Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  I can’t feel the bones, Palmer thought.

  The transparency’s high resolution provided a good sense of the brushwork—too good, as it turned out. Giacometti used a very fine brush to build up his figures with a series of frenetic strokes. While Bartos’s piece possessed some of that same energy, the brushstrokes suggested an attempt to fill in a predetermined form rather than to build the figure up from the core.

  Palmer examined the transparency again. The signature in the bottom right-hand corner wasn’t right either. Giacometti hated signing his name and often did so in a hurry. He rarely bothered to dip his brush for a final flourish, and many of his signatures were not perfectly legible. This one seemed studied and unwavering, as if it had been traced in pencil and then copied over with a wet brush.

  More disconcerting still was the painting’s all too perfect provenance. Giacometti’s attitude toward business was informal in the extreme, and occasionally the association would find gaps in provenances for paintings or identical numbering for sculptures cast in bronze. By contrast, the chain of provenance accompanying Bartos’s Standing Nude was a wonder of documentary diligence. It was too perfect. It included a stack of invoices, receipts, and personal correspondence from previous owners. Palmer examined each item carefully and recognized a familiar pattern: The provenance was strikingly similar to that of the Footless Woman at Sotheby’s. In both cases the provenance documents bore the Tate’s rectangular stamp—“For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive”—and both paintings had purportedly been owned by the Hanover Gallery.

  Palmer turned to the catalog Bartos had included in his package, “Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World,” from a 1950s show at the O’Hana Gallery. In it was an illustration of Bartos’s painting. Palmer reread his letter: “I trust that the above information is sufficient for verification and inclusion [in the catalogue raisonné].”

  Far from it, she thought.

  As Palmer was preparing her response to Bartos, she received a request from a French media company to reproduce for a poster a Giacometti drawing titled Standing Man and Tree, which had recently been featured in a Phillips auction catalog. She recognized immediately that this too was a fake.

  She contacted Phillips and learned that in 1990 the drawing had been “generously donated” by Norseland Industries, along with a Le Corbusier, for an ICA benefit auction organized by Sotheby’s. According to the provenance, it had been owned by Peter Watson and Peter Harris, whose names Palmer recognized as previous owners of the Footless Woman. She called the ICA to see if they had any information on Norseland or Harris and was told that they did not. Then she called a curator at the Tate who told her that Harris’s name had appeared in the provenance of two Bissières that had been donated to the Tate and subsequently withdrawn. The curator had met the donor, an arts patron named John Drewe, who was interested in the Tate archives. He was an odd fellow, she said, and the whole Bissière business had left an unpleasant aftertaste.

  Palmer felt queasy. More than two years earlier she had accumulated enough evidence to be reasonably certain that John Drewe was involved with one or more Giacometti fakes. She had tried but failed to get Sotheby’s to send her the Footless Woman. Without an actual forgery in hand, she couldn’t move on the information she had because there was no definitive proof. Nor could she call the police and ask them to raid a private gallery where she suspected there might be a fake. Now she had to face the fact that the scam was much bigger than she had imagined. This was no longer a case of a single forged painting or artist. If her instincts were correct, someone—very possibly Drewe—had managed to penetrate the art world’s inner sanctum. While forgeries were as old as art itself, the genius of this particular scam did not lie solely in the forger’s skill with a brush. It was a complex plot to corrupt the provenance process, to control the system that collectors and curators relied on to authenticate a piece of art. Whoever was behind it had gained access to the most secure databases, doctored exhibition catalogs and other historical documents, and altered important art archives.

  Dealers and experienced collectors are usually wary about relying on their own critical judgment alone when it comes to a piece of art. However, when the piece has a seemingly impeccable provenance, supported by references to prestigious galleries and archives, the prospective buyer can be lulled into a false sense of confidence. In regard to Giacometti, Palmer realized, dealers and auctioneers were now more concerned with provenance than the work itself. They thought they had an option to bypass the association entirely to set up a quick sale. They could rely on the phenomenal provenance that accompanied the fraudulent art. And why shouldn’t they? Good provenance was like liability insurance. If the paperwork checked out, who could accuse a dealer of knowingly selling a fake?

  While Palmer was mulling over this new flurry of revelations, Bartos was bombarding her with faxes and phone calls from New York. He had a deal pending, and he needed an answer on his Standing Nude. Finally she wrote back and asked him to send the painting to Paris for her inspection.

  Seeing the work itself only confirmed her opinion that it was a forgery. She contemplated initiating the seizure of the work but quickly decided against it. It would not be effective or efficient. Bartos and others would simply point to the paperwork as evidence of the painting’s authenticity and complicate the matter.

  Soon Bartos had his painting back, but no certificate of authenticity. His calls and faxes continued unabated. “I am really disappointed that each time I call you, you are too busy to speak to me,” he wrote on one occasion. “I have tried to make it clear to you that time is of the essence. I have asked you by fax and by telephone what is your procedure in terms of a certificate or letter, and I have to ask why I am not getting any response from you. Is there something else I should do? You asked me to send the painting, which I did.”

