I have already described those events between 1999 and 2002, directly related to the "Big One" and its owner and also its "Director" and the discovery of the forgeries and the illegal use of my artist's signature; the horror of seeing the sale of those unauthorized prints every day on the Internet. The numerous, revealing emails from so many people asking me whether I have this or that print to sell, as if I was "in charge" of those forgeries, were practically a routine between 2002 and 2004 and even until today. In fact, just as I was relating this account I received an email from someone asking me the price of one of these forged prints.
It seems like it will NEVER end, just as I explained in my earlier accounts where I described how those criminals created the perfect scheme for selling those forgeries forever and where I predicted that they would continue printing them behind my back and selling them right before my eyes forever and ever to eternity. Tragically, I suppose the heirs of those criminals could also end up printing and selling those prints and enriching themselves at the expense of my name without any fear of the law and without the least shame.
From the time of the exhibition in 2002 nothing special occurred between my agent and me except in my personal life. In 2003, after my divorce, I went to live in another country. The monthly shipment of my paintings to my agent at his company address was a silent routine. Every now and then he called me on the phone, asking me occasionally to return to my former country and telling me that it would be a bit of a problem for me to supervise the printing of the limited editions of serigraphs from another country. I told him I had the solution to that: that he send me proofs from the last step but one of the process and I would write instructions to follow for the quality.
There was also the fact of what I consider to be the ridiculous and unnecessary process of hand embellishment of the prints on canvas. As for the term "Hand embellished by the Artist", it is worth explaining in great deal this process which I call "the most fraudulent and stupid so-called pictorial process currently existing in the fine art prints industry today." It was created solely and only to increase sales and create a false and fictitious effect of an original and thereby to raise the prices and the size of the edition and therefore increase the sales of a print, since modern industry and the invention of specialized printing machines made it possible to print on materials other than the thousand year-old and well-known medium of paper.
I am afraid I am going to have to extend and detail the explanation of this process which I personally refer to as: "The phenomenon of a sausage cut into thin slices which will generate the same profits as a hundred unsliced sausages." But in this way once and for all the entire public will receive first hand and from a professional artist an explanation of it so they can understand what this all means and so that they can finally have a clearer concept of what a "Limited Edition" is and will think twice before acquiring one of these strange extensions to editions.
It would also be quite beneficial to the health and reputation of the fine art prints industry to explain the "phenomenon" of the incomprehensible extensions to an edition which is supposedly limited. The "respectable" ones among them do not generally reach more than 350 examples per edition, but strange new sub-nomenclature has been invented solely to dishonestly extend the edition and therefore sell more prints. It is also worth noting the fascinating tricks which can be carried out today with the highly effective high tech inkjet printers with their so-called "indelible" inks in the hands of good graphics software and an operator with imagination and technical skill and some additional experience in aging paper and in using heavy presses for printing engravings.
It would also be beneficial to gain some understanding of how, by making a negative of a photo of an ancient engraving, a new metal or plastic plate can be created and thus present to the public a false edition of old engravings which are nothing more than mere cheap fakes. It is also possible today to easily extract an artist's signature from a simple photo of one of his works and, using sophisticated technology, print it on new prints, thus creating the false impression that it is the artist's original signature. There are thousands of other tricks of forgery in this field of what is today called Fine Art prints. After all, a false print of a tiny Rembrandt etching can be sold for much more than a fake hundred dollar bill. It certainly IS a lucrative market!!
It is interesting that the authorities launch themselves rapidly and effectively against forgers of banknotes and come down on them with the full force of the law, meanwhile with forgers in the field of art they are so lenient and rarely apply the just and due weight of the law. These forgers even sell their products to those same representatives of the law and also give them to them, if they are their cronies or fellow members of the same political party, as if it was something so lovely and cultural. What is most nauseous is to know that those criminals also donate those forgeries and part of the profits therefrom to charitable institutions and thus get a name for being great and charitable figures as a result of fraud and crime. Horrible!
