Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  Each detective had his own way of dealing with a suspect or potential witness. Volpe could be rather aggressive and tended to lean on witnesses he suspected of being accomplices. In the interrogation room he was fully charged and often brusque. He took no one at face value, including Searle’s star witness. Even though Myatt had been singing like a canary, Volpe frisked him in the interrogation room before interviewing him. Searle thought this was unnecessary, a ritual act of humiliation. Volpe maintained that a criminal was a criminal and there was no gray area in between. He wanted to put Myatt on edge, to let him know that he shouldn’t take anything for granted. Still, the two detectives complemented each other. Volpe could get to the heart of a case and knew what elements were required to win a conviction. Searle knew art and was the team’s de facto curator.

  Because the art world could arouse as much resentment as reverence, Searle decided to home in on the paintings that would not only make the best evidence but would appeal to a middlebrow jury. He began to steer away from the more abstract pieces, the ones that might prompt jurors to sneer and mutter, “I could have painted that myself!” To keep the jury from seeing Drewe as merely a mischievous prankster, a canvas pimpernel who had brought down the hoi-polloi and taken the aristocracy for a ride, Searle wanted to put “nice, pretty pictures” on the courtroom walls, works a juror could easily digest, understand, and admire. For that reason he weeded out the Dubuffet fakes Myatt had painted. Jurors might not have much sympathy for a collector who had paid several thousand pounds for a childish rendering of a cow—a diseased cow, at that.

  There was also the issue of the director of the Dubuffet Foundation, who had authenticated eighteen of Myatt’s fakes. It had taken Searle and Volpe several hours to convince her that she was wrong. When she finally acknowledged her blunder, she burst into tears. It was far too dangerous to put her on the stand. Drewe would testify that he did not know the works were fake, and his lawyer would pick the witness apart: If the director of the Dubuffet Foundation couldn’t tell the difference between a fake and an authentic work, how could Drewe possibly know?

  Searle needed credible witnesses, preferably victims who had never stood to profit from the con and were thus above suspicion. He and Volpe decided to focus on the Order of the Servants of Mary, which had provided provenances for a number of Sutherland Crucifixion scenes. Before making arrangements for several of the friars to come down to Scotland Yard, Searle interviewed Mibus and Peter Nahum, who had agreed to testify in court that they had received their Crucifixion pieces either from Drewe or one of his runners.

  When Father Bernard Barlow walked into the interview room to examine Nahum’s piece, Searle asked him if he recognized it.

  “Never seen it,” said the friar.

  Searle said he had documents indicating that St. Philip’s Priory had sold this Crucifixion scene and several other artworks to Fisher & Sperr as part of a lot of books.

  Barlow conceded that he had had a hand in the sale, but he couldn’t recall any paintings or drawings.

  Searle turned the Crucifixion panel over and showed him a handwritten inscription: “Father Bernard F. Barlow, Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion of our Lord—study in oil—loaned Jan 1972 to Oxford University Bod Library reference R203.”

  “That isn’t my handwriting,” Barlow said. “I wasn’t even in the country at the time.” He pointed out that when friars entered the O.S.M., they adopted the middle name “Mary” and used it for church-related business. Thus, Barlow always signed himself “Bernard M. Barlow.” The forger, unaware of this, had used Barlow’s original middle initial, F for “Francis.”

  It was clear to Searle that Drewe had used intimidation and coercion to con the friars, and that they would make good witnesses. Drewe had duped a religious order that depended on charity, and that would not sit well with a jury.

  Meanwhile, Volpe had a chat with Sperr. The bookstore owner categorically denied that there had been works of art among the books he’d bought from St. Philip’s. He led the detective upstairs and showed him some of the volumes Drewe had been interested in. As they leafed through them, Sperr noticed that one of the title pages was missing. Volpe suspected that Drewe had torn out the page, which contained an impression of the O.S.M. stamp, and used it to make a counterfeit stamp.

