Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  “It is absolutely correct that any work which is definitely established to be a fraud should immediately be confiscated and then eventually destroyed,” he wrote. “I would have to accept your judgment as the ultimate authority in this matter . . . and would be prepared to guarantee that these two paintings would then be burned in front of any witnesses you might wish to nominate.”

  First the disarming carrot, then the stick. Drewe followed his offer of accommodation with a veiled threat that the reputation of the association itself might be compromised.

  “An American industrialist, a prominent man of great integrity, has an affidavit and documents contending that a painting now in the vaults of a gallery, and known indubitably to be by Alberto Giacometti, was stated to be a fraud” by the association.

  “I am rather anxious that, unless I am careful, an elegant and delightful painting might be destroyed needlessly. . . . Please accept my assurances that I do not believe that you could be personally responsible for such a decision: in a busy office mistakes occur easily, and art, particularly, depends so much on intuition and subjective responses, rather than formal scientific measurements.”

  After studying the enclosed photographs of the two works, Palmer and Annette had decided not to respond to Drewe’s request. They agreed that the paintings looked fake and that the florid letter was the work of a loose cannon. They were confident that without the certificates he would never be able to sell the fakes.

  Three weeks after getting Drewe’s letter, however, they received a note from Phillips auction house in London asking for information on a piece that was about to go on the block. Attached was a copy of a letter from a Richard Cockcroft and a photograph showing one of the very works Drewe had tried to have authenticated. Titled Deux Figures, it was purportedly owned not by Drewe but by Cockcroft, who said he had bought it from E. C. Gregory. Cockcroft had helpfully provided the auction house with a purported letter from Giacometti’s biographer, James Lord, stating that the work was genuine.

  Palmer was livid. Cockcroft or Drewe or both were trying to go around the association, and she knew that it in the end it would just cause her more work. Eventually, all of Giacometti’s works end up on her desk.

  She wrote back to Phillips, told them the work was wrong, and asked them to send it to the association. Phillips replied that they no longer had it because it had been reclaimed.

  Palmer remembered another work titled Deux Figures from the catalogue raisonné. She consulted her records and found a picture of the original, which had been bought from the artist by E. C. Gregory, who had bequeathed it to the Tate Gallery in 1959. As far as she knew, Gregory had owned only one Deux Figures in his life.

  Clearly, this “Richard Cockcroft” was not only copying the work but also forging part of its provenance, cleverly embroidering fact with fiction.

  Three months after the arrival of Cockcroft’s letter, Palmer received a bizarre phone call. In a measured tone, a Londoner identifying himself as Viscount Chelmwood said he had been referred to her by a mutual acquaintance at the renowned Wildenstein Gallery.

  Chelmwood launched into a complicated story, claiming he owned a portrait that had once belonged to E. C. Gregory and was now mired in legal wrangling over its ownership. Chelmwood needed her help.

  She listened quietly. The mention of E. C. Gregory made her leery, and there was something odd about the viscount’s manner. He was asking too many questions about Giacometti and his acquaintances, she thought, as if he were trolling for inside information. Like any other researcher working on a catalogue raisonné, Palmer was wary of sharing information with possible competitors or dealers who might be wondering whether their paintings were going to make it into the catalogue. Depending on what ends up in a catalogue raisonné, fortunes can be lost or gained, and researchers have occasionally been threatened or offered bribes.

  Finally, the viscount told her that he owned several Giacometti sketches and documents and wondered whether she would be interested in including them in her catalogue raisonné.

  Palmer thanked him, said she would be in touch, and hung up. She opened her logbook and made a note next to Chelmwood’s name:

  “Weird.”

  Next she rang up their mutual acquaintance at the Wildenstein, David Ellis-Jones, to ask if he had ever heard of Chelmwood.

  He had not.

  Had he had a recent visit from someone interested in a Giacometti?

  Indeed he had.

  Several weeks earlier, a “nice, modest man” named Drewe had wandered in. He was a doctor and a distant relative of the architect Jane Drew, and he had inherited a 1956 portrait of Peter Watson from his mother. It was purportedly by Giacometti, but Drewe was trying to fill in the gaps in the provenance. He showed Ellis-Jones a letter indicating that the painting had been sold through Wildenstein as part of an exchange for a Modigliani. He had several other letters referring to the Giacometti’s past ownership, and he wanted to verify his research.

  “Drewe’s a timid amateur, ignorant but sincere,” said Ellis-Jones. The painting could never have come through Wildenstein because the gallery did not deal in modern art. Worse still, Ellis-Jones thought the piece looked dubious, and he’d told Drewe to contact Palmer and ushered him out the door.

  The connection between Peter Watson, E. C. Gregory, and Jane Drew was clear: They were all spokes of the ICA wheel. Each one had been an important figure in the British modern art movement.

  Palmer wondered whether the inclusion of these notables in the provenances was intended to take the focus away from the fakes, to distract potential buyers with the luster of owning a work that had once been in the hands of such luminaries. She also wondered whether Cockcroft, Drewe, and Viscount Chelmwood were somehow connected. Could they be one and the same person?

  She went back to her files, found the original letter from Dr. Drewe, and laid it out on her desk next to Richard Cockcroft’s letter to Phillips. Her eye settled on the return addresses: Drewe lived at 30 Rotherwick Road, and Cockcroft at 20 Rotherwick. Their phone numbers were almost the same, off by just a single digit. The signatures were similar, and beneath each one the writer had typed his name and then underlined it.

  Palmer checked her notes on the viscount’s phone call. His complicated explanations echoed the tone of the letters: an abundance of detail coupled with a certain overall vagueness. At the bottom of her phone log she had jotted down the viscount’s number. It was identical to Drewe’s.

  From her files she dug up a third letter containing a photograph of the same suspicious Portrait of a Woman that she and David Sylvester had seen in the Hanover album at the Tate. The letter was signed by John Cockett, chairman of Norseland Research, the firm Dr. Drewe had claimed to be representing as agent for the Footless Woman.

  Were Drewe and Cockett colleagues? Was Cockett an alias?

  This third letter had the same discursive quality as the others. Cockett said he would bring the painting to Paris for Palmer’s review, but that the trip would coincide with a business venture in which he was “co-operating with the French on a project to develop new propulsion systems.”

  “It might not be possible to get the painting on board our aircraft if the customs indicate that it would complicate the clearance of the industrial equipment we are bringing with us,” he wrote.

  Cockett’s signature was underlined, and the letter, like the others, contained several cc’s at the bottom. Palmer suspected that these were deceptive flourishes, and that he had no intention of copying anyone. The letter was typed on what looked like expensive stationery, with fancy heraldic signs at the top, but when she ran her fingertip across the letterhead, she could tell it was not embossed. The type was smooth to the touch, a mere photocopy. Suddenly she thought she had a clearer picture of the man: He was arrogant, a risk taker, and a cheapskate.

  Curious about Norseland, Palmer phoned the Trade and Industry Department in London, which kept records of all registered British companies. She learned that
Norseland was registered to a physicist, John Drewe, and his secretary and art historian, John Lawrence Myatt. The firm had never earned a cent or filed a tax return. It was a shell.

  15

  FALLING OFF A LOG

  It had been a bad year for Clive Belman. The onetime jewelry salesman was out of work and nearly broke, living with his wife and two kids in a house he could barely afford. On this fall afternoon, he tossed aside the want ads and headed down Rotherwick Road to his neighbor John Drewe’s house to pick up his children, who often played with Drewe’s after school. Belman envied Drewe, who was successful—he drove his kids to school in a Bentley—and unburdened by life’s troubles, least of all the next month’s mortgage. Professor Drewe was an accomplished Oxford graduate and nuclear physicist who worked from home. Belman had recently discovered that they shared an acquaintance, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Brian Josephson, whom Belman had known as a child.