This is the time also to make it clear that there are still in the field of fine art prints some business people and professionals who are very honest and whom one can trust completely. Unfortunately these are becoming scarce.
I would give such an explanation the following lengthy title: "If Rembrandt, Goya and Toulouse-Lautrec (three pioneers and developers of what is called the fine art print in the fields of Etching and Lithography) were to rise from their eternal rest, they would ask to be rapidly returned to their graves after seeing what is being done and can be done today in the field of art-technology which in their day was a respected, laborious and culturally accepted part of Fine Art."
It's a long title but a reasonable one. But before that I need to return to what I have begun to relate about my agent and my last visit to the USA to sign the last series of my serigraphs, and more technical explanation will follow later in a separate article so that you can understand properly the relationship between those terms and so that you will be experts in everything connected with this modern art market so that you do not permit yourselves to be conned and will know exactly what to buy from whom.
Although every now and then he would whine to me over the phone because, according to him, the process of shipping proofs back and forth for me to supervise was so expensive whereas the ten minute walk from my house to the print shop which was so close in that same city in Israel, at the same time he was increasing the number of artists he represented, from what I could see on his website.
Also my name and several of my paintings and serigraphs were featured on the website of the "Big One". I would sometimes laugh at the ridiculous and fraudulent terms and definitions attached to the image of some of my works on their website, such as these:
"From the collection of the Artist." Ha, ha, ha! As if I had this painting hanging in my home and had never sold it and they only show it as a great curiosity. Anyone could understand from that lie and false definition that that painting was something super special and that I presumably did them the honor of publishing this image under the condition that they stated that it was from my special "private collection". That and so many other "conjuring tricks" were and are used and exploited unscrupulously by the "Big One" in their sales literature. As a side comment, that phenomenon of writing "from the artist's collection" first came to my notice on the invites for the exhibition in May 2002 and also in the very badly printed catalog for that same exhibition at the "Big One".
I don't have collections. I paint. Don't be tricked by false arguments designed to increase sales.
Well, I'll continue with my agent and me. With that routine of the come and go of shipments of proofs reviewed for printing, we come to the first third of the year 2004. It's important to note and detail at this point that it was already more or less a year since my agent had told me to change the address on the tubes I used for sending my monthly original paintings. I was no longer to send them to his company address but now it was to be directly to the address of the "Big One", addressed to the son of the Big Boss and with a slash (/) to the name of my agent. This meant that my original paintings now went directly to the Big One. I didn't care where my agent wanted me to send them. The Fed Ex account and number was his private one. I never paid for any shipping and never sent anything at my own expense or on my account to the addresses of the Big One. I repeat, I never had any business dealings with them. Again, this apparently innocuous detail is worth noting so that the reader can have a better understanding of its connection with the horrendous events of the end of 2004.
At this time, living as I was so far from the print shop where I always used to sign my prints, it was necessary to solve the "where" of my signing the prints under this new and unusual situation. In a phone conversation which we had about it in April 2004, my agent told me that my trip to the print shop would be very expensive for him and that he considered that the best solution was for him to pay for my flight to his company in the USA and that I should stay in a hotel very near his home. I told him he was a tightwad and that the difference in the cost of flights would be balanced by the fact that in Israel my stay would cost him nothing because I could stay with my younger son who was living in the same city as the print shop and I stressed that I did not understand his accounts and calculations, that they didn't make sense and that at the time I had problems of my own and the signing could wait until the beginning of September. In passing I reminded him that that way he had a few months more in which to complete the 14 editions which were still owing to me. I could already predict that the strange trick of now going to his location, with the consequent loss of time I feared I would never see the 14 editions, which he had owed me for so long, finalized. I therefore told him that I was not going to travel to his place of business until I saw the 14 editions finalized so that I could sign all 35 editions at one time. At which – and this is the first time in all those years of that long and sad relationship between us, that I heard him raise his voice - he answered me as follows:
"Then the Big One will sue you immediately!!!" I didn't understand what the Big One had to do with all of this. I told him that in that case HE (my agent) would be the one who should sue me, not the Big One, because my contract was not signed with that individual but with him, my agent and the sole one responsible and I hung up.