  “This is good evidence,” Volpe told Searle when he got back to the Yard.

  Although they could now establish Drewe’s connection to the Crucifixion fakes, they wanted a bigger bang, proof that the professor had pocketed hundreds of thousands of pounds and bilked innocent victims not only in Britain, but all over the world, from Canada to the Philippines. Searle suggested that they rein in the fake Giacomettis supposedly authenticated by documents in the Tate Gallery archives. Giacometti was a well-known figure, and even his minor works sold for six figures. A jury would be impressed with the amount of money Drewe must have made. With the right evidence, the detectives could also link him to the corruption of the archives.

  Searle told Volpe about his visit with Jennifer Booth. She had mentioned that there was a Giacometti expert in Paris who could help him crack the case.

  It was time to call in Mary Lisa Palmer.

  For the early bird the Chunnel train from London to Paris is a silent dream of a commute, an aerodynamic wonder. This morning, as she slid past the French countryside at 180 miles an hour, Palmer was grateful for the two-and-a-half-hour ride ahead. She wanted to organize her thoughts before her meeting with Detective Searle.

  Gradually she had come to appreciate the enormous scope of the con and the audacity of its mastermind. Since her conversation with Searle, she had a sense that the tide was turning in her favor. The association was no longer alone in the fight against her formidable opponent, a man who appeared to have a natural talent for manipulation.

  A large overnight bag at her feet was crammed near to bursting with evidence of a new genre of art fraud. The association had expended a great deal of time, money, and effort to piece together the paper trail that documented Drewe’s unprecedented scheme. She was not about to let the bag out of her sight until it was safely inside Scotland Yard.

  The train pulled into Waterloo Station, and Palmer caught a taxi. As it crossed the Thames, she felt a sense of relief. Searle had told her that the forger was under arrest and that he was cooperating with the police. That was a start, she thought.

  Searle and Volpe had left word for Palmer to be escorted up to the fifth floor, where Searle had set up his Giacometti files. With relative archival clarity, he had sorted stacks of documents and drawings into individual plastic troughs, each one a different color.

  Palmer sat down and began to recount a decade-long sequence of events: the bizarre letters and phone calls; the correspondence with various dealers; the phenomenal string of fakes she’d come across at the Tate and on the market. She showed the detectives a pile of photographs and letters she believed Drewe had sent her under different aliases. Each letter contained a request for the Giacometti Association’s imprimatur. One of the photographs was of a pencil drawing titled Deux Figures, owned by “Richard Cockcroft.”

  Searle recognized the piece. His detectives had recently confiscated it from the home of Danny Berger, the only runner who had thus far been interviewed. Searle reached into one of his troughs and showed Palmer the original drawing.

  “It’s a fake,” she said firmly.

  She explained that the painting was an imitation of a real one in the Tate’s collection. The forger misunderstood the perspective of the two figures in the authentic work. He had placed the large and small figure beside each other rather than one in the foreground and one in the background, as represented in the original work.

  One of the figures was particularly bad, she said, uncharacteristically abstract and indecisive. Giacometti was allergic to symbolism. He painted what he saw. His line drawing may have been delicate and willowy, but he always conveyed a sense of a fully formed human presence: That was his genius. Finally, the sign
ature was too neat, too perfect.

  Searle brought out the 1991 Sotheby’s catalog with the picture of the Footless Woman. His team had given it a morbid nickname, “the Legs Job”—a reference to the IRA practice of kneecapping.

  “That one’s wrong too,” said Palmer, who had been after the painting for years. Its final destination remained a mystery. For all she knew it could be hanging on a wall in Monte Carlo or gathering dust in an attic in Madrid.35

  For the next several hours Palmer filled in Searle and Volpe on her research, particularly her dealings with Armand Bartos and his Standing Nude. She hadn’t heard from him for a while and suspected the nude might eventually come up for auction.

