The work’s impressive provenance included handwritten letters and newspaper clippings. Receipts and invoices showed that it had passed through the hands of several well-known Nicholson collectors, including Cyril Reddihough, an early supporter of his work, and William Copley, a Beverly Hills dealer with ties to the surrealists. The documentation also included a photograph of the watercolor in a copy of the catalog for a 1957 exhibition at London’s Gallery One titled “The Road to Abstraction.” Clearly visible on the first page was a red oval stamp bearing the inscription “St. Philip’s Priory OSM Oxford.”
Gimpel arranged for Nicholson expert and former Tate Gallery director Alan Bowness to see the work, and Bowness seemed satisfied that it was genuine. Gimpel phoned Levy and told her he wanted it.
Levy called Belman, who in turn called Drewe.
The professor immediately upped the price to £18,000.
Belman was used to this kind of behavior from Drewe, but Levy was outraged.
“This is no way to conduct business,” she told Belman.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “My hands are tied.”
Levy called Gimpel, who reluctantly met the new price.
Belman closed the deal and breathed a sigh of relief. He thought he was finally free of John Drewe.
About a mile from Belman’s home, Danny Berger’s unlikely little garage on Finchley Road had become a popular viewing room for runners, gallery owners, and curators from London, Paris, and New York. Business was good, but Berger was getting the runaround from Drewe, who was slow in paying commissions. Whenever Berger insisted on his share, the professor would explain that there were problems at home and he was having trouble making ends meet.
One day he surprised Berger at the garage. He said he was embarrassed to ask but he needed a £3,000 loan for the mortgage. Berger thought it was the least he could do, and wrote him a check. Several months later Drewe had not returned the money, and when Berger asked him for it, the professor announced that he was broke. He proposed that instead of paying Berger back in cash, he would give him paintings. Once Berger was fully reimbursed, he could buy directly from the syndicate at a substantial discount.
Around the middle of 1994, Drewe showed up at the garage again and told Berger that he’d broken up with Goudsmid and moved out. She was emotionally unstable, he said, a threat not only to her children but to herself. He had been forced to take everything he owned with him and was now virtually homeless. Berger felt sorry for him and agreed to store some of his belongings. Soon the garage was filled with frames and boxes of documents and several trunks—one of which, Berger couldn’t help noticing, had guns in it.
Drewe asked for another loan, and said that if he couldn’t repay it in a timely manner, Berger could simply take another painting. Berger knew that the value of the works in his garage far exceeded the loans, which now totaled about £30,000. The risk seemed minor, and he was sure he was getting the better end of the deal. After six years selling paintings for Drewe he considered the professor a friend, and wrote Drewe another check without delay.
Despite the fact the Drewe had been using Hugh Stoakes’s name on his false provenances for a long while, Stoakes had not been in contact with his childhood friend in years. Drewe had always been one of the few who appreciated him, but their friendship was interrupted when Stoakes turned seventeen and won a full scholarship to study philosophy and psychology at Oxford, an adventure that lasted a mere four months. He began drinking heavily and ignoring his academic responsibilities. On the night before a crucial biology exam that required dissecting and describing a rabbit’s digestive system, he blew all of his meager allowance at the pub. When he saw the bunny the next morning, he gagged, walked out of the exam room, and packed his bags. He’d had enough.
Over the next few years he made his way across Europe, drank a lot of ouzo, and taught English wherever he could find a job. Whenever he was home for a visit he would get in touch with his childhood friend. Drewe would invariably show up in a brown suit and tie, and the two of them would again disappear into an imaginary world of gravity-defying scientific theories and Nobel prizes.
On one occasion, in the early seventies, Drewe stayed with Stoakes for a whole week, which did not please Stoakes’s parents at all. They had long ago taken a dislike to him. There was something about his tight smile and rigid walk, something shifty and unsavory that rubbed them the wrong way. Whenever Mrs. Stoakes saw Drewe march up to the house, his torso thrust forward with an exaggerated momentum, his arms swinging in time with his stride, her hackles would go up. She felt that he was carrying some hidden burden, something much too heavy for so young a man.