At the end of a week he called, practically in tears, telling me that for so many years we "had done so well together" and there was no reason to end up fighting and that he hoped to renew our contract in September and that what we had could continue and he would raise the prices, etc., etc. and that if he had made mistakes along the way he was sorry and that I was the best artist he had, and so he went on imploring like a bride abandoned in the middle of the wedding ceremony – pathetic!
What made me the most nauseous was all that about "so many years in which we have done so well together." The brazen and shameless liar, as if all his tricks and mistreatment were a light matter of no importance, as if the forgery and violation of my copyright were naughty pranks between infants playing in a sand box in a neighborhood nursery.
At that time I was living in a wood cabin not far from a village in the remote South of my new country with the person who is now my wife. It was a wild, mountainous place without the resources and conveniences of a normal city. I had no Internet, no computer. For that I had to go down to the plane where the village was and go to a cyber café so as to check my emails from time to time and the only means of direct communication I had at the time was an old cell phone which at those altitudes and distances could hardly connect to the network, and that only with great difficult. What that place had that was very important for me as an artist was one of the most splendid landscapes in the world, and being in the lap of a major active volcano gave it a touch of wildness and danger which were so attractive to those who visited it. I painted many landscapes of those surroundings. Another reason for my deciding to live in such a far off and climatically cold place was because I suffer from a terrible chronic ailment, and the only thing that relieves those horrible pains is the cold and relatively humid climate of that part of the world.
After thinking over and analyzing the last conversation I had had with my agent, I came to the conclusion that there was no end to this, and that I had to terminate the boggy relationship with those criminals as soon as possible. So I decided to accept my agent's invitation to travel to his location and finalize that work as soon as possible and only hope that with my presence there I would be able to convince my agent in the right way and to extract from him a promise that he would begin the process of printing the other 14 editions which were still owing to me after I signed the 21 which were waiting for me there, before the end of our contract in September. In passing I told him to pay for my partner's airfare which he agreed to and we left it that he would meet us at the airport in his home town.
When we arrived at the terminal he was nowhere to be seen. I called him on his cell phone to find out at which exit he was waiting for us and to our surprise he answered that he had not found us and that he had "waited" a long time and since he couldn't find me he had gone back to his office because he had some urgent things to do. He told me to just get a taxi and come straight to the address of his company which was about an hour from the airport.
When we arrived at his company we were greeted by his chief employee, a good natured chubby fellow with the face of a serious gourmet. He told me I had met him several years earlier on an occasion when my agent had brought him to my studio to meet me on a visit to our country. That was in 1998 and I remembered it well. The impression which that likable and cordial man had left on me was that he was the only one of the pair, or really of the whole company, who understood or knew something of art history and appreciation. My ex-agent is and was completely ignorant of anything connected with art history and appreciation and even more ignorant of painting techniques. I often advised him to go and study art history and appreciation in some school and told him that in my opinion in order to be a professional artist's rep the first and least that he should do before starting work would be to study something about it. His response, with his perennial, childish grin on his face, that to sell one did not have to study. I remember one of his "maxims" on the subject which he loved to throw out when I asked him whether or not he liked this painting or that one when he visited me in my studio: with his chest inflated and his head thrown back he would say, "The best painting is always the one that was sold just yesterday." This shows the concept of culture and the respect for art and artists possessed by this one-dimensional, stupid and ignorant individual.