  The detectives wondered if it was possible that one person alone had planned and carried out such a complex scam. Dozens of phony catalogs had been produced and, according to Myatt, at least two hundred paintings had gone on the market. In addition, Britain’s most important archives had been corrupted. Was Drewe the front for a syndicate of crooked dealers? Was Bartos his New York connection? Searle and Volpe were aware of at least half a dozen runners who had moved pieces through London, New York, and Paris.

  Palmer was very helpful and provided several good leads. The detectives were confident that she would make a fine witness in any courtroom. She had a clear expository style and could explain how she had arrived at each of her conclusions. If she could talk Volpe through the basics of art appreciation and the mazelike subtleties of provenance, she could certainly convince a jury. Unlike other experts, she had never given the nod to a single one of Drewe’s fakes. She was untouchable, and her expertise was unquestionable. Now the police just needed to recover a fake Giacometti that they could prove had been sold by Drewe.

  Whenever she was in London, Palmer liked to pop into the auction houses to see what was coming up. After leaving Scotland Yard, she dropped her bags off at the hotel and walked to Sotheby’s, where she bumped into an acquaintance from the Impressionist and Modern Art Department.

  “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “Come and see what we’ve got for the next sale.” In his office he showed her the galleys of a catalog for the forthcoming auction and turned to a picture of Bartos’s Standing Nude.

  “It’s a fake,” she said. “I’ve been in contact with the owner, and I’ve told him what I think about it.” She warned the startled Sotheby’s rep that the Giacometti Association would never approve the work and that the auction house should immediately withdraw it.

  The next day she told Searle about her visit to Sotheby’s. The nude was back in play, she said. Apparently Bartos had been unable to sell it privately, so he had put it up for auction.

  When Bartos discovered that Sotheby’s had nixed his Standing Nude, he knew Palmer was to blame. After all his exertions, he wasn’t about to give up on the piece, which experts had assured him was authentic. He called Stuart Berkeley, who had originally shopped the piece, and told him he was coming to London. He wanted to see Berkeley and his investigators from Art Research Associates before meeting with Palmer at the archives.

  “This problem is as much yours as it is mine,” he told Berkeley.

  Then he left a message on Palmer’s answering machine saying that he stood by the piece and was flying in to prove its authenticity. Could they meet at the Victoria and Albert and go from there to the Tate? He had hired an art research firm that could guide them through the evidence: Once she saw it, he was sure she would be convinced, and they could settle the matter once and for all.

  As soon as Palmer heard Bartos’s message she called Detective Searle. “What should I do?” she asked. “Should I meet him?”

  “Stall him a few more days,” Searle said. “I need a little more time.”

  Searle took the forged O’Hana catalog Palmer had given him—“Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World”—and showed it to Wendy Fish at the V&A. The catalog contained an illustration of Bartos’s Standing Nude, 1955 and had the V&A emblem neatly stamped on the front cover.

  Fish found a bound volume of original O’Hana catalogs and handed it to Searle. Requisition slips indicated that Drewe had consulted the volume frequently, which consisted of a dozen catalogs in chronological order from 1954 to 1962. One of them looked identical to Palmer’s “Entertainment World” catalog.

  The publication was made from folded sheets of paper stapled down the middle and glued to a larger folded sheet of coarse brown paper serving as a cover. This brown paper had a black, red, and blue picture on the front, and had been sewn into the binding of the volume. It appeared to be part of the original catalog. Unlike the other catalogs in the volume, which were slightly different in size but flush at the top, “Entertainment World” was off-kilter. Searle looked at its bottom edge. Trapped in the stitching between the two brown paper leaves were small fragments of paper. He guessed that these too were probably pieces of the original catalog.

