You’ve been waiting for that Degas pastel for years; it’s the one that will flesh out your heady collection of the master. Get it quick, before the competition hears about it! You’ve been given a special two-day window of opportunity to make up your mind. You’ve simply got to snag it. . . . You know you should be calm, but this is a sure thing and you are dying to own it. Go for it.14
Palmer had no financial stake in the transaction. Her job was to protect Giacometti’s legacy, and she was determined to stop the sale of the piece. The photograph in the catalog was not sufficient proof of forgery, and the association had a standing policy of not judging a work’s authenticity on the basis of a reproduction, so she called Sotheby’s and made an appointment to see the Footless Woman.
Palmer flew to London and took a taxi to New Bond Street, a West End shopping thoroughfare that had been fashionable since the eighteenth century. At Sotheby’s, she stepped into the lobby and went up the well-worn staircase to the viewing room, where she asked to see the Giacometti nude.
What a mess, she thought. It was definitely a fake, not even a nice try.
There were a number of giveaways, not least of which was the table in the foreground. In addition, the nude was uncharacteristically lifeless, with a series of aimless, floating brushstrokes in the background. Giacometti often painted a glimpse of his studio behind the model, with a row of canvases stacked up against the wall. Here the forger had laid in flat, abstract lines and applied a heavy coat of varnish, something Giacometti would never have done.
Palmer expressed her concerns to a Sotheby’s representative, who argued that the previous owner might have added the varnish himself. He insisted that Sotheby’s had done its homework. Perhaps this wasn’t the best Giacometti, he said, but it was a Giacometti nonetheless. Sotheby’s had performed due diligence and had found the provenance impeccable. They had also examined a photograph of the painting in the files of the now defunct Hanover Gallery. The files were stored at the Tate archives, and Palmer was urged to go and take a look at them for herself.
Palmer’s infallible eye had rarely been questioned so she was slightly taken aback, but she had no intention of backing off. Since the auction was only a few days away, she decided to stay in London and do a little footwork. She hailed a cab and asked the driver to take her to the Tate. En route she reviewed in her mind Giacometti’s relationship with the Hanover.
The gallery, which had dealt with Giacometti for years, had never been a huge financial success, but it had been one of Europe’s most influential showcases of contemporary art. His widow, Annette, still had occasional dealings with its founder, Erica Brausen, who had set out in the late 1940s to challenge conventional thinking. Now in her eighties, Brausen had been as fearless in her personal life as she was about the art she supported. She fled Germany for Paris in the 1930s, ran a bar frequented by artists and writers, and used her contacts with the U.S. Navy to help her Jewish and socialist friends escape from Europe during the Spanish Civil War. She herself had fled in a fishing boat and arrived penniless in London at the start of World War II. Then she began organizing small exhibitions.
It was not an easy road: Brausen was a woman in a male-dominated business, a German in a Germanophobic society, and an open lesbian (her lover was Catherine “Toto” Koopman, a former Chanel model and film actress). At the Hanover, which she opened in 1949, she repeatedly went out on a limb for unconventional artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Her gallery later foundered, and went under in 1973, but during its quarter century in existence Brausen had kept meticulous records, logging each sale, purchase, loan, and commission in her ledger books. These were now stored in the Tate archives.
Palmer paid the cabbie, walked into the museum, and introduced herself to the head archivist, Jennifer Booth. She asked to see the Hanover photograph albums, the visual record of all the artwork that had passed through the gallery. This old-fashioned two-ring binder was about the size of a school composition book, and its heavy black pages were brittle and stiff with age.
Palmer flipped through the relevant album until she found the Footless Woman. The details on the label below the photograph coincided with those in the Sotheby’s catalog:Nude 1954
By Alberto Giacometti G67/11
Oil on canvas: 23-7/8 × 17-7/8 ins
Signed lower right.
Sold June 16th 1957
She did not, even for a moment, consider the possibility that her judgment was off. She looked closely at the black-and-white photograph. To her trained eye, both the image and the contrast seemed a little too sharp. She had spent the past seventeen years looking at pictures of Giacomettis, and she was sure this one had been shot fairly recently.
She reminded herself of her own mantra: Where there’s one fake there’s another.
She turned the pages of the album until she came across a second “Giacometti,” a portrait of a woman from the waist up. It was as bogus as the first one. How on earth had the two pictures ended up in the Tate’s files?
Palmer doubted that Brausen would have fallen for a fake. The dealer’s eye was too good, and she had bought directly from the galleries that represented Giacometti. Palmer asked to see the Hanover’s sales ledgers and found the Sotheby’s nude. It had the same reference number, G67/11, and the details were the same as those in the Sotheby’s catalog. The ledgers also listed ICA cofounder Peter Watson, who had purportedly sold the nude to the Hanover, as the owner of three other Giacomettis. Palmer knew nearly every Giacometti in the world, and was sure Watson had never owned that many of the artist’s works.
Were those other Giacomettis fakes too?
