12

A SINISTER MESSAGE

From her office, Mary Lisa Palmer called Sotheby’s and said she had spent hours at the Tate archives examining the records of the 1954 nude. It was her considered opinion that something was wrong with the photograph of the painting. She had no doubt whatsoever that the painting was a fake. Then Annette sent a fax to Sotheby’s demanding it hold off the sale and send the nude to Paris.

The anonymous owner, however, refused to grant Sotheby’s authority, and the work was never sent. The auction house still thought the provenance was solid, but Palmer wouldn’t budge. The provenance material was as phony as the painting, she thought.

Sotheