Fake Art, Real Money

That beautiful painting by Cuban artist Domingo Ramos? The one you bought from a Miami gallery for $10,000? Ready for some bad news? It's a forgery

Comments (0) By Kirk Nielsen Thursday, Apr 28 2005

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Informed of the test, Roberto Ramos says he hadn't heard of the nineteenth-century Manuel Mesa Rodriguez but asserts that Cernuda must have been selling the painting as if it were created by the twentieth-century Manuel Mesa Lopez. Both are Cuban, but the latter is widely known for his paintings of folkloric scenes and murals on government buildings in Havana. "He painted the whole Capitolio Nacional; he painted a lot," says Ramos. "He is in all of the books of the era; he was the son of a patriot who was José Martí's secretary, who was named Luis Mesa. That's the Manuel Mesa who is collected." The Mesa Rodriguez in Cernuda's collection is, he declares, "European garbage that doesn't have anything to do with Cuban painting."

Alvaro Diaz-Rubio

Jonathan Postal

Roberto Ramos (top) believes that Cuban art is being damaged by allegations of widespread forgery asserted by collector and dealer Ramon Cernuda (above), pictured here at his Brickell condo in 2003

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The evening of February 11, Cernuda stuck his neck out again, this time at the University of Miami's Lowe Art Museum. The occasion: the opening-night reception for an exhibition of some 50 paintings and drawings by the late Antonio Gattorno, a Cuban modernist who was friends with writers John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Alejo Carpentier.

According to the owner of the collection, 46-year-old Frank Padron, Cernuda attended the opening and then went to dinner with a group of collectors and told them he believed some of the Gattornos were fakes. "He questioned a couple of paintings, and he's wrong," says Padron, who owns an art-framing shop in Kendall. "Fortunately for Gattorno and for me, Gattorno's paintings are very exclusive. He died almost like Vermeer. He kept his best paintings, and when he died, they were all in his home."

After the artist's 1980 death in Massachusetts, his widow, Isabel Cabral, sold about twenty of his paintings to a neighbor for $20,000. Those paintings remained in the neighbor's attic for two decades. Padron bought them in 2003 and collaborated with Sean Poole, who is married to a niece of Cabral's, on a book about Gattorno that was published last year.

"There hadn't been too many fakes, but since we did the book, some fakes are popping up right now," Padron reports. "A couple of people have brought me paintings that I've rejected, that I'm not interested in. I try not to get into telling people, 'Your painting is fake,' and stuff like that. Because I did that once and you lose the friendship, you lose the collector as a possible buyer. If somebody comes and asks me my opinion about Gattorno and a Gattorno painting, I'll tell them. But I don't volunteer. I don't try to be like Ramon Cernuda, who claims to be the crusader for Cuban art. He offered his opinion in front of too many people, which makes it no longer private conversation. That hurts Gattorno's paintings, and he may have to answer to that a little bit later."

At Cernuda's office, when the subject of Padron's Gattorno exhibit comes up, the dealer simply smiles. "No comment," he says. Perhaps he is only now learning that when Ramon Cernuda talks, people listen -- sometimes too many people.