11
AFTER GIACOMETTI
On a narrow cobblestone alley in the Latin Quarter of Paris, in one of three sixteenth-century courtyards known collectively as the Cour de Rohan, Mary Lisa Palmer managed the affairs of the Giacometti Association from an office on the top floor of an old three-story building. To the American eye the secluded Cour was so quintessentially Parisian that it was used as a backdrop for Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywood musical Gigi. In the twenties, the photographer Eugène Atget snapped a series of iconic pictures of the courtyard with an enormous wooden bellows camera. The writer Georges Bataille threw parties here for Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, and the artists Balthus (a good friend of Giacometti’s) and David Hockney set up their easels in the Cour.
Nothing had changed much in the intervening years. Sprigs of rosemary still fought their way up through the cobblestones to the light, and wild grapevines climbed the brick facades. What attracted Palmer most about the courtyard was its solitude. Palmer, the longtime director of the association and personal assistant to Giacometti’s widow, Annette, appreciated the short distance that separated her from the bustle and flow of the city. Here she could focus on Alberto Giacometti’s legacy and defend it from the vultures and forgers that had hovered since his death.
On this November morning Palmer was leafing through the latest Sotheby’s catalog when she spotted something unusual. The auction house routinely sent her its glossy publications with the understanding that if she or Annette came across a dubious Giacometti, Sotheby’s would hear about it.
The new catalog heralded an upcoming auction of impressionist and modern pieces featuring four works by the Swiss artist: a sculpture of a woman, a bust of the artist’s brother Diego, a portrait of one of Giacometti’s mistresses, and a fourth piece, lot number 48, a painting entitled Standing Nude.
The painting caught Palmer’s eye. It was a phony.
Underneath the photograph of Standing Nude was a thumbnail sketch of the provenance: It had purportedly been painted in 1954 and bought by Peter Watson, a cofounder of the ICA. Watson, in turn, had sold it to the Hanover Gallery, which had then sold it to the Obelisk Gallery. Finally, in 1957, it had been bought by Peter Harris, a private collector. The piece was estimated at £180,000 to £250,000.
The provenance seemed impressive enough. The Hanover had been a prestigious gallery until it closed down, and Watson had been a wealthy collector and benefactor until he mysteriously drowned in his bathtub in 1956. It was rumored that he was murdered by a rich American lover, Norman Fowler, who was also found dead in a bathtub, some fourteen years later.
Despite the Standing Nude’s persuasive documentation, Palmer remained skeptical. When she showed the catalog to Annette Giacometti, with whom she had worked for nearly two decades, Annette was struck by the odd-looking table in the foreground, which sliced the nude’s lower legs off and shattered the composition. Whoever painted the picture, she thought, had probably bungled the feet, then tried to cover up the mess with a piece of furniture.
Palmer called Sotheby’s, told them she had problems with the piece, and asked for copies of the provenance documents. Several days later she received a package from the auction house that included a receipt from the Hanover Gallery and another from the lesser known Obelisk Gallery, which had supposedly sold the work to Peter Harris for £150.
Palmer wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but her instinct told her that the piece was wrong, and her experience had taught her that instinct was her greatest ally. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former director Thomas Hoving, a notable fake-buster, would have agreed. He once described “that vague tug at the brain telling you that something is not quite right,” a feeling often ignored by art dealers, collectors, and curators, particularly when it failed to harmonize with a deal.
You’ve been waiting for that Degas pastel for years; it’s the one that will flesh out your heady collection of the master. Get it quick, before the competition hears about it! You’ve been given a special two-day window of opportunity to make up your mind. You’ve simply got to snag it. . . . You know you should be calm, but this is a sure thing and you are dying to own it. Go for it.
14Palmer had no financial stake in the transaction. Her job was to protect Giacometti’s legacy, and she was determined to stop the sale of the piece. The photograph in the catalog was not sufficient proof of forgery, and the association had a standing policy of not judging a work’s authenticity on the basis of a reproduction, so she called Sotheby’s and made an appointment to see the Footless Woman.