  When Drewe’s daughter, Atarah, answered the door, Belman could hear Drewe calling him to come upstairs. He walked up to a small, spare room on the second floor and found Drewe crouched on the floor in a business suit, hammer in hand, banging away at a wooden picture frame. There were a dozen or so paintings lined up along the walls, abstract works by painters whose names Belman was unfamiliar with: Jean Dubuffet, Ben Nicholson, Le Corbusier, Alberto Giacometti.

  “It’s sort of a hobby of mine,” Drewe said, explaining that the paintings belonged to a syndicate of scientists and businessmen who had been collecting for half a century. He served as the group’s representative and occasionally restored the works and repaired their frames.

  “These are quite valuable,” said Drewe, gesturing at two Nicholsons. “That one’s worth about £60,000, and that one”—he pointed to an abstract piece by the window—“that’s about £40,000.”

  “I hope they’re insured,” Belman joked.

  The collection had been stored away for years in vaults and safe houses all over England, Drewe told Belman, who stood in the doorway listening as Drewe went on to say how much pleasure he got from making the frames and being surrounded by such beauty. If Belman had looked more closely, he might have noticed that the wood Drewe was using for the frames was left over from Goudsmid’s endless home renovations.

  On his way home with the children, Belman could barely focus on them. The difference between his situation and Drewe’s was almost too much to bear. The professor lived the easy life, while Belman, at forty-six, could scarcely find the money to fill his car with gas, let alone indulge in hobbies like picture framing. At his age he should be enjoying himself, but his life had begun a dramatic downward trajectory a year earlier, when two thugs in balaclavas burst into his jewelry store, lodged the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun in his mouth, and cleaned out his shop.

  Belman had been robbed before, but this was far worse, and it unnerved him. His business had been losing money steadily, and he had taken out an £80,000 home equity loan to cover the losses. The jewelry trade was a tough proposition, and a dangerous one, and soon after the robbery he decided to close down. He couldn’t help but think about the value of the works in Drewe’s home: One or two of them were worth enough to clear him of debt and stop the bank from foreclosing. As he approached his house he tried to ignore his worries for the children’s sake. Surely, he thought, something would come along.

  A week later, Drewe was standing at the door. “What do you know about art?” he said.

  “This much,” said Belman, pinching thumb and forefinger together. He had a passion for bridge, not for canvas.

  Belman invited his neighbor in, and over the course of the next hour Drewe explained that his syndicate needed £1,000,000 in a hurry to buy a cache of long-hidden Russian archives that would forever put to rest revisionist theories that the Holocaust was a myth. To raise the cash, the syndicate would have to sell a significant portion of its collection of twentieth-century paintings.

  Would Belman consider “taking them around”?

  Belman couldn’t remember the last time he’d stepped into a museum or a gallery, and he wasn’t exactly sure what “taking them around” meant, but it sounded like a good opportunity. Nevertheless, he asked Drewe why the syndicate didn’t simply put the paintings up for auction.

  Drewe said that he and his colleagues had to move quickly because someone else had also expressed an interest in the same batch of Holocaust files. There wasn’t time to go to the auction houses, which planned their sales months in advance. Not only that, they charged a steep seller’s commission, as well as a fee for reproducing the works in their catalogs. With several dozen works at stake, these commissions would be astronomical. It would be far more economical and much faster if Belman agreed to act as a middleman for the works, for which he would get a 20 percent cut.

  Belman was hesitant; there must be a catch. “How much will it cost me to get in?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” said Drewe. “The paintings are the crème de la crème, from Picasso on down. They’re worth millions.”

  Belman, an utter novice, felt that he was probably the wrong man for the job, but the offer was a lifeline.

  “You’re a good salesman,” Drewe said. “It’ll be like falling off a log.”