Palmer studied the ledgers, loose-leaf leather volumes held together by a thong. They reminded her of nineteenth-century accounting books. It would be easy enough to slip a page out and then replace it. Palmer scrutinized Watson’s name, which had been written alongside the entries for the four works. The ink appeared to be fresh. Then she examined the entry for the Hanover’s sale of the Sotheby’s nude. Here a name had been scratched out and replaced with the words “R.D.S. May, Obelisk Gallery.” Again the ink looked fresh.
In the archivist’s parlance, the files had been contaminated.
Palmer asked Booth for the Hanover daybooks, which tracked the movement of paintings in and out of the gallery. She found a listing for G67/11, but here it was a painting that had been done in 1951. The Sotheby’s catalog listed the Standing Nude as having been painted in 1954. The forger was off by three years. He probably hadn’t bothered to doctor the daybooks, which were hard to decipher, and thus the least likely of records a dealer would consult to verify a work’s provenance.
Palmer was now certain that whoever was behind the Sotheby’s nude had slipped a photograph of it into the Hanover album and falsified the sales ledger. She resisted going through all of the Hanover records to check the other possible forgeries. Her immediate priority was to keep the nude from the auction block.
No doubt the Tate would not take kindly to the suggestion that its security had been breached, and Palmer still lacked absolute proof. Nevertheless, she took Booth aside, told her what she suspected, and asked for copies of the photographs of every Giacometti in the Hanover files, and of all the Hanover records that referred to Giacometti transactions. In addition, she asked Booth to check the backs of the two suspicious Giacometti photographs she’d seen and find out if they’d been stamped by the Hanover Gallery’s official photographer.
To Palmer’s surprise, the archivist was more than willing to accommodate her.
Jennifer Booth had been watching Professor Drewe for the better part of a year. There was something odd about him, and she felt uneasy whenever he came into the reading room. He dressed beautifully and spent hours at the archives, but she sensed that behind his refined and articulate exterior he was out of his element, not quite sure how to behave. It wasn’t that he lacked confidence but that he could be so annoyingly obsequious.
“I’m so sorry to be a nuisance
, but could you be terribly kind and get this material?” he’d ask in a stage whisper, ostensibly to avoid distracting the other researchers. Instead, he only drew attention to his exaggerated mannerisms. Her staff had complained; they disliked him and preferred not to be on duty when he was around.
Booth’s regulars were serious researchers who didn’t think twice about sending her staff into the darkest corners of the stacks. By contrast, Drewe made an unctuous ritual of it when a simple thank-you would have sufficed. On the other hand, while the archive had its share of nuisance researchers on fishing expeditions, Drewe seemed to know exactly what he was after.
After her disquieting conversation with Mary Lisa Palmer, Booth decided it was time to sound the alarm. She walked into the office of her supervisor, the head of the library and archives, Beth Houghton, and told her about Palmer’s visit. She said Palmer suspected that the archives had been compromised, and that they contained photographs of fake paintings.
Booth told Houghton that she too was suspicious. “I think Professor Drewe is involved in something here, but I’m not quite sure what it is,” she said. “I suggest we open a formal investigation.”
Houghton stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told Booth. “He’s a benefactor. He’s given the archive £20,000, and the Tate can’t risk alienating him on nothing more than a hunch.”
Booth was undeterred. She was guided by a code of ethics and considered herself both a scientist and a keeper of memory. She had spent her entire career safeguarding historical documents, and she could still remember the excitement and wonder of the first few years. The first time she had examined a three-hundred-year-old document, she’d felt in its delicate confection of old ink and paper an immediate and tactile connection to history.
Booth went to the stacks, pulled out the Hanover album, and began making copies for Palmer.
12
A SINISTER MESSAGE
From her office, Mary Lisa Palmer called Sotheby’s and said she had spent hours at the Tate archives examining the records of the 1954 nude. It was her considered opinion that something was wrong with the photograph of the painting. She had no doubt whatsoever that the painting was a fake. Then Annette sent a fax to Sotheby’s demanding it hold off the sale and send the nude to Paris.
The anonymous owner, however, refused to grant Sotheby’s authority, and the work was never sent. The auction house still thought the provenance was solid, but Palmer wouldn’t budge. The provenance material was as phony as the painting, she thought.
Sotheby’s cited two experts who believed the work was authentic. One was the London art dealer Thomas Gibson, who had bought several Giacomettis from Annette in the past. The other was Erica Brausen.
Palmer telephoned the eighty-three-year-old Brausen, who sounded weak and out of sorts. She had been down with the flu for several weeks and couldn’t remember the details of the sale, but she thought it was possible she’d bought the painting from Watson.
“The provenance is good,” she said. “If it’s in my record, then it’s right.”
Palmer was hoping that Brausen would look at the painting, but the old woman’s breathing sounded labored and she seemed too ill to travel. (She would die the next year.) Palmer thanked her, rang off, and called Thomas Gibson.
“The painting’s a bit fishy, but the provenance is respectable enough,” he told her.
“What about the varnish?” Palmer asked.
“Shouldn’t be put off by that,” he said, adding that aesthetic gaps and failures of judgment might exist in any given piece. While this certainly wasn’t the greatest work, Gibson thought the provenance was solid.