From among the few conversations we had with my agent about his employees, he told me that he had contracted or rather dragged him out of the personnel of his former chain of galleries with whom my agent was working between 1995 and 1998 – that one which had thirty branches. According to my agent, in his time that chain of galleries was a division of a well known US insurance company, and its major shareholder or president of the galleries had bought that chain from the insurance company. My agent told me with great pride that he had brought this employee to his company and put him on contract and salary after he had been fired by the new owner of that chain of galleries. He told me, in the following words, the major quality he admired in this man: "It's that he is a Perkins yes man who doesn't ask any questions and just carries out my orders like a robot – perfect!" I had to hear this and many other arrogant, sarcastic, disparaging and insensitive opinions with regard to his work force from his mouth, along with the many times he bragged about his achievements and ridiculed his fellows, especially two of his artists and his female employees.
Well, when we arrived, this man excused himself on behalf of my agent who would arrive a bit later and asked us to sit and wait and have a coffee. This gave me the opportunity to see how much my ex agent had refined his career, the opulence of the part of the city he was now working in compared to the almost nothing that he had during his time in Israel – you could see that things were going very well for him.
What was most curious was that on the upper floor there was a place like an open loft facing the central entrance hall, like an open gallery, and there was a sort of studio and from above I was greeted with an outstretched arm and a loud voice as if I was his comrade, "Hi....(me)...!!!" It was no less than the famous artist of which we have already spoken, the one of the large paintings hung on both walls at the entrance to the 2000 Expo in New York where one of my paintings was also supposed to be on show. It seemed so strange to see that individual there, looking like he was working on his paintings in the office of my agent's company.
About an hour later my agent appeared at his office and came up and greeted us very cordially, very intrigued by and looking at my new wife. One of the biggest weaknesses and obsessions this individual has always had is women. This weakness often brought him problems and not minor ones either. Well, he introduced us to his chief secretary, a pleasant young local woman. As was to be expected from this bad-mannered individual, as soon as she returned to her desk this idiot told us in a low voiced that she was very efficient and that he loved to see the way she did everything he told her to, just like a robot, "Up!", "Sit!"...like a poodle according to his "humorous" critique. It reminded me exactly of his previous comments years before about his chief employee, who had just at that moment returned to his desk. I asked myself, has this degenerate not changed at all in all the years I've known him?
Then I asked him where the piles of paper of the editions I was to sign were as I hadn’t seen them there. He told me that they were not there because his space was too small for this job and that because a much larger space was needed with many tables to set up the thousands of sheets of paper for me to sign he had decided that the best place would be at the Big One in a neighboring city. This seemed fairly sensible to me from a logistical point of view. I was also very happy not to have to spend too much time in his company because I was already ready to strangle him there and then for everything he had done to me. So we agreed that he would take me to my "so-called hotel" near his house. This hotel turned out to be no more than a sort of cheap hostel, as he is a very stingy exploiter. But nothing mattered to me any more and all I wanted was to be done with that work and go back to the mountains as soon as possible.
The day for the commencement of signing the serigraphs arrived and my agent took my wife and me to the Big One's great, massive facility in the neighboring city.
This huge complex had none of the Graeco-Roman façades and nothing even close, but more of the look of a modern industrial complex with glass windows and a plain entrance with concrete steps leading up to glass doors in aluminum frames and no fine carpets or subdued lighting. In general it was the look of something that had nothing to do with art and even less the aspect of a gallery but more like the entrance to a high tech company.
Inside, in the large entrance hall there was a reception counter, a computer, a telephone and a pleasant young woman of Hispanic origin answering the phones. Behind her there was a sort of screen or large partition which separated this sort of reception from the high wall at the back. In other words, a large room divided in two.
My agent asked the young woman if he could use the phone for a second. With the handset in his hand he just said the following: "We have arrived. I'll call you later." The receptionist also made a phone call, I think to announce our arrival to someone inside, because in a few seconds a man appeared. He was well-built with a country boy look, sports shirt outside his jeans, with a big smile. He shook my hand, "Hi, I'm so-and-so, I'm glad to finally meet the great ('ME'), follow me and I'll show you the place....."
