defendant did not admit to his criminal conduct until after the Government had compellingly begun to prove its case (including presenting virtually all of the evidence of the Cemin fraud), [an] acceptance of responsibility reduction is not merited.”29
Before his guilty plea, Ramnarine and his attorneys gave indications to Judge Koeltl that they intended to introduce an argument involving one of Jasper Johns’s assistants as part of their defense. That assistant, James Meyer, was the man who had originally and unsuccessfully attempted to retrieve the mold for Flag back in 1990. Incredibly, Meyer had appeared in federal district court related to the theft of Johns’s works within just days of the artist’s testimony in US v. Ramnarine. But Meyer’s appearance was not related to Ramnarine’s crimes. Instead, he was also arrested by federal agents in an unrelated investigation for selling works by Jasper Johns that he claimed were gifts from the artist.
James Meyer is an artist in his own right, albeit not in the same stratosphere as Johns. He has received some critical acclaim for his work, much of which addresses perceptions of suburban America. His love of creating art extends back to his grade school days, and he has said that school was where he “saw that drawing was the only thing [he] did well.”30 Soon, he would be asked to create murals while still a student and would eventually move to Washington, D.C., as a young man to begin his career as a professional artist. By the early 1980s, however, he had moved back to New York, where he would occasionally see his paintings shown at local galleries.31 At 22, he was earning $6 an hour selling copies of other artists’ masterworks to restaurants.32 But soon he would win praise for his paintings and ultimately saw his works included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. By 2014 his work would appear in more than 50 group shows.33 Undoubtedly, his work under Jasper Johns had a great influence on his career and would prove to be the key to his rise in standing as an American artist.
Meyer describes himself as barely aware of the work of Jasper Johns when he knocked on the door to the artist’s studio looking to apply for a job as an apprentice in July 1985. With the artist unavailable to greet him, he left his resume and slides of his work with an assistant of Johns’s and went home, whereupon he discovered that he had no other copies of his resume to use for other applications. He returned to the studio with a request to make a copy of the materials he had left and, by happenstance, met Johns in person. The artist, apparently intrigued by Meyer, told him he could have the materials back after the two spoke for a bit. “Two hours later, he hired me,” Meyer said. “[He] told me to come back the next day.”34 Meyer went on to serve Johns as one of his small, select group of studio assistants for more than a quarter of a century, becoming so trusted that he was given the responsibility of traveling to St. Martin every year to prepare Johns’s home studio for his annual three-month stay on the French side of the island.35
Meyer’s skill set benefited greatly from his exposure to the techniques and style of his mentor. But it was Johns’s mental approach to his work that impacted him greatest. “Most important, however, Jasper has taught me to think about what I’m making before I make it.” He has also professed his own love for using encaustic painting—the same technique Johns used in creating Flag—after being taught his mentor’s method. “For a long time I didn’t work in it out of respect for his medium,” Meyer told Matthew Rose in a long interview in 2005.36
Meyer’s so-called respect for Johns came into question in 2014 when he was arrested by the FBI after being indicted by a federal grand jury for selling 22 works he stole from Johns’s studio. According to the indictment, Meyer perpetrated a six-year scheme to defraud Johns that ultimately netted him $3.4 million. Meyer’s scam, the FBI found, involved a component that was now all-too-familiar to Johns: he claimed that the 22 works he removed from the studio were gifted to him by Johns. He then told both gallery owners and potential buyers this fiction, and produced phony provenance by creating fake pages from the official ledger book of authorized works kept by Jasper Johns to present to buyers. Ultimately, a Manhattan gallery sold the works for about $6.5 million.37 In August 2014, Meyer pleaded guilty to a fraud charge before Judge J. Oetken.38 The gallery, unnamed in the indictment, was not charged with a crime.
While federal prosecutors did not charge the gallery with a crime in the scheme, at least one party did not see them as innocent dupes of Meyer’s scam. On May 8, 2014, Frank Kolodny filed a civil suit against James Meyer as well as the gallery involved in the sale of Johns’s art—which he named as Dorfman Projects LLC—in federal district court, alleging fraud and seeking compensatory damages. In his civil complaint, Kolodny claimed that Meyer stole the artworks from Jasper Johns’s private studio and, “with the aid and assistance of the Dorfman defendants,” sold him the purloined piece for $400,000. Kolodny’s suit also claimed that the affidavits produced by Meyer authenticating the works were notarized by Fred Dorfman’s wife.39
Kolodny’s suit alleged that aspects of both Meyer’s story and the art he was selling should have raised red flags to Dorfman, considering that Dorfman Projects had been in business for more than three decades and that proprietor Fred Dorfman is a respected specialist in twentieth-century art. For instance, Kolodny stated that it “defies credulity” that the gallery believed Meyer would have received “gifts” from Johns valued at $6.5 million. (As to why he as the buyer would believe that the works were gifted to Meyer, Kolodny points to information he received that Johns had given his longtime administrative assistant an original work as a wedding gift.) Further, none of the 22 works, created in the 1970s, had an exhibition history, which, Kolodny stated, was simply implausible. But perhaps the greatest concern should have been raised by conditions that Meyer insisted upon, said Kolodny. These included a demand that the sale of the works remain confidential and that they “not be re-sold, loaned, or exhibited during Johns’ lifetime.”40
The civil case notwithstanding, with the evidence against him overwhelming and indisputable in the criminal case, James Meyer pleaded guilty in federal court to theft charges in relation to the 22 works he stole from Jasper Johns.
As the chaos surrounding allegations of criminal activity swirled around Jasper Johns, he prepared for a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition bore a relevant and poignant title: Jasper Johns: Regrets. The title referred to the words he used to sign most of the pieces in the show, which consisted of two paintings, ten drawings, and two prints he produced—probably not coincidentally—contemporaneous to the height of the Ramnarine and Meyer affairs. According to MoMA, the title of Johns’s exhibition “call[s] to mind a feeling of sadness or disappointment,”41 emotions that undeniably the artist must have experienced firsthand upon learning of the stories of alleged multimillion-dollar gifts that he never really gave, made up by once-trusted associates.
The show features images based on a photograph of the artist Lucien Freud seated on a disheveled bed, his head in his hand in an image that screams of dejection. Interestingly, Freud too was a victim of art crime when his painting of his friend Francis Bacon was stolen in 1988 and not seen since (Freud himself designed a “Wanted” poster for the painting that was posted around Berlin in 2001). In a 2014 interview with FT Magazine, Johns was asked his thoughts on the apparent betrayal by his longtime assistant Meyer. “Certainly not a pleasure,” he said in his typically understated manner. Referring perhaps to both the ongoing litigation and the distress he had to feel over what had occurred in the past years, he added, “But I can’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to define it in any way.” Apparently closing the book on the matter, he avoided self-pity by alluding to the title of his exhibition and saying, “Regrets belong to everybody, don’t they?”42