About two years later, the two friends went on a picnic. They sat together until twilight, eating and talking about politics and sex. Drewe told Stoakes that he had completed a doctorate at Heidelberg and Kiel universities in Germany, and had taken a job with the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell. He was now involved in nuclear research. None of this seemed fanciful to Stoakes, who had always been convinced that his twenty-seven-year-old friend was headed for the bright lights. Drewe had taken a flat in Golders Green, and after they’d finished all the food, Drewe invited Stoakes up. The flat was musty, filled with dark, heavy furniture left behind by a former tenant: an enormous mahogany wardrobe, a sideboard, and a file cabinet covered with documents. They settled in and began to brainstorm the way they had in the old days. Drewe sketched out a blueprint for an article on hydrostatics, and Stoakes took notes and typed them up. They labored for weeks on the piece, cutting, pasting, and editing. Stoakes smoothed it out until they were both satisfied, and Drewe put his name on it.
When the paper was rejected, Drewe said he’d outdone them again. He’d gone one step beyond where the journal editors believed the leading edge to be. It was only a matter of time before the custodians of the various scientific disciplines would have to acknowledge his contributions.
As far as Stoakes could tell from their infrequent meetings, Drewe kept himself in good physical shape. His clothes seemed tidy enough, in a thrift-shop sort of way, nothing fancy. He was tall and sturdy now, his youthful nervousness gone. In its stead was a minus, a vacancy. He had about him “the air of a masked ascetic, a disordered sainthood,” Stoakes recalled.
A few years later the two friends met up again in Leicester Square. Drewe seemed even taller and more solidly built than Stoakes remembered. Over drinks Drewe talked about his hopes and fears. He felt undervalued, he said, but he intended to rectify that state of affairs. He proposed that they collaborate again. This time they would focus on the philosophy of science. Stoakes would provide the conceptual framework and Drewe the technical details. They fell into their old colloquy, and Stoakes felt that their boyhood intimacy had been refreshed.
In a mellow mood, they strolled across the square and saw Apocalypse Now in velvet comfort in front of a mammoth screen and a mountain of blaring speakers. Stoakes was blown away by Francis Ford Coppola’s combination of Conrad, Vietnam, and psychedelics, but the experience seemed to have little effect on Drewe, who was aroused only by the airborne weaponry and the apparent effects of a B-52 on the jungle foliage. Apparently, neither the film’s grandeur and tragedy nor its politics made the slightest impression on him. This did not surprise Stoakes, who considered his friend a nuts-and-bolts man, a technician and cold-fusion genius. Poetry was for those who had time for it.
After the film they took the tube to Drewe’s flat, where Stoakes was to spend the night. Drewe confided for the first time that he was involved in a romantic relationship with a woman named Batsheva Goudsmid. Before they turned in they vowed to work together again soon. In the morning, Drewe excused himself and said he had to leave. He did not want to overextend his energies. They would meet in a week or two, he assured his friend. Stoakes thanked him, and Drewe waved cheerily, with a strained smile.
They would not see each other again for well over a decade.
During those years Stoakes often imagined Drewe’s
comfortable and successful life, while his own life took a decided turn for the worse. He suffered from intense depression and was drinking heavily again. His marriage collapsed, and there was an ugly custody battle over his daughter. He fled southwest to the old port city of Exeter, where he managed to gain employment as a nurse, treating patients with end-stage dementia. His salary was barely enough to live on, and he had moved his few possessions into a mobile home. The same man who used to spend all-night sessions discussing arcane mental challenges with his soul mate now anesthetized himself in front of the TV for hours on end.
Then, one clear, cold day in 1994, he picked up the phone, tracked Drewe down through his mother, and called his old friend. They had a lot to catch up on. Drewe told him that his relationship with Batsheva Goudsmid had gone to hell, and Stoakes confessed to the loneliness that now marked his own life. When he mentioned to Drewe that he had changed his Christian name from Hugh Roderick to Daniel, Drewe reacted palpably, something Stoakes would only later fully understand.
A few days later Drewe arrived in Exeter in a Bentley. They talked about old times, and Stoakes felt as if his long-lost brother had returned in the form of a great bird swooping down to pull him out of the muck and save him. Drewe said that Goudsmid, whom he had once loved, had become a danger to his children. He had tried but failed to have her committed. He claimed that Goudsmid had conspired with her father, a former Mossad agent, to destroy his career and take the kids away from him. She was an unrelenting harpy, a “savage” with powerful friends in Israeli intelligence. She had made bomb threats against him and had managed to freeze his bank accounts. Drewe broke down in tears when he talked about the children, and Stoakes was moved. “That grabbed me,” he later recalled.
But Drewe went on to say that he had his own powerful contacts who could be convinced to act on his behalf, and Stoakes’s too. Drewe waxed eloquent about their shared history and suggested they throw in their lot together. They were brothers in arms in a common struggle. He invited Stoakes to his new home in Reigate, two hours away by train.
When Stoakes arrived at the station a day or two later, Drewe was waiting for him in the Bentley. As they drove up to the house, Stoakes admired the impressive garden. Inside, he saw that Drewe had turned the living room into a workshop. There were picture frames in various stages of deconstruction, a mountain of clippings, sheets of foolscap, stacks of letterhead and file folders, pots of glue, rulers, and utility knives.
Drewe made tea and invited Stoakes to spend the night. They had a great deal to talk about. The following morning, Drewe was up early and in good spirits. He sat his friend down and told him he’d had a vision, something they could work on together. He had a plan, a proposition.
“Listen,” he said. “Listen to me.”
18
STANDING NUDE
Armand Bartos Jr. was at work in his Upper East Side duplex in Manhattan when the long-awaited painting came in from Sheila Maskell, a New York-based private dealer and runner. Every once in a while, when she came across something really special, she would put in a call to Bartos. The last time they did business, she’d hooked him up with a Smoker, one of Tom Wesselmann’s many quintessentially American pop art pictures of erotic red lips puffing on a cigarette.
Now she had something rarer and considerably pricier: Standing Nude, 1955, by Alberto Giacometti. Pieces from this period rarely came on the market, and Bartos was delighted to have one within reach. It had been painted a few years after the struggling artist finally gained international recognition. Its source, Maskell said, was the same group of “very substantial” Britons who had sold two other Giacomettis to Bartos’s colleagues at the Avanti Galleries, a portrait of a woman from the waist up and another standing nude.
Bartos had already seen a high-resolution transparency of the work, on the basis of which he could tell that the canvas was cracked with age and might have been improperly stored. Maskell said the piece had been hidden away for years. Its condition was clearly a problem, but one within the range of a restorer’s ability. More important to Bartos was that the painting appeared to be superior in many respects to other Giacomettis of the same period. It was clear, precise, and fully articulated: Potentially, it was a real find.
Bartos had a good eye long before he went into the business. He was brought up in a cultured household, and as a young man he studied art history; for a time he considered himself a serious painter. He taught art at private schools in Manhattan, but eventually admitted to himself what he had long suspected—that he didn’t have the goods to make it as an artist. He decided to move on to the business side. If he couldn’t create art, at least he would wrap himself around the best of it. In an ideal world, he would live with Lichtensteins and Picassos and immerse himself in what another dealer described as “the last great luxury.”21
To ease the transition, he took a job in the print department of Christie’s New York branch, and then, after many years, struck out on his own. At six foot five he stood out even among the idiosyncratically beautiful people of the art crowd. With his thin, athletic frame and elongated Roman face, he looked rather like a Giacometti sculpture himself. He brought a genial manner and abundant knowledge to his work, and within a few years he was one of the city’s prominent dealers, with a fairly dazzling collection of modern and contemporary masters housed in his thirty-five-hundred-square-foot duplex. He had several small Picassos, a Shawn Scully, works by Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and a Calder mobile that hung over the dining room table. Some of these he owned outright, others were on consignment. Ever since he first set eyes on the transparency of Standing Nude he’d been imagining how it might look on the wall.
He unsealed the wooden crate, pulled off the bubble wrap and brown construction paper, and removed the cardboard that protected the canvas. Once he stood it up against the wall, it was immediately apparent that the transparency had not done justice to the work itself. Emerging from the depths of the canvas, nearly four feet tall, was a two-dimensional female figure with a searching, almost haunted look. In the lower right-hand corner, in a thick script of black paint, was Giacometti’s unmistakable signature. Bartos was bowled over.
“It’s the best one I’ve ever seen,” he said to himself.
He looked through the provenance. There were receipts and invoices going back to the work’s creation, and catalogs from exhibitions where it had been shown over the years. Nearly every document was stamped “For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive.”
Before he bought the painting outright, he thought it would be prudent to show it to some of his colleagues, and to his restorer. The damage and the cracks were more extensive than the transparency had revealed. Paint cracks were quite common in older works. Bartos knew that most of the aging in an oil painting occurs during the first five years, although it takes about fifty years for it to harden thoroughly. When it does, it often develops a fine web of cracks.
This Giacometti was in far worse shape. It looked like it was flaking off in sections, perhaps because the canvas had relaxed on the stretcher over time. His restorer said he could get the painting back in shape for less than $10,000.
The initial feedback from colleagues was good. During two separate flybys, experts from Sotheby’s and Christie’s estimated that once restored, the piece could fetch between $350,000 and $550,000 at auction.
Maskell’s client was asking only $200,000 in return for a quick deal. Bartos stood to make a handsome profit. Sensing that Maskell was open to negotiation, he offered $175,000, and she accepted without hesitation.
When the work came back from the restorer several months later, it looked stunning. Bartos hung it up in the studio and decided to hold on to it until the right buyer came along. There was no hurry.
“It’s a great piece that has fallen through the cracks,” he told a friend. “It’s what every dealer dreams of.”
It was exactly what Myatt had dreamed of when, determined to make up for his failure with the Footless Woma
n, he stood before the easel and painted his perfect ten.
19
THE POND MAN
On the night of January 17, 1995, as a belt of cold rain moved eastward across England, Horoko Tominaga chose to stay in and watch television. The young Japanese student had rented a basement room in a run-down Victorian boardinghouse on the edge of Hampstead, a subway stop away from Drewe’s neighborhood. Even though she had to share a bathroom and kitchen with several other foreign students, the rent was cheap and the Heath was close enough that she could always go out for a stroll whenever she felt cramped or homesick. Tonight the BBC was showing Pride and Prejudice and Sounds of the Eighties.
Tominaga flipped through the channels.
In Japan, a massive earthquake had shaken the city of Kobe.
In Texas, a retarded man convicted of murder was executed after the newly inaugurated governor, George Bush, turned down his appeal for clemency.
A little after nine Tominaga heard one of her housemates, Gina, coming downstairs to use the bathroom. An hour later Sandor and his girlfriend, Gyongyver, both Hungarian students, stumbled in from an evening on the town. Tominaga could hear them chatting and laughing upstairs. Around midnight she decided to turn in. She snapped the hall light on and walked to the bathroom. A man was standing inside, in the shadows. She couldn’t see his face.
“Who are you?” she asked, alarmed.
The stranger said he had a meeting with the landlord, David Konigsberg, and was looking for his room. Tominaga led him up the darkened stairway to Konigsberg’s room on the first floor and knocked on the door. There was no answer. The man asked to borrow Tominaga’s cell phone to call the landlord, but again there was no answer. Then he asked if he could wait in the hallway until Konigsberg returned. Tominaga felt uncomfortable leaving him there, but this was a boardinghouse, after all; strangers came and went.
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