  The professor had read his mind. It was no secret that Belman was nearly broke. He’d been open about his predicament, and everyone knew about the smash-and-grab robbery at his jewelry store. He’d always had an uncertain career, starting out as an actor at a repertory company in his hometown of Cardiff, then working in voice-overs and on radio adaptations of television shows. These were written the night before they aired, so there was little time for rehearsal. If an actor dropped a line, the others improvised. It was bare-bones theater, and Belman learned to spin on a dime and crank out his shtick on the high wire. Finally, when even these meager acting jobs had dried up, Belman took a job managing an all-night bridge club in London, confident that he understood this world as only the child of a champion bridge player could. Each hand was a new adventure that required card smarts as well as mental fortitude.

  With Drewe, Belman’s improvisational and mental skills would be tested again. There was a lot to learn about the art world. Belman would have to educate himself and get to know his inventory thoroughly. But what was selling if not playing a role to perfection? He could do it. He knew from experience that if he was selling something even remotely interesting or worth buying, he could make a profit. As for finding the right buyer, he’d always operated on the “six degrees of separation” principle. If you cast your net wide enough, you’d find someone who would lead you to the perfect buyer.

  Belman wasn’t simply interested in the money. He needed a shot of confidence, a sip of success. Drewe’s proposition might just get him back on his feet. And besides, he would be helping to keep the reviled Holocaust revisionists at bay.

  He shook hands with Drewe, and they agreed to talk again soon.

  A couple of days later Drewe came by with two paintings, a Giacometti and a Nicholson watercolor composed of blue, red, and yellow squares and rectangles. Belman knew a little about Giacometti but almost nothing about Nicholson. He went to the library and found that the British painter had died a decade earlier, in 1982, and that he was best known for his geometric landscapes and white reliefs. A Nicholson work had recently sold at auction for more than £1,000,000, a record for a British abstract.

  Drewe told Belman that his syndicate wanted £200,000 for the Giacometti and £40,000 for Nicholson’s Aegean. He said the Nicholson had languished on consignment at a London gallery, and that its price had been reduced from £70,000. Belman began cold-calling anyone who knew anyone who might be even vaguely interested, and soon he had a bite from David Stern, a respectable dealer in Notting Hill.

  The Stern Pissarro Gallery, a second-generation family business, had opened its doors in Tel Aviv in the early 1960s before branching out. David Stern, its current director, was married to Lelia Pissarro, the great-granddaughter of th
e French impressionist Camille Pissarro. Oil and provenance ran through the family’s veins, and several generations of Pissarros had honed their talents at the easel. Lelia learned to paint on her grandfather’s boat and sold her first painting when she was just four years old, to Wally Findlay, a well-known New York dealer who sometimes, on a whim, bought work from artists’ children.

  David Stern guarded the Pissarro legacy and specialized in sales of the family’s work, but he was always looking for additional business. He told Belman he might be interested in the two works.19

  At Belman’s home a few days later, Stern examined the Giacometti and the Nicholson. As Belman filled him in on the syndicate’s attempts to acquire the vitally important Russian archives, Stern took his time studying the works. Belman had imagined a short meeting and a rapid appraisal, but the dealer checked the canvases thoroughly and turned them over to examine their frames. He took them out to the garden and held them up to the light, and then he leaned them up against the wall and photographed them from several angles.

  “Clive,” he said, “I’ve been in this business for twenty-five years. It takes twenty years to build up a reputation and two minutes for it to go up in smoke.”

  Belman, who was feeling a little anxious by now, was relieved when Stern finally said he was considering Nicholson’s Aegean and wanted to examine the documentation.

  Provenance is a fluid construct. A single piece of memorabilia can bring to life an otherwise moribund pile of receipts and invoices. A fully loaded provenance, with details of a work’s trajectory through the marketplace, can add substantially to the price. Further, if there’s any hint that the work was once associated with celebrity or scandal, infamy or criminal endeavor, its value may increase significantly. (Collectors have been known to arrange to have a painting stolen and subsequently recovered.) More often, however, a work’s provenance might consist of a single bill of sale, one catalog, or a passing mention in an old letter.