For Aegean, Drewe had provided Belman with a sensational provenance, including a handwritten letter from Barbara Hepworth, a major British sculptor and Ben Nicholson’s second wife, to Margaret Gardiner, an early member of the ICA and a patron of the arts who had once donated seventeen tons of Nigerian hardwood to Hepworth for use in her work. Drewe told Belman that the letter, which mentioned Aegean in passing, had accompanied the painting for years as part of its provenance.
Drewe had also supplied Belman with photocopies of various receipts, several of them marked with a rectangular stamped impression reading, “For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive.” This indicated that the originals were tucked safely away at the Tate. Other documents showed that the original buyer of Aegean was Jacques O’Hana of the O’Hana Gallery, who had acquired it from the artist for £900 in 1955. The work had later been bought by Peter Harris, a collector who was based in Israel and was a member of Drewe’s syndicate. The receipts had all been signed by either Harris or O’Hana. One further document lending weight to the work’s authenticity was a 1950s exhibition catalog that included a black-and-white photograph of it.
Belman sent Stern a transparency of the painting, along with the provenance. Stern was evidently impressed. He told Belman that he had a potential buyer in New York, an art consultant who worked out of her East Side apartment and had done business with Stern in the past. The consultant had a corporate client who seemed interested.
On a July morning in 1993, Belman landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport to deliver Aegean. With the small painting tucked safely under his arm, he folded himself into a waiting cab and went straight to the consultant’s office. She examined the work and its provenance, seemed pleased with both, and immediately agreed to buy the piece for £35,000. When Belman returned to London a few days later, Drewe paid him his £7,000 commission.
The job could not have gone more smoothly. It was the easiest seven grand Belman had ever made, and he promptly phoned his bank manager and told him to call off the wolves.
The sale of Aegean was the first of a string of successes for Belman, who no longer lay awake at night worrying about how he was going to take care of his family. He was selling to dealers in London and New York, calling friends for new leads, dropping hints at parties, and talking up his inventory to his old mates in the gem game. The word had gone out that he had important connections in the art world.
Occasionally, Drewe would dangle transparencies or laser printouts of the syndicate’s more expensive Chagalls, Monets, and Picassos, but he rarely gave Belman the really good stuff. All in due time, he’d say. Belman could hardly complain. He was happy with what he’d been getting, and whenever his friends came by, he’d march them through the collection.
“That’s a Giacometti,” he’d say proudly. “That’s a Ben Nicholson.”
He refined his pitch, read up on the artists, spent time at the museums, and even sat through the occasional lecture. Once, he took the train down to the Cornish seaside town of St. Ives, which had been a haven for Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore, and roamed along the cliffs and down by the coves, soaking in the atmosphere. After all, he was in the art business now.
16
THE BOW TIE
Peter Nahum was a familiar face to the legions of dedicated viewers of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. He wore a bow tie and wire-rimmed glasses, and had an easy manner. He was a natural for television, and had been the Roadshow’s expert in nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings since 1981. It was great fun. On one show, a Scotswoman from Inverness unwrapped a painting she had bought at a yard sale for fifty pence. Nahum quickly identified it as a valuable work by the nineteenth-century “queen of cat painters,” a Dutch artist named Henriëtte Ronner-Knip. The work sold at auction for £22,000. When a banker brought in a collection of twenty-five Filipino watercolors he’d inherited from his grandfather, Nahum knew right away that it was gold, worth £240,000, as it turned out.
Nahum’s favorite was an episode in which an elderly couple brought in a watercolor of a moonlit desert scene. They’d kept it in a cardboard tube since the 1930s, and were on the verge of throwing it out, when they decided to come on the show on a lark. It took Nahum all of ten seconds to recognize a long-lost watercolor by Richard Dadd, a solid mid-Victorian painter who had done much of his work while confined to an asylum after murdering his father. As soon as Nahum laid eyes on the piece, his brain began to spin. It was in perfect condition.