Palmer flew to London and took a taxi to New Bond Street, a West End shopping thoroughfare that had been fashionable since the eighteenth century. At Sotheby’s, she stepped into the lobby and went up the well-worn staircase to the viewing room, where she asked to see the Giacometti nude.
What a mess, she thought. It was definitely a fake, not even a nice try.
There were a number of giveaways, not least of which was the table in the foreground. In addition, the nude was uncharacteristically lifeless, with a series of aimless, floating brushstrokes in the background. Giacometti often painted a glimpse of his studio behind the model, with a row of canvases stacked up against the wall. Here the forger had laid in flat, abstract lines and applied a heavy coat of varnish, something Giacometti would never have done.
Palmer expressed her concerns to a Sotheby’s representative, who argued that the previous owner might have added the varnish himself. He insisted that Sotheby’s had done its homework. Perhaps this wasn’t the best Giacometti, he said, but it was a Giacometti nonetheless. Sotheby’s had performed due diligence and had found the provenance impeccable. They had also examined a photograph of the painting in the files of the now defunct Hanover Gallery. The files were stored at the Tate archives, and Palmer was urged to go and take a look at them for herself.
Palmer’s infallible eye had rarely been questioned so she was slightly taken aback, but she had no intention of backing off. Since the auction was only a few days away, she decided to stay in London and do a little footwork. She hailed a cab and asked the driver to take her to the Tate. En route she reviewed in her mind Giacometti’s relationship with the Hanover.
The gallery, which had dealt with Giacometti for years, had never been a huge financial success, but it had been one of Europe’s most influential showcases of contemporary art. His widow, Annette, still had occasional dealings with its founder, Erica Brausen, who had set out in the late 1940s to challenge conventional thinking. Now in her eighties, Brausen had been as fearless in her personal life as she was about the art she supported. She fled Germany for Paris in the 1930s, ran a bar frequented by artists and writers, and used her contacts with the U.S. Navy to help her Jewish and socialist friends escape from Europe during the Spanish Civil War. She herself had fled in a fishing boat and arrived penniless in London at the start of World War II. Then she began organizing small exhibitions.
It was not an easy road: Brausen was a woman in a male-dominated business, a German in a Germanophobic society, and an open lesbian (her lover was Catherine “Toto” Koopman, a former Chanel model and film actress). At the Hanover, which she opened in 1949, she repeatedly went out on a limb for unconventional artists such as Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud. Her gallery later foundered, and went under in 1973, but during its quarter century in existence Brausen had kept meticulous records, logging each sale, purchase, loan, and commission in her ledger books. These were now stored in the Tate archives.
Palmer paid the cabbie, walked into the museum, and introduced herself to the head archivist, Jennifer Booth. She asked to see the Hanover photograph albums, the visual record of all the artwork that had passed through the gallery. This old-fashioned two-ring binder was about the size of a school composition book, and its heavy black pages were brittle and stiff with age.
Palmer flipped through the relevant album until she found the Footless Woman. The details on the label below the photograph coincided with those in the Sotheby’s catalog:
Nude 1954
By Alberto Giacometti G67/11
Oil on canvas: 23-7/8 × 17-7/8 ins
Signed lower right.
Sold June 16th 1957
She did not, even for a moment, consider the possibility that her judgment was off. She looked closely at the black-and-white photograph. To her trained eye, both the image and the contrast seemed a little too sharp. She had spent the past seventeen years looking at pictures of Giacomettis, and she was sure this one had been shot fairly recently.
She reminded herself of her own mantra: Where there’s one fake there’s another.
She turned the pages of the album until she came across a second “Giacometti,” a portrait of a woman from the waist up. It was as bogus as the first one. How on earth had the two pictures ended up in the Tate’s files?