My agent followed us in complete silence, serious and looking a bit uncomfortable, while this man opened some very tall, industrial gray, metal sliding doors. This entrance was on the right of a large passageway behind the partition in the reception area which was full of heavily framed prints hanging on the wall on the left of that entrance behind the partition. I managed to catch sight of a large display print of a work by Miró and some Dalís hanging there. Leading off the large passageway to right and left there were two narrower passageways full of offices.
We went into the space behind the metal doors and my wife and I stood there gazing in open-mouthed astonishment at the immensity of that space. From the reception area one couldn't imagine that there was such a huge and noisy area beyond. The impression we had was of falling through some kind of time warp or like in a science fiction movie falling off a precipice into a different dimension. The incredible contrast between the silence and relative luxury of the entrance compared with this huge industrial complex was genuinely shocking.
It is an area of several thousand square yards on a single level with a metal and plastic ceiling. Some parts of this large space were divided into sort of offices with low dividing walls so that you could see someone standing inside. Each office contained computers and other equipment. In one of these cubicles which was a bit larger there was a whole modern set of machinery to make high quality cardboard matting, all completely computerized, as our country boy guide proudly pointed out.
Across the whole width of that space there were some carts and on their platforms standing up in piles were hundreds if not thousands of framed words of art ready to be transported to various FedEx trucks which were waiting outside at the back entrance on the right.
This extraordinary, vast spectacle of industrial efficiency disconcerted me. In my lifetime I have seen many factories and industrial complexes of all types, but this was the first time I had seen an art factory on this huge scale and I had never imagined that one could exist.
On one of the carts I managed to recognize a large framed painting of mine with the four corners of the large frame covered in triangular cardboard pieces for protection. Our guide, seeing my discovery, exclaimed cheerfully, "Yessss!!! There are many of yours here ready to be sent today to the port!!!" Wow!! I was amazed. Because my archaic concept of the transport of delicate works of art was at total variance with this rough handling and mass production which I was standing before, open-mouthed.
I got closer to have a better look at my painting and to my surprise noticed that it had a rough, diagonal scratch about sixteen inches long from the top left of the varnished and brilliant surface of the painting towards the center. It could easily be seen from at least a yard away. I drew our guide's and also my agent's attention to it and was astonished when my guide explained: "That happens a lot when you're dealing with such large quantities of artwork. Something always happens to them. But don't worry, nobody will notice it and if anyone complains about the scratch we'll send it to the restoration section." That was how my works of art were treated there. I almost threw up in disgust at the feet of the country boy. My agent at that point seemed impatient to get out of there and looked around as if he was distracted. My wife and I looked at each other horrified.
After the visit to the "factory" we made a quick tour of the adjacent passages where the offices were. I managed to recognize several of my oil paintings hanging there. That was all I saw that day.
On the next day at about 9 a.m., my agent brought my wife and me back to the place. On this second trip to the "factory" there was a point in the car when I said to my agent, "You never did any promotion or advertising or anything for me ever. I am sure you never will now." His answer to this was, "Your stuff sells itself. You don't need any promotion. Leave that for the 'lesser' artists who really need it. Your work has been selling automatically for years!" He threw this out at me with that permanent stupid grin painted on his self-satisfied face.
My wife and I were left open-mouthed and wanting to strangle him then and there. This clearly confirmed the "why" of the lack of promotion since 1999. This corrupt fellow had already sold me to the Devil the very day that the contract was signed in September 1999. At that moment I understood. Why waste money on an artist that who was no longer his but the Big One's? He had simply sold me!!
Analyzing in retrospect the steps this degenerate had taken since the end of 1998, he and the Big One had already conspired between the two of them and came up with a scheme and program with regard to my artwork. This criminal had SOLD MY AUTHOR'S RIGHTS to the Devil. He washed his hands and happily went off laughing all the way to bank months after 1999 until this very day.
When we arrived we were introduced to a smiling and very charming African-American woman who explained to us that she would be our assistant in our work. They had already prepared some large tables along that passageway between the receptionist's partition and the high wall at the end. From that position, and with the large wall plastered with extravagantly-framed paintings and prints behind me, I was to sit down and sign my serigraphs.