“It can’t be!” he thought. “I’ve never seen anything like it in this condition, it’s too good.”20
The old couple sold the watercolor to the British Museum for £100,000.
A fixture on the lecture circuit, Nahum knew the art world intimately, having spent seventeen years at Sotheby’s working the gavel and the sales floor. It was said that Sotheby’s was filled with dealers fobbing themselves off as gentlemen while Christie’s was a bastion of gentlemen who desperately wanted to be dealers. As a teenager Nahum had aspired to both. He started at Sotheby’s at age eighteen, earning eight pounds a week as a clerk on the bustling auction floor. It was hair-raising, adrenaline-fueled work. A first-rate auctioneer could sell nearly two hundred lots in an hour, and it was Nahum’s job to stay abreast of the bids, convert currencies, and keep the sale ledgers up-to-date while he kept an eye on the room. He memorized the faces of important clients, and was occasionally asked to bid on their behalf. The learning curve was sharp, and he quickly rose in rank to become a senior director and department head.
After nearly two decades of feeding the art machine and pulling paintings off old ladies’ walls, Nahum left Sotheby’s in 1984 and opened the Leicester Galleries on Ryder Street. The timing was good, for the market was soaring. He was as tough as his clients, none of whom were pussycats, and he kept a constant watch on the auction houses, where he had witnessed toe-curling manifestations of greed and cunning.During his career he had experienced moments of fantastically good fortune as well as downturns so nasty—particularly in the early 1990s—that his bankers found reason to doubt his capacity to perform miracles.
Nahum’s gallery, whose centerpiece was a plush velvet showroom hung with placid landscapes and seascapes, sat off one of the main thoroughfares of central London, in an elegant district of high-end shops and boutiques crammed with tourists carrying turquoise bags filled with chocolates and teas from Fortnum & Mason. There were frequent drop-ins at the gallery, and Nahum kept his ear cocked for the telltale accent of cash-heavy Americans, Germans, and Japanese. His experience had taught him that the rarest treasures could be found in the most unlikely places, so when Clive Belman walked in with a painting under his arm one day in the fall of 1993, Nahum went up to him and politely asked what he could do for him.
With all the patience in the world, he helped Belman unwrap a small wooden panel of the Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland. Christ was depicted as an emaciated figure against a yellow background, and Belman explained that the panel was one of a series of working sketches for the Crucifixion scene in Sutherland’s famous tapestry in Coventry Cathedral. He told Nahum he was selling the work on behalf of his neighbor, John Drewe, a physicist who was conducting research into long-hidden Holocaust archives.
In Nahum’s opinion, the work was unremarkable, but it had a solid provenance. He remembered that not long ago Christie’s had auctioned a similar group of Sutherland Crucifixions with identical provenance: They had all come from St. Philip’s Priory in Begbroke. On the back of Belman’s panel was the priory stamp and the inscription “Father Bernard F. Barlow, Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion of our Lord—study in oil—loaned Jan 1972 to Oxford University Bod Library reference R203.”
Nahum assumed that Christie’s had checked with the monastery and vetted the provenance of the other Crucifixions, but to be on the safe side, he decided to take Belman’s over there for an informal evaluation—which was easy enough to do, since his gallery was right next to Christie’s back door. Sometimes, w
hen he opened up shop in the morning, he found boxes of spent champagne bottles that had been left outside overnight. Nahum believed that such luxuries, which were financed by the auctioneers’ usurious commissions, were outrageous. Still, the auction houses were useful when he needed to unload mediocre works that he considered unworthy of his own clientele.
Christie’s estimated Belman’s Sutherland panel at about £15,000. Nahum thought that was high and offered Belman £5,500. Belman accepted and made out a receipt in the name of John Drewe at Airtech Systems.
A few weeks later Belman was back with two more pieces, both by Ben Nicholson and both from the collection of John Cockett. Nahum remembered that he had seen one of them a year or so earlier in a vault in Golders Green, where he had gone with an artist and runner named Stuart Berkeley. At the time Nahum thought the work was either badly restored or the product of one of Nicholson’s off days, and his opinion hadn’t changed.
The second painting, titled Mexican, was no better than the first, but it was commercial enough, with skewed geometrical shapes and an abundant palette. Nahum thought he could probably find an American buyer for it. The back of the stretcher was signed and dated by the artist, and there were two labels, one from Galerie de Seine in Belgrave Square, London, the other from New York’s Willard Gallery. The documentation seemed solid. The piece was dated 1953 and had been bought from Nicholson by E. J. Power, a businessman and future Tate Gallery trustee. Belman showed Nahum an old receipt for the work, along with a 1950s catalog from the Galerie de Seine that was titled “Paintings by Five Artists From St. Ives” and contained a photograph of the painting. Finally, the provenance included a letter to Belman from the Nicholson scholar and former Tate head Alan Bowness, who had seen a transparency of the work and accepted it as genuine.
“The fact that it was shown at a reputable gallery and illustrated in the catalogue would seem to confirm the attribution,” Bowness wrote.
Belman told Nahum he wanted £40,000 for Mexican. Nahum sought a second opinion from a curator at the Tate, who thought the piece was genuine but second-rate. After a third expert confirmed that Nicholson’s signature on the stretcher was authentic, Nahum pooled his resources with another dealer and paid Belman £35,000 for the painting. Then he put it in storage and decided to wait until the next auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
Shortly after the purchase, Nahum got a phone call from Drewe, who wanted some information on a painting Nahum had on consignment, Claude Monet’s Cleopatra’s Needle and Charing Cross Bridge. Drewe had a private client for the piece, and asked whether he could borrow a transparency. Nahum declined. Dealers rarely shared transparencies with intermediaries, particularly unfamiliar ones. Top-tier dealers observed certain trade rules, and it was Nahum’s experience that runners often felt free to break them. A clever middleman with a borrowed transparency could slice a dealer’s commission in half. Nahum preferred to conduct his business with a work at its source.
The Monet was at the restorer’s, he told Drewe, but the professor was welcome to take his client there to examine it. Collectors love private viewings, the more remote the location the better. It gives them a sense of exclusivity and a feeling that they are getting a jump on the market.
Drewe said he would bring his client to the restorer’s that afternoon, but he asked Nahum to stay away from the showing. This was not an unusual request in the business, and Nahum agreed to it. He told Drewe that he had another appointment in any case and would be busy all afternoon.
By sheer coincidence, Nahum’s meeting was canceled, and he went back to the gallery to finish up some work. As he was reading his mail, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform came in and announced that he was there to pick up the Monet transparency for Dr. Drewe.
Nahum told him the transparency wasn’t available. The chauffeur bristled and said Mr. Nahum had specifically left instructions for him to pick it up.
“Awfully bad luck,” said the dealer. “I’m Peter Nahum, and I told Dr. Drewe very clearly that he couldn’t have it.”
The driver skulked off.
An hour later the phone rang. It was Nahum’s restorer, calling to say that he had recognized Drewe’s “private client” as a former auction house employee who had been fired for stealing. Nahum had been expecting a call from Drewe with an update on the Monet, but he never heard from him. Just as well, he thought.
In a matter of weeks Belman was back at the gallery with another painting for Nahum from Drewe’s collection. The dealer took him aside and told him he wanted nothing more to do with the professor.
“I’ll never do business with him again,” he said.
17
INTO THE WHIRLWIND
These people are all barking mad,” Belman muttered to himself as he left Nahum’s gallery. By now, he’d been around the art business long enough to know that it was a small world, rife with competition, vile gossip, and eccentricity of every sort, and that it was almost entirely unregulated. Many of the dealers he’d worked with wouldn’t last five minutes in another business. They would be blacklisted, fined, or jailed. Drewe fit in perfectly.
Belman had been selling paintings for him for two years now. The professor seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, as well as an array of personal causes ranging from Holocaust archives to student grants and religious orders. Drewe was fond of peppering the newspapers with letters to the editor, and one of them, published in the London Times, made reference to art that had been confiscated by the Nazis from European Jews. It had helped Belman sell a painting whose proceeds were destined for Drewe’s latest pet project, an Auschwitz memorial charity concert. Occasionally Belman wondered whether Drewe’s paintings were fake or stolen, but the fact that they had passed muster with some of the biggest dealers in town reassured him.
Drewe’s behavior, however, was becoming a principal source of irritation and a cause for concern. He was increasingly unpredictable, and lately his demeanor set Belman’s heart racing every time they did business together. Often, after Belman had set up a deal, Drewe would fail to deliver on a promised painting. If the sale did go through, Drewe demanded his money immediately once the painting changed hands. In one instance, Belman recalled Drewe telling him that he’d hacked into the computer system of the dealer’s bank and watched the transaction take place in real time.
“I’ve got friends in powerful places,” he said.
From that day on Belman began to feel a certain nostalgia for the old days behind the jewelry counter.
Not long after the unpleasant visit to Nahum’s gallery, Drewe invited Belman and his wife over for dinner. The evening was a disaster. Drewe and Goudsmid screamed at each other while the children fought. It was chaotic, a free-for-all, and Belman swore to himself never to return.
The next day, as Belman sat in his living room, Drewe came up the driveway in a brand-new Jaguar. He wanted to talk about a fresh consignment, he said. Neither of them brought up the shouting match of the night before. Drewe had another business proposition: He was selling surplus military equipment for a Middle Eastern country, and suggested with a straight face that some of Belman’s art contacts might be interested. He said he could get his hands on anything from an F-16 on down, and hinted that he had connections to the Ministry of Defence, MI5, and MI6.
“He just threw it out there,” Belman recalled. “I thought he was just another mad boffin.” England was full of them.
When Belman tried to change the subject, Drewe insisted that he come outside and see the Jaguar. He said he had paid for it with money from John Catch, whom Belman already knew as Drewe’s “sugar daddy,” a Scottish nobleman and art collector. Drewe walked Belman to the trunk of the car and opened it. Inside Belman saw guns.
“What the hell do you want all those for?” Belman asked.
“For my own protection,” Belman recalled Drewe saying.
Belman knew that Britain’s gun laws were notoriously tough, and he asked Drewe to leave. The professor insisted it was all legit
imate, and that he had a license to carry weapons.
“You’ve nothing to worry about,” he said. “I know everyone from the pope down.”
Belman rolled his eyes and went back inside. Drewe could talk the hind legs off a donkey. In the living room he noticed that Drewe had dropped a letter on the couch—perhaps intentionally, but he couldn’t resist having a look. It was a clinical diagnosis describing Batsheva Goudsmid as suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which the mother fakes or induces illness in her children in order to gain attention and sympathy as the “worried parent.”
Increasingly alarmed by Drewe’s behavior, Belman considered cutting his ties with him: The man was clearly insane. Belman had an offer to work at an air-conditioning supplier, and while it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting as selling art, it would provide a steady income and a world without surprises. Before he could break it off with Drewe, however, he had a bite on another painting. He promised himself that if the sale went through, it would be his last.
At a dinner party he met an art expert and lecturer named Maxine Levy, who knew her way around the business and had contacts. Belman mentioned that he had several paintings for sale, including an untitled 1938 watercolor by Ben Nicholson worth about £15,000. Levy thought she could place it, and within a week she called to say she had found a buyer at Gimpel Fils Gallery.
Rene Gimpel was a fourth-generation dealer whose father had been Nicholson’s principal dealer in the 1940s and 1950s. A soft-spoken man with sloping shoulders, he looked more like an impoverished painter than a gallery owner. He examined Belman’s painting and found that it was slightly damaged in one corner. There were faintly visible black lines beneath the watercolor, as if the artist had sketched something in and then changed his mind.
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