Palmer doubted that Brausen would have fallen for a fake. The dealer’s eye was too good, and she had bought directly from the galleries that represented Giacometti. Palmer asked to see the Hanover’s sales ledgers and found the Sotheby’s nude. It had the same reference number, G67/11, and the details were the same as those in the Sotheby’s catalog. The ledgers also listed ICA cofounder Peter Watson, who had purportedly sold the nude to the Hanover, as the owner of three other Giacomettis. Palmer knew nearly every Giacometti in the world, and was sure Watson had never owned that many of the artist’s works.
Were those other Giacomettis fakes too?
Palmer studied the ledgers, loose-leaf leather volumes held together by a thong. They reminded her of nineteenth-century accounting books. It would be easy enough to slip a page out and then replace it. Palmer scrutinized Watson’s name, which had been written alongside the entries for the four works. The ink appeared to be fresh. Then she examined the entry for the Hanover’s sale of the Sotheby’s nude. Here a name had been scratched out and replaced with the words “R.D.S. May, Obelisk Gallery.” Again the ink looked fresh.
In the archivist’s parlance, the files had been contaminated.
Palmer asked Booth for the Hanover daybooks, which tracked the movement of paintings in and out of the gallery. She found a listing for G67/11, but here it was a painting that had been done in 1951. The Sotheby’s catalog listed the Standing Nude as having been painted in 1954. The forger was off by three years. He probably hadn’t bothered to doctor the daybooks, which were hard to decipher, and thus the least likely of records a dealer would consult to verify a work’s provenance.
Palmer was now certain that whoever was behind the Sotheby’s nude had slipped a photograph of it into the Hanover album and falsified the sales ledger. She resisted going through all of the Hanover records to check the other possible forgeries. Her immediate priority was to keep the nude from the auction block.
No doubt the Tate would not take kindly to the suggestion that its security had been breached, and Palmer still lacked absolute proof. Nevertheless, she took Booth aside, told her what she suspected, and asked for copies of the photographs of every Giacometti in the Hanover files, and of all the Hanover records that referred to Giacometti transactions. In addition, she asked Booth to check the backs of the two suspicious Giacometti photographs she’d seen and find out if they’d been stamped by the Hanover Gallery’s official photographer.
To Palmer’s surprise, the archivist was more than willing to accommodate her.
Jennifer Booth had been watching Professor Drewe for the better part of a year. There was something odd about him, and she felt uneasy whenever he came into the reading room. He dressed beautifully and spent hours at the archives, but she sensed that behind his refined and articulate exterior he was out of his element, not quite sure how to behave. It wasn’t that he lacked confidence but that he could be so annoyingly obsequious.
“I’m so sorry to be a nuisance, but could you be terribly kind and get this material?” he’d ask in a stage whisper, ostensibly to avoid distracting the other researchers. Instead, he only drew attention to his exaggerated mannerisms. Her staff had complained; they disliked him and preferred not to be on duty when he was around.
Booth’s regulars were serious researchers who didn’t think twice about sending her staff into the darkest corners of the stacks. By contrast, Drewe made an unctuous ritual of it when a simple thank-you would have sufficed. On the other hand, while the archive had its share of nuisance researchers on fishing expeditions, Drewe seemed to know exactly what he was after.
After her disquieting conversation with Mary Lisa Palmer, Booth decided it was time to sound the alarm. She walked into the office of her supervisor, the head of the library and archives, Beth Houghton, and told her about Palmer’s visit. She said Palmer suspected that the archives had been compromised, and that they contained photographs of fake paintings.
Booth told Houghton that she too was suspicious. “I think Professor Drewe is involved in something here, but I’m not quite sure what it is,” she said. “I suggest we open a formal investigation.”
Houghton stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told Booth. “He’s a benefactor. He’s given the archive £20,000, and the Tate can’t risk alienating him on nothing more than a hunch.”
Booth was undeterred. She was guided by a code of ethics and considered herself both a scientist and a keeper of memory. She had spent her entire career safeguarding historical documents, and she could still remember the excitement and wonder of the first few years. The first time she had examined a three-hundred-year-old document, she’d felt in its delicate confection of old ink and paper an immediate and tactile connection to history.
Booth went to the stacks, pulled out the Hanover album, and began making copies for Palmer.