  Palmer wondered if he actually had a deal pending. She considered the possibility that her correspondent might in fact be John Drewe, Peter Harris, or a renegade dealer working for Drewe. An operation of this size surely required the cooperation of others. How many were involved?

  Bartos had a right to expect Palmer to play by the rules and either authenticate the painting or tell him the basis for her reservations. If she was to persuade the art world’s experts that the nude was a fake, she had to play the game their way, not hers. She could point to the brushstrokes or the signature, but she knew these would be considered subjective judgments by some. Instead, she had to use objective standards to prove that the provenance was bogus beyond question. She had to buy time, and the best way to do that without showing Bartos her hand was to stall him.

  She decided to ask for the original documentation. In her request for the material, however, she added a key sentence. If he was honest, there would be no harm done. If he was not, she understood she was taking a calculated risk.

  “I cannot yet confirm the actual state of my research. I can only advise you to use extreme prudence with this painting,” she wrote.

  Then, she got in touch with Jennifer Booth at the Tate: “I am again confronted with a certain number of documents which perplex me . . . and need your assistance.”

  25

  WE’RE NOT ALONE

  Jennifer Booth still had her qualms about Drewe. Though he had stopped coming into the archive himself, he was sending in his researchers. Danny Berger seemed particularly suspicious. His application to access the Hanover albums was barely literate. He wrote that he was interested in the work of “Jacamety.” His visit and appearance unnerved Booth. He stayed only a few minutes, and as he flipped through the album, she realized how easy it would be for him to swap pages in the ring binder.

  Meanwhile, dealers in Monaco and New York were sending Booth photocopies of receipts, correspondence, and catalogs bearing the Tate’s trademark rectangular research stamp. The documents all related to Giacomettis, and the dealers wanted Booth to conf
irm that the originals were in the archives. Booth combed through the Hanover and O’Hana files but could find none of the original documents. She also checked the Hanover index for the names listed on the provenances. They were nowhere to be found. She checked the application forms from researchers who had visited the Tate over the past few years, looking for those who had requested records from the Hanover and O’Hana galleries. There were several requests for the Hanover records, Drewe’s among them, but he was the sole researcher given access to the O’Hana files.

  Her first thought was that he had been stealing the originals, and she reported this to her supervisors. They brushed her off, suggesting that documents were occasionally lost, stolen, or destroyed in an archive the size of the Tate’s. There was no need to hurl accusations.

  Booth felt increasingly anxious about the integrity of the records in her charge. The sudden stream of requests for authentication could hardly be random. Again she inspected the photocopies she’d received, focusing on the Tate stamp: It looked too pristine. The archive’s stamp had faint hairline cracks from constant use. Someone had forged it.

  And now there was a new request from Palmer, who had sent a number of documents for Booth’s review. When Booth looked at them, one letter stood out. It was from Erica Brausen to the O’Hana Gallery. The date on the letter was five months before the file on the O’Hana Gallery at the Tate started. Booth was now convinced that all the documents she’d been receiving lately were phony. “Despite the stamp,” she wrote to Palmer, “I do not think [the documents] were ever here.”

  Booth again reported her findings to her supervisors, only to be told that she was being paranoid. She was insulted. She saw herself as part of an extended line of archival guardians charged with protecting the credibility of the venerated institution for which she toiled so diligently. By now she had some solid experience as head of the archives under her belt, and she knew enough not to ignore the inner voice telling her that whatever was going on in the Tate’s stacks was momentous and unacceptable. The value of an archive was measured by its totality: Each document confirmed the veracity of an earlier one and supported the next. If a single item had been doctored, the integrity of the entire collection was in jeopardy.

  The word “archive” is derived from the Greek arkhe, meaning “government” or “order.” Its opposite is “anarchy,” a state without rule or order. Booth was certain Drewe was involved in precisely that: He was breaking down the system and creating chaos. Two questions remained unanswered: Why? and How?

  She understood why her superiors didn’t take her seriously. Her allegations must seem preposterous. After all, the higher-ups had dined repeatedly with Drewe, at the finest restaurants in the city, and they had been impressed by his poise, intelligence, and sophistication. His largesse was another significant factor. He was known to have contributed to several art-related charity events, and he had donated £20,000 to the archives, with an informal promise of an additional half million. That had been some time ago, but patience was a necessary virtue where museum fund-raising was concerned. Tate officials had every reason to believe that Drewe was a serious researcher. He had tipped them off to hidden archives they might be interested in, including a cache of ICA records that were said to be in New York. To the senior staff, Drewe was beyond reproach.

  Shortly after Booth wrote back to Palmer, a man named Raymond Dunne applied for admission to the archives. His accompanying letter resembled others Booth had received from Drewe and his colleagues. Each paragraph was indented seven spaces, and the name of the applicant was typed beneath the signature and underlined.

