Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  After Palmer hung up with Gibson she sat drumming her fingers on the desk for a moment. There was one more call to make. She phoned David Sylvester, an art critic and Giacometti scholar, and told him she was sure there was a fake in the Sotheby’s catalog. Sylvester had already seen it.

  “I agree completely,” he said. “It’s wrong.”

  He recounted a recent visit to a New York gallery, where he had seen another, similar fake, a portrait of a woman from the waist up. The model resembled Annette, but the head was a dreadful botch-up. “Looks more like Diego,” he joked, referring to Giacometti’s brother.

  Palmer asked him about the provenance.

  He told her that the Avanti Galleries had apparently bought the piece in London for a Swedish client. The dealer had paid $325,000 for it, and had recently put it back on the market. The provenance included personal letters from Giacometti and Peter Watson, the initial owner.

  “The paperwork is astonishing,” Sylvester said, “but it’s still a fake. One of the Watson letters is dated two months after Watson’s death.”

  Palmer told him that she had also seen a portrait of a woman from the waist up, in the Hanover photo album, and that she believed it was a forgery. Could it be the same piece?

  A few days later Sylvester called her from the Tate.

  “I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s the same painting,” he said. “It’s a conspiracy, a swindle.”

  The following day, at Palmer’s urging, Sylvester called Sotheby’s to say that he concurred with her opinion that the nude in the catalog was a fake. The auction house agreed to “postpone” the sale, which Palmer knew was a polite phrase for pulling the work, but turned down Palmer’s request that they ship it to her. Instead, they returned the piece to the unnamed consignor.

  On December 4, 1991, a day after the auction, Palmer found a sinister message on her answering machine.

  “Good morning,” said the caller. “I would like to notify you of the following facts concerning the Giacometti entered at Sotheby’s for auction.”

  The work was genuine, the caller said. Furthermore, he knew that she had blocked the sale. She had seven days to inspect and certify the piece. If she failed to do so, the caller would “commence a prosecution in both the United States and France.”

  The man sounded polite, well-spoken, and determined. She replayed the call several times and transcribed it. She was sure she would hear from him again.

  13

  THE BOOKWORM

  Every time Drewe walked into Fisher & Sperr’s antiquarian bookshop, he would have been startled by the sound of the ancient doorbell, a refurbished fire alarm that shook the premises. It had been installed years ago by the shopkeeper, John Sperr, who was pushing eighty and nearly deaf. He had rigged the alarm so he could hear customers enter before they disappeared into the maze of bookcases on the ground floor.

  Fisher & Sperr sat on a corner of Hampstead Heath in the quaint neighborhood of Highgate, an area dotted with splendid seventeenth-and eighteenth-century residences. The building’s white-stucco-and-beam design dated back to the 1670s, as did some of its inventory. It had been an inn and then a bakery until the 1930s, when Sperr’s now-deceased partner turned it into a trove of rare and secondhand books.

  Over the past month Drewe had set off the alarm half a dozen times. He would come in and work his way around the bookcases to the small clearing where Sperr sat reading the trade journals behind a walnut desk on a raised landing, a black rotary telephone in front of him and a space heater at his feet. Even in the summer, he wore an old blue cardigan beneath several layers of fleece.

  The old man had been buying and selling books from the same landing for four decades, after apprenticing at sixteen at the art bookstore across the street. Over the years he had done little to upgrade the shop, which was dark and drafty and too cramped even for a spare chair for the customers. The aged leather spines and delicate vellum had become a comfortable cocoon. Real estate in this fashionable part of London was worth much more than his inventory, but he never once considered selling, even though he could have retired on the proceeds. Instead of closing up, he had paved over the garden between the store and his apartment behind the lot and built an extension for even more books. Fisher & Sperr, with its forty thousand titles, was a bibliophile’s paradise.