“Anyone can fake a document,” Palmer argued.
“Granted,” said Gibson. “But if someone wanted to fake a Giacometti, why choose such an unattractive composition?”
Palmer asked whether he had approved the piece for Sotheby’s, as the auction house had claimed.
“They have a vivid imagination,” he said.15
Mary Lisa Palmer was not one to give up. She had devoted too much of her life to the task of bringing order to Giacometti’s legacy. At his death in 1966 he left behind an estate that would later be evaluated at $200 million, but he left behind practically no documents
on what he had produced and where it went. With the help of an assistant, Annette immediately began writing galleries, collectors, and museums around the world in search of files and photographs of Giacometti’s works. Her work laid the foundation for a catalogue raisonné, a scholarly listing of all of an artist’s known works. Annette had several loyal assistants, two of whom would later play a larger role in the association, one Martine Neeser—today the association’s president—and the fourth and last, Mary Lisa Palmer.16
When Palmer, a petite Connecticut woman with flyaway hair, walked into Annette’s office in 1974, the two women got along right away. Palmer had a quiet industriousness and was almost obsessively attentive to detail, two traits particularly suited for a catalogue raisonné. She shunned “art world black,” wore little or no makeup, favored functional shoes, and avoided the long, expensive lunches that were so common in the trade. A strong cup of coffee in the morning saw her through to noontime, and then she had a croque-monsieur at a local café or a sandwich at her desk.
The tables in her office were invariably piled high with material to be examined, classified, and filed away. Over the previous few years she had discovered among Annette’s files dozens of casual sketches Giacometti liked to draw on whatever material was to hand. She examined them for information that might be useful for the catalogue raisonné and for a book in progress on Giacometti’s writing. She had deciphered and transcribed hundreds of tiny scribbled notations, in French and Italian, he had made on drawing-paper table mats, in sketchbooks, and in notebooks, the words leaping sideways and upside down from one notebook page to the next. The book, Ecrits, was finally published in 1990, but work on the catalogue raisonné continued.
Once published, the catalogue would be the bible for all things Giacometti.It would include every known fact on each work—materials, dimensions, exhibition histories, provenances, scholarly analyses—and stand as the single most important defense against the addition of frauds to the artist’s oeuvre. For those in the trade, the catalogue raisonné was the ultimate arbiter: The inclusion or exclusion of a work could mean the difference between a high offer and a pass.
A catalogue raisonné could take years to compile: Dozens of dealers had to be contacted, old bills and receipts traced, records of defunct galleries resurrected, and libraries searched for references. Unlike Giacometti, Pablo Picasso had kept meticulous records and was still alive when his catalogue was being assembled. At thirty-three volumes, it was still incomplete more than three decades after the artist’s death in 1973, yet at one time copies were selling for about $100,000. Jean Dubuffet was just as meticulous, and he edited the thirty-nine volumes of his own catalogue.
Palmer put everything she had into the job, and Annette treated her as part of the family. Through studying his work and long conversations with friends of Giacometti, Palmer got to know the artist whose deeply lined face she had never seen in the flesh. His work had a raw, unadulterated, mystical quality that spoke to her, and the very notion that someone would try to forge it offended her to the core. From the start she and Annette had kept careful files on the dozens of attempts to market spurious Giacomettis after his prices began to skyrocket in the 1950s, but the majority of these were fake sculptures and unauthorized bronze castings made from illegally obtained molds of the genuine works. The castings were particularly difficult to spot because they were nearly identical to the originals, except that the originals were always a hairbreadth larger, because the molten bronze in which the fakes were cast shrank slightly as it cooled. With caliper in hand, Palmer had tracked down each suspect piece until it was out of circulation.
To Palmer, any forgery was an insult to Giacometti’s memory and craft. He had been a perfectio
nist who worked and reworked his pieces obsessively. At one point his sculptures in progress were so tiny that, according to one of his biographers, James Lord, they fit into a matchbox he carried in his pocket. An early acquaintance once said of the bushy-haired artist, “He will either go very far or go mad.”17 Palmer was certain that Giacometti would have been furious had he lived to see his painstakingly made sculptures—and now his paintings—forged with such élan.
Palmer’s confidence in her own judgment was well earned. Over the years she had handled and cataloged hundreds of Giacometti’s sculptures and canvases, and had developed an uncanny knack for honing in on the bogus. By inspection alone she could determine if a piece had come from the master’s hand. If she felt even the slightest nudge of a doubt, there was no talking her out of it. Hapless dealers or collectors who brought in a piece that seemed slightly off could expect no niceties. When she or Annette determined that a work was fake, they did their best to have it seized by the police in order to start the required legal verification process. Once declared a fake by the court on the basis of independent expert testimony, the court can either have the work destroyed or placed in the custody of the plaintiff, usually the association in the case of a Giacometti. The association preferred custody for purposes of evidence for future cases. So far, the courts have always sided with the association.
“I’ve never been wrong, yet,” she once told an interviewer.
Palmer’s critics thought her self-assuredness verged on arrogance, but she paid them no mind. Now she was determined to put the Footless Woman away.
Provenance Page 10