I was told that this was the first time an artist had arrived at this facility to sign editions. I should explain that my agent, after having brought us twice to the place in his car had told us that, according to him, the distance from our "hostel" to the "factory" was a big problem because the trip back and forth to the Big One took over two hours so he had decided to rent a car for us for the following day so that he wouldn’t waste time with it. We accepted, and on the third day we went back to the factory on our own. Naturally that day we got lost several times trying to find the place. My agent also put us in a different hotel nearer the factory and so freed himself up entirely from this business of traveling back and forth, because it became clear that signing the 21,800 sheets was going to take me nearly a week. We accepted the change of strategy eagerly, above all because in this way we would avoid having to put up with this idiot so close to us all the days of our stay there.
Our improvised assistant asked us how I wanted to sign – how many sheets of paper to put on the tables and in what arrangement. I explained it and she returned from the "factory" behind with the help of a young lad who was dragging a cart like those in the hotels which they use for carrying luggage but an industrial version, and on it a mountain of about a meter by a meter of printed sheets. In my astonishment and the impression that that would take me years to sign, I asked her how many there were still inside and she laughed, "A whole lot more!"
I asked for a box of new pencils and an eraser and started left to right signing the prints which she laid out, with the help of my wife, in groups of ten sheets, one on top of the other in such a way that the lower part of the edge of the sheet where I was signing, was exposed about half an inch. I began the long, arduous job with speed and vigor. By the time I had been signing almost without a break for four hours I was nearly cross-eyed and could hardly recognize my own signature! Since I knew the procedure I could calculate how long it would take me, signature by signature, and multiply by X number, adding some minutes more to compensate for tiredness and therefore slower speed, I rapidly reached the conclusion that in five days of ten hours a day I would manage that number of signatures.
That turned into a daily routine. I finished the pencil signatures on paper in two and half days and the ones on canvas in indelible ink in a day and a half, in other words, in the record time of four hard days of work.
A total of 21,800 signatures!!! A real record, even for me.
One interesting curiosity appeared one day among the many other employees who, according to our assistant, wanted to see in person the famous and renowned ("Me"), whose presence was causing such a stir, so much curiosity and rejoicing.
Among these was a gentleman with a Hispanic accent, medium height who came up to us and shook my hand with almost trembling respect and gestures of admiration, introducing himself as the framer who was in charge almost exclusively of framing my work. He congratulated me for being such a great artist and told me in passing that in all the years he had worked there he had never seen one of my works return unsold from the auctions on the high seas.
At that point I didn’t know whether to be happy or scared at such a great revelation. I feared that this man might be reprimanded by the "central command" for revealing such major, secret information.
I should explain that the editions were printed in the shop in Israel on large sheets, usually between two and six prints to a sheet. These they called a "project" and my agent paid me for each of these "projects" according to the prices stipulated in our contract. The bigger and fewer the images per "project" the less I would be paid and the more and smaller the images, the more I would be paid. Never before had ten small images been printed on one sheet. In other words, on this occasion, much to my surprise, it was the first time I had signed such an extensive "project".
Years later another art dealer told me that this trick of printing at the last minute a project so “tight” with ten different images, in my case 8,000 pieces as the product of a single project, is called in certain circles of publishers of fine art prints and in the slang of artist's reps, "CLASSIC END OF CONTRACT PROJECT." In other words, before terminating a contract with an artist, knowing or feeling ahead of time that the artist would not be renewing that contract, they would make sure of the largest possible reserve of editions and prints so as to be able to flood the market the day that that artist contracted with another print publisher or agent and thus swamp the competition. Another reason that reached my ears was that they could perfectly well use these small prints of between eight and ten inches as a promotional gift for their clients as an incentive to buy an expensive piece from other artists they represented and whose work they sold at auction. In other words, they would use an artist like me in the final count into a sort of incentive to promote the work of other artists.