  These days most of his customers were a nuisance, bargain hunters who ignored the first editions of Coleridge and the signed Bertrand Russells in favor of secondhand guidebooks and novels. Drewe, on the other hand, liked to linger on the old volumes and seemed to admire the artistry that went into them. Sometimes, when Sperr had forgotten that Drewe was there, the professor would reappear with something interesting and ask various questions, though he never bought anything valuable. He had asked Sperr to find some obscure eighteenth-century German math texts for him, but so far Sperr had had no success.

  This morning Drewe came in with his usual greeting. “And how are we today, Mr. Sperr?”

  “Very well indeed,” Sperr replied with a throaty scratch. “Nothing new for you this week, I’m afraid.”

  Drewe browsed the shelves and pulled out a little-known work by the twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Kurt Gödel. He didn’t buy it, and then he turned down a nice New York edition of Das Kapital, whose author, a bookworm himself, was buried a few blocks away in Highgate cemetery. Karl Marx had spent his happiest time in the reading room of the British Museum, and had died in London surrounded by his books.

  Sperr noticed Drewe admiring a thirty-five-volume set of an eighteenth-century French encyclopedia, each volume with a pea-green cover and copper engraving. Sperr explained that it was a seminal work of the Enlightenment whose contributors included Voltaire and Rousseau. In its time it was widely considered subversive. After it was banned by royal decree, its editors were chased from one printer to another, and it had taken twenty years to complete. The Encyclopédie had played an important role in the ferment leading to the French Revolution.

  Drewe seemed interested, but not quite enough to make an offer.

  A week later, as Sperr was going for a tea break, he saw Drewe standing behind one of the bookshelves, holding the back cover of a very large book. He seemed startled and embarrassed.

  “I was just coming to see you,” Drewe told the old man. “I’m terribly sorry, but this must have fallen off. I’d be more than happy to pay for it.”

  Sperr told him not to worry, that it was not a particularly valuable book, but the professor insisted on paying for it; he liked the cover and thought he might have some use for it.

  “You can have it,” said Sperr. “I don’t need it.”

  Drewe apologized again and left the shop.

  Sperr made a quick calculation: This was the professor’s tenth or eleventh visit, and he had spent a grand total of £10. Perhaps it was time to show him some of his better inventory.

  A few weeks and several visits later, he invited Drewe to see a collection he reserved for his regular customers: first editions and other one-of-a-kind volumes, some with handmade pages and illustrations. He guided Drewe up a narrow spiral staircase that was roped off by a blue velvet cord with gold tassels and led to a tiny rare-books room with a single window, a fireplace, and a thin red rug on the floor.

  A whole shelf had been set aside for two hundred thick volumes of religious texts, each one about fifteen inches high and nine inches wide. This, Sperr said, was a compilation of all of the known research and writings of the Catholic Church from A.D. 200 to the 1400s. Written in Greek and Latin, the set was known as the Patrologiae Cursus Completus . Sperr had at one time owned all 382 volumes, but over the years he had sold several of them to Catholic institutions and libraries. The work was considered a milestone in Church history. Published in the mid-1800s, the Patrologiae included treatises on theology and doctrine, apologias, and studies of saints.

  Drewe leafed through one of the volumes and noted that the title page bore a blue oval stamp with the inscr
iption “St. Philip’s Priory, Begbroke, Oxford—O.S.M.” Another volume had a similar stamp that read “St. Mary’s Priory, Fulham, London—O.S.M.” Sperr explained that the initials referred to the Order of the Servants of Mary, a brotherhood of friars devoted to the Virgin Mother. St. Philip’s and St. Mary’s were two of the order’s priories. Sperr had bought the Patrologiae some fifteen years earlier from the library at St. Philip’s.

  Drewe seemed fascinated. “I’d love to spend more time with this,” he said.

  Sperr left him alone and went off to mind the shop. He could hear the professor pacing around upstairs and wondered whether he would finally spend a little money.