  Booth took matters into her own hands. She asked the department secretary, who shared her suspicions, to do a little detective work. The secretary dialed the phone number Dunne had listed on his application and found that it was out of order. When she drove to the address on the application, she found a boarded-up house.

  When Dunne called a few days later to make an appointment, the secretary passed the phone to Booth. “It’s Drewe,” she whispered. “I’m absolutely sure of it.”

  Booth told the caller she needed more information if his application was to go through. The man explained that he was working on his thesis, which focused on London’s postwar art exhibitions. Booth was also sure it was Drewe: The same upper-class accent, the same cascade of accumulated detail and cultural references. She asked him to send a second reference letter, and he agreed to do so.

  She never heard from Dunne again.

  A few days later a colleague at the British Council called to warn her about a well-known researcher, Anne Massey, who had been caught photocopying material without authorization and was subsequently banned from the council archives. She told Booth to be on the lookout in case Massey tried to gain access to the Tate. Booth was surprised, because she knew Massey and respected her work.

  Then Booth’s council colleague mentioned that Massey had been focusing on Ben Nicholson’s paintings and was working for a wealthy collector named John Drewe.

  We’re not alone, Booth thought.

  26

  A SLOW BURN . . .

  Her worst suspicions confirmed, Mary Lisa Palmer began poring over old London telephone directories and newspaper archives. In decades of back issues of an art journal listing the exhibitions held at London’s major galleries in the 1950s, she found nothing that matched the awkward title of the O’Hana catalog Bartos had sent her, “Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World.” However, the defunct gallery had once held a show with a similar title, “Paintings by Stars of the Entertainment World.”

  Palmer speculated that this show might have provided the inspiration for the bogus catalog, which had a photographer’s stamp and the name of a printer on the back. She called the printer. They had no record of any such catalog. The photographer’s stamp was from Leslie & Collier Partners, the agency that had supposedly shot the pictures and had an address that put it next door to the ICA. That was an odd coincidence, Palmer thought. She checked the records for registered British companies but could find no trace of Leslie & Collier.

  Palmer held one of the catalog pages up to the light and copied down the watermark, which consisted of the word “Conqueror” over the image of a castle. Watermarks were commonly pressed onto high-grade paper to show a company’s logo or trademark and add a certain prestige to an ordinary sheet of stationery. Early artisans often “signed” their paper in this manner. Palmer had worked with countless old documents and was familiar with paper textures and watermarks. She went to the association’s files and unearthed a number of business and personal letters contemporary with the purported 1950s catalog and bearing the Conqueror logo. The design was slightly different from the watermark on the catalog pages: The letters over the castle on the association’s letters were all uppercase and included the word “LONDON.”

  Palmer contacted the manufacturer of Conqueror paper and was told that the catalog watermark could not have been made in the 1950s. The design was from the 1970s, when London had been dropped from the watermark to reflect Conqueror’s growth as a global brand. Bartos’s catalog could not possibly be an original document.

  But what of the illustrations, which showed works by Noël Coward, Peter Ustinov, Rex Harrison, and John Mills, mixed in with pieces by Nicholson, Dubuffet, Kandinsky, Chagall, and Giacometti? This made little sense. The whole thing must be an awkward copy of the genuine “Paintings by Stars of the Entertainment World” catalog. Palmer doubted that the forger would have gone to such lengths simply to include one fake Giacometti nude. Were the works by the other artists forgeries too?

  She called Ustinov’s office in London. The catalog listed five whimsical titles by him, including Macbeth in Mexico and Mr Curtiz Directs a Battle Scene, a reference to the filmmaker Michael Curtiz, with whom Ustinov had worked. His secretary seemed surprised. She told Palmer that the actor was an amateur caricaturist who had never once exhibited
his doodles. A Ustinov forgery would not have been worth much. Why go to the trouble of inventing fake titles for nonexistent paintings? Clearly, whoever was behind the operation was mocking the very art establishment he was scamming.

  Palmer turned her attention to the booklet’s serious painters. With seven works Dubuffet was more heavily represented than the others, including a series of royal playing cards and a pair of cow portraits. Palmer called the Dubuffet Foundation in Paris and asked the director whether she had seen the catalog. Yes, the director said, she had seen a copy made from the original in the archives of the National Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The director had a good reputation in the art world, and Palmer trusted her enough to communicate her concerns about the catalog’s authenticity.

  The director insisted that the Dubuffets were genuine. In fact, she had recently authenticated them, and they were about to go on sale at one of the auction houses in London. Palmer checked the records at the National Library. The “original” O’Hana catalog was indeed there, and was identical to the one Bartos had sent. Now Palmer was sure that the V&A’s security had also been breached.

  Next Palmer focused on the work’s previous owners. She called Albert Loeb, whose father had owned the Paris-based Pierre Loeb Gallery. According to the Bartos provenance, the elder Loeb had bought the work directly from Giacometti and then sold it to the Hanover. Palmer asked Loeb to check his father’s files for any record of the transactions, but he could find none.