If anyone thinks that the world of the commercial art market is a bed of roses, then they are thoroughly in error.
On the third day I was introduced to a high executive of that organization who arrived apologizing for his earlier absence and wishing me a pleasant stay at the "factory".
As far as this individual is concerned, a young man, elegant in appearance and of good manners, more will be understood in the more tragic chapter of this story. At that moment I did not understand with certainty exactly what his role was in the organization because I couldn’t connect him with any of the names which I generally heard mentioned by my agent when he spoke to me about them. My agent was the only source of information I had about the "Big One" and its people.
Apart from that fellow I saw no one of high rank who I recognized in those four days that I was there.
Two days later my wife and I returned home exhausted without any promise from my agent to finish up the other fourteen editions which he owed me in the four remaining months before our contract ended.
On the 1st of September of that year, six days before our contract ended, my agent called me on the phone to propose an extension to the contract. I told him that because he was a thief, a forger and a liar I was not interested in continuing to work with him and that if I had the money I would long since have sued him. He said that all those things had been done by the "Big One" and not only to me but to other artists as well and that he suffered at the hands of the Big One just as much as I did and that he was looking at no longer working with him. I told him to go to hell and hung the phone up in his face.
Today my ex-agent has his publishing business and two retail galleries in the USA.
That same day I wrote an email to the "Director", the only email address I had for any executive in the company since he had emailed me years before asking me for photos of me so that he could put them in the catalog and on the invites for the 2002 exhibition. In that email I demanded that they stop printing those forgeries and the image of my artist's signature on unauthorized prints and in passing I reminded them of the international copyright laws. I never got an answer to that email.
And so the day arrived, 7 September 2004, when my contract ended.
On the 21st of September I went down to the town and from a cyber café I added a note to my web page, showing one of my certificates of authenticity, and stating that this was the only valid certificate of authenticity for my original art works and for works signed by my hand, and that the use of a printed artist's signature while the artist was still living was a violation of his copyrights and a fraud if it has not been previously agreed to by the artist to do so before his death, because a living artist can perfectly well sign all his original works and derivatives of these in the form of prints personally.
In that note on my website I never mentioned any names, not of the Big One nor its Owner, nor any name connected with my case, nor names of other companies. The only thing I showed was a brief explanation of what a Certificate of Authenticity was and a brief explanation regarding the use of a printed signature, some of the copyright laws and a sample of one of my own certificates of authenticity for my artworks signed by me. That was all.
That was the only way left to me to try to educate the public about my author’s rights in relation to the unauthorized use of my artist's signature. Since my agent had put the blame on them and they never answered my email I felt impotent in being able to do something effective to defend my reputation as an artist. I was in a more precarious economic position than ever so even less than before could I sue them all as a group for conspiracy to commit a crime, forgery and fraud on the public.
Three days later, on the 24th of September 2004, I received an email from a lawyer saying that he represented a prestigious art gallery and that his client demanded that I immediately take down my "defamatory website" and that if I didn’t I would find myself in serious legal problems and would be sued for large amounts and a number of other terrible threats and a bunch of lies with regard to my alleged relationship with them and my ex-agent together.
I responded to this the same day with my version of the facts, telling him that if he was their legal representative, then all the more reason he should teach them to respect the law and not violate my rights as an author. He answered this with another, final email telling me that although I was a foreigner I came under US jurisdiction because I "conduct business over there" and other lies such as I had "opened galleries there" and that in those days I was signing serigraphs I also "personally sold art objects", etc. etc., colossal lies and perversions of the true facts. He also mentioned my exhibition at the place of the "Big One" and that I had signed my last editions of serigraphs in his client's place of business along with "certificates of authenticity" for them (the incredible thing is that they never produced those alleged certificates of authenticity supposedly signed by me, which I never did, not there and not anywhere else in my entire life; the only certificate of authenticity which I had made up to that date was the one I designed days earlier specifically to post on my website as an example of a real certificate of authenticity. He went on to say that this was enough to sue me in his country and that the court would take the case very seriously, without mentioning the incredible lies and alleged facts specially prefabricated and designed by them to drag me into a local court there.