  It was no news to bibliophiles that convents and monasteries often harbored valuable old books, manuscripts, and works of ecclesiastical art. Aficionados of rare books knew of dozens of great inside stories. One of the more famous concerned the near-mythical manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels, written and illustrated—or “illuminated”—by an eighth-century monk on a remote island in Northumbria. Over the centuries the leather-bound, jewel-encrusted volume had been transferred from one priory to the next, finally ending up in the British Museum. Book dealers dreamed of finding such ancient treasures in obscure church libraries, and were always on the lookout for oddities like the Breeches Bible or the Vinegar Bible.18

  Art dealers, too, dreamed of finding rare works, paintings hidden beneath decades of soot from vigil candles and coal-burning stoves, a Caravaggio discovered in a village church in France or a Michelangelo behind an altar in Tuscany. Such miracles had taken place. Thus, Drewe reasoned, it was not inconceivable that the odd work of art might have made its way to the three-hundred-year-old former estate near Oxford that was now home to St. Philip’s Priory.

  Shortly after, Drewe sat down at his dining table and began what would become a long correspondence with the friars at St. Philip’s. His ultimate aim, of course, was to find a weakness he could exploit to provenance another batch of fakes.

  Drewe wrote that he represented two businessmen who had bought several dozen volumes of the Patrologiae from Fisher & Sperr. Inside, they had found sketches attributed to Peter Paul Rubens and Sebastiano Ricci, along with a number of much more recent watercolors by Graham Sutherland, a twentieth-century English artist known for his works on religious themes. The businessmen wanted to sell the works and needed written assurance that they had once belonged to the priory and were sold according to Church bylaws. Drewe put a fake priory stamp on the back of a “Sutherland” sketch of the Crucifixion—done by Myatt, of course—and enclosed a photograph of it with his letter to the friars.

  A few weeks later the priory wrote back, saying it had no recollection of owning any artworks. It made the mistake of telling Drewe that, although it had sold hundreds of books from its library, it had not kept complete sales records. Drewe replied that it was too bad the priory had been careless and “foolishly” sold off the Patrologiae; otherwise it would still own the works that had been found in the volumes. He insisted on a meeting, and drove to St. Philip’s on the appointed day.

  Although the sale had taken place many years earlier, some of the friars were still upset that such a valuable trove had been sold for a pittance. Drewe sympathized with them and told them the works belonged to Messrs. Peter Harris and Hugh Roderick Stoakes, who were willing to donate 10 percent of the proceeds of the sale to the O.S.M. This was false, of course, nor did his friends Harris and Stoakes know that they had just become the proud owners of “Sutherlands.” To make the sale, however, Harris and Stoakes needed proof that the works had been at the priory and had been sold to Fisher & Sperr legitimately. Drewe hinted that the owners were considering legal action if the priory did not issue some kind of declaration to that effect.

  The matter was now taken up by the overseer of the O.S.M. in England, Father Paul Addison. The U.K. branch of the order was a small, tight-knit community little more than a century old, and most of the friars knew its history well, having passed it along from one generation to the next. Father Addison discovered that none of them recalled seeing or hearing about religious works of art in the libraries of either St. Philip’s in Begbroke or St. Mary’s in London.

  Addison knew and admired Graham Sutherland’s work, particularly Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph, the vast green and gold tapestry the artist had designed for Coventry Cathedral. Addison would have remembered if any of Sutherland’s religious works had ever belonged to the priories, but since it never occurred to him that Drewe was lying, he came up with reasons to question his own judgment. Many friars had died in the period since the community was founded, and the memory of such ecclesiastical works might well have disappeared with them. The assets of the order had never been fully cataloged, and it was possible that sketches and watercolors had been overlooked or misplaced or slipped between the pages of the Patrologiae for safekeeping. How else to explain Drewe’s photocopies of several small Sutherlands with the priory’s stamp on them? To Addison’s knowledge, the priory had used a single stamp on its library and archival matter since the early 1900s. It was the only one of its kind, and identical to the one on the photographs.

  Addison consulted his board of trustees and then wrote to Drewe.

