NEW YORK — In a clattery, uptown bistro, not far from the studio where he once watched his father paint bold abstract masterpieces, Earl Davis contemplates the greatest loss of his life.
Not his beloved father, Stuart Davis, who died in 1964 when Earl was 12. Nor his father’s work, which Davis, an only child, spent three decades trying to document, preserve and showcase.
The biggest loss, Davis says, was the friendship of the man he trusted with everything — his confidences, his dreams, his father’s life’s work.
Even now, years after the unraveling of one of the most elaborate art frauds in history, Davis has nightmares about confronting Lawrence Salander.
The same anguished questions have tortured dozens of other victims — from celebrities to wealthy collectors to artists and those managing their estates — defrauded of some $120 million by a man some call the Bernard Madoff of the art world, owner of a lavish Upper East Side gallery.
Earlier this year, Salander pleaded guilty to 29 counts of grand larceny and fraud. In August, he was sentenced to six to 18 years in prison.
In court documents and testimony, the 61-year-old Salander outlined his schemes: How he would sell art he didn’t own, sometimes peddling the same painting or shares in a painting to two or more buyers. How he falsified records, lied to investors, submitted fraudulent loan applications, sold paintings that were for exhibit only and used the money to pay for private jets, his multimillion-dollar Manhattan townhouse, his 66-acre estate upstate.
“Larry Salander took that which is the essence of the art world — relationships — and violated it in the worst possible way,” says Ellyn Shander, a psychiatrist who lost her late father’s art collection to Salander.
But others describe Salander as a misunderstood visionary who was passionate about great art.
Salander researcher Paula Hornbostel remembers the chaotic day in 2007 when the gallery closed, ordered padlocked by a court after Salander’s former partner and biggest investor, Donald Schupak, filed a series of legal motions to end Salander’s control.
About six months later, Hornbostel was having lunch with her husband and young children when Salander and his wife walked into the restaurant. He smiled, joked with the kids, never mentioned the gallery. Hornbostel could barely contain her anger. The Lachaise Foundation, for which Hornbostel had been responsible, had lost an estimated $6.6 million.
“There was no apology, no remorse,” Hornbostel says. “After all the agony he had put me through. I kept looking at him thinking: How could you? Who are you?”