From the aggression and lies of this lawyer and the revealing and alarming explanations of my agent and the unanswered email which I sent to the Director, I understood that I was dealing with very dangerous and evil people so I took down the page with the certificate from my website.
I wrote this lawyer an email telling him that I had taken down the web page but on the other hand they should stop their violations and that on my part I had done what they demanded and as a goodwill gesture they should publish the fact that they were committed to indemnify me and never again print those forgeries. They never answered this email.
On the 1st of October I was sued in the court of that city for defamation and another three counts for the sum of 19.5 million dollars.
On the 10th of October I sent that court my defense, written in my terms and unmasking their lies one by one, describing the criminal and fraudulent scheme that they created with my works and artist's signature and explaining the reasons for my complaints and asking that court to defend me against their violations instead of believing their lies. Their lawyers called this an "incomprehensible and vague document" which didn't answer their supposed "charges" against me and asked the court to order me to send them another answer, etc.
Until then I communicated with them and with the court by email or in other ways. Two years later I learned the hard way that without a lawyer one is lost. Nobody takes you seriously if you defend yourself. Nobody is interested. If you don't answer in the established and professional form of the court, nobody understands anything. For a foreigner like me, it’s like talking a language from another galaxy.
I was left practically out on the streets with no chance of selling my paintings for a long time because of the bad reputation amongst the serious galleries and other agents, because I was one of the artists whose work was sold by those people, not to mention the criminal methods they used to put obstacles in the way of my attempts to open up the market for my own work.
I was left with no other way of supporting myself than to go up into the mountains and work as a caretaker on some farms there, very far from civilization and with no means of transport or communication except a horse. In those two long years of retirement, my wife and I tried to heal ourselves of the monstrous trauma which this whole horrific and unjust period caused us. Finally in the year 2006 we decided to go and live in the city and find a pro bono lawyer to take on our case and to try in one way or another to sue those criminals. No lawyer would take any interest in my case until one day one of them did, but when he went through the court papers he told me that the court had judged against me in default and that before I could think of suing them I should first of all deal with the contempt of court which had been pronounced on me for not showing up and that my defense, as written up by me, was not taken into account. This frightened me. I hadn't known anything about it. Frightened and horrified, with much difficulty we obtained a loan from a family member so that I could defend myself. It was $11,000 to try to get me out of that problem, according to the lawyer. And so I have remained without being able to do anything until today.
These days I live in the most modest way and far from the forces of Evil. I am cheerful, and proud of my honesty even if it has brought poverty. I currently live off $1000 a month thanks to a non-US art agent who buys some of my paintings each month. With that I rent a small apartment and everything goes on keeping my family going. One small spare bedroom serves as my studio. My website is kept up by friends and family who help me with that and other things. They have been helping me since 2005. I do not own a house, have no car and no health or life insurance. I live in these precarious conditions as a result of the great theft and abuse of myself, my artist's name and reputation and the interference with my potential sales, as outlined above, all of which has amounted to major fraud committed on the public.
Meanwhile the ex-agent who was part responsible for all this, has enriched himself enormously, has properties in the USA and Israel, lived in a luxury condo in Florida which he boasts cost him half a million dollars, not to mention the luxury items inside it. He opened two large galleries over there, while I am practically in the street and he and The Big One continue to profit from my work while I have been crippled not only by their criminal acts but also by the injustice and indifference of the court in Florida.
THIS IS HOW YOU RESPOND TO AN ARTIST ABUSED FOR YEARS, WHOSE ONLY SIN WAS TO TRY TO DEFEND HIS AUTHOR'S RIGHTS!
These were the "previously unpublished chronicles" of an anonymous artist, trampled on and raped by the great forces of corrupt magnates and criminals who are still walking at liberty behind their chimeric palaces and questionable businesses.
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