  “After proper investigation and consultation with the persons concerned . . .”

  He paused at the typewriter. He did not want to deny the order a donation, nor did he want it involved in a lawsuit.

  “. . . All and any sales of books, maps, manuscripts, papers and drawings belonging to the English Province of Friar Servants of Mary from its Begbroke Priory during the years 1966 to 1976 were conducted with due permissions and observance of the regulations. . . .

  “I hope the above declaration will leave all subsequent handlers of those books, maps, manuscripts, papers and drawings quite clear as to the origins of their acquisitions.”

  With full faith in Drewe’s good intentions, Addison provided the details of the order’s bank account, so that Drewe could wire the donation.

  Now Drewe had his provenance, and several weeks later at Christie’s, dealers and collectors bid on a series of Crucifixion scenes by Graham Sutherland. Each one of them bore the O.S.M. stamp.

  The order never received a penny from Messrs. Peter Harris and H. R. Stoakes.

  John Sperr sat at his desk, eyes peeled for Drewe. The professor had become something of an irritant. Lately, whenever Drewe went upstairs and paced, Sperr listened to the creaking floorboards and imagined the seventeenth-century building sagging, the walls straining. He suspected that Drewe was doing more than browsing, that he was looking for something specific.

  Sperr checked the contact information the professor had given him and discovered that the Duke Street address did not match the postal code. When he dialed the phone number, he got an answering machine with a generic greeting. He dialed directory inquiry and found that there was a listing for a John Drewe, but at a different number.

  The next time Drewe came in, Sperr was waiting for him. As usual, the professor asked to be let upstairs, but Sperr stood by the staircase to block his way.

  “The rare books section is closed for renovations,” he said.

  Drewe was not disappointed. He had what he needed. Forging provenance had become a full-time job, and the letter from the priory could be used for dozens of fakes. When the time came for another “owner,” he was confident he’d find a mark. He thanked Sperr and let himself out.

  14

  THE PAPER TRAIL

  When the material she had requested from the Tate arrived in Paris in the fall of 1992, Mary Lisa Palmer examined it closely. Among the documents was a conservator’s report on the two suspect photographs in the Hanover album, of the Footless Woman and the portrait of a woman from the waist up. As she had surmised, neither bore the stamp of the Hanover Gallery’s photographer. Furthermore, both were printed on a shiny resin-coated paper that had not been in use until the mid-1970s, decades after the works were supposedly painted. Palmer
knew that Erica Brausen had donated her records to the Tate in 1986 and strongly suspected that the phony pictures had been slipped into the archives in the intervening years.

  In the Footless Woman’s provenance was a handwritten letter from the owner, Peter Harris, authorizing his agent, John Drewe of Norseland Research Ltd., to sell the work on his behalf.

  The names rang a bell. For years Palmer had kept a log of the calls and letters that came to her attention, as well as the dozens of attempts to forge the master’s work. In the association’s records she found a batch of letters dating back to the late 1980s requesting certificates of authenticity and archival information on Giacometti. At the time, something about them rang false, and she had filed them for future reference. Now, nearly five years later, she reread them. Each one appeared to have been mailed by a different collector, but the style was very similar. Each envelope also contained a photograph of at least one dubious-looking painting.

  The first letter, from a Dr. John Drewe, was addressed to Annette. Drewe identified himself as a collector of early Dutch works who had recently inherited several modern paintings, including two Giacomettis. He planned to loan these to a British gallery and needed certificates of authenticity.

  Generally, such requests consisted of a few succinct explanatory paragraphs and a picture or slide of the work. Drewe’s letter was three pages long and elaborate in the extreme, vague on certain key points and all too specific on others. It had a slightly unpleasant tone, by turns submissive and threatening.

  Drewe was aware that the association would never certify the works without seeing them, and he volunteered to ship them to Paris. However, he said, he would agree to do so only through the auspices of the diplomatic service to protect the paintings from confiscation “according to the Geneva Convention.”