  Searle asked to borrow the bound volume, and took it to Adam Craske, the Yard’s in-house document expert. Craske confirmed his suspicions. All the other catalogs had been printed in the 1950s with an antiquated letterpress system, but “Entertainment World” had been printed with the modern chemical process of lithography. And all the other catalogs had been stamped in ink, with a red or purple impression of a crown over an oval containing the words “Victoria and Albert Museum Library,” but the stamp on “Entertainment World” had been made with a copy machine whose toner dated to the mid-1970s. Craske said he had found similar discrepancies in the Hanover catalogs.

  When Searle returned the volume to the V&A library, Wendy Fish stopped him at the door. She showed him another bound volume of O’Hana catalogs that was identical to the one Searle held in his hand—or almost identical. She opened it to a catalog entitled “Painting by Stars of the Entertainment World.” This had to be the original. The volume had been at the restorer’s and therefore could not have been tampered with.

  Drewe’s mistake could be a significant plus for the prosecution.

  Back at the Yard, Searle and Volpe hammered out a strategy. They called the city’s most prestigious dealers and curators and asked them to be on the lookout for Drewe’s fakes, and for his cohorts, if they showed up at any of the archives.

  Within days they received a call from Christie’s. Batsheva Goudsmid was trying to sell a suspicious-looking work attributed to Georges Braque. Searle was furious: She was potentially one of his more important witnesses, and this might make it impossible for her to testify.

  He paid her a visit. “Why did you try to sell that painting?” he asked.

  “I’m broke,” she said. “It’s worth three and a half million pounds.”

  Searle raised an eyebrow.

  She told him that Drewe had assured her it was real and had promised to split the proceeds with her to pay back what he owed her.

  “Goudsmid, these are all fakes,” Searle said. “Don’t you trust the police?”

  Goudsmid was close to tears. “You haven’t charged John with anything yet. I’m desperate. I feel like killing myself.”

  Searle told her to stay away from Drewe, but she was like a moth to a flame. Because of the custody battle she saw Drewe frequently, and Searle feared she might scuttle the case. If she told Drewe about the investigation, he would certainly destroy all evidence of the con.

  Several days later Searle received a frantic call from Wendy Fish. “Drewe just rang. He’s coming in tomorrow with a dealer from New York and the director of the Giacometti Association. He wants to see the Giacometti material.”

  Searle and Volpe now had a clear shot at catching Drewe, and possibly Bartos, in the act of using fake documents to authenticate a forgery. They rounded up their team and put the Victoria and Albert under close watch.

  At 10:30 A.M. on the first Tuesday in April 1996 Bartos took a taxi to the Daquise, an old-fashioned Polish café next to the South Kensington tube station. He and Berkeley had planned t
o meet here before heading to the V&A. Though Bartos needed a stiff drink, he made do with a cup of coffee.

  Palmer had been playing cat and mouse with him for weeks, making and breaking appointments. He was tired and frustrated. She had canceled again this morning, but it was too late for him to get in touch with Berkeley. Fine, then, the two of them would go to the V&A without her and examine the documents with their researcher, and Bartos would finally be able to prove beyond any doubt that the painting was genuine. If Palmer still refused to budge, he would take the Giacometti Association to court. He would argue that Palmer had disparaged a work certified as genuine by art experts, and that her capriciousness had caused the work to depreciate in value and halted its sale.

  In the U.S. courts, he might well have had a case. A few years earlier the Metropolitan Museum of Art had rejected the loan of a privately owned Seurat for a 1992 retrospective because one of the curators had expressed doubts about the work’s authenticity. The owners of the painting had sued, claiming that a potential buyer had backed out after the museum lost interest in the work. The owners’ lawyers argued that the Met and its curators were guilty of “product disparagement,” and the case was settled out of court.

  By noon Bartos and Berkeley were at the V&A library, where they met their man from Art Research Associates. He introduced himself as John Drewe and explained that he had been called in at the last minute to replace a colleague. He said that for the past quarter century he’d made his living recovering Jewish property stolen during the war, that he knew how archives worked, and that he could track down nearly anything. The V&A librarians had prepared a stack of research material, and it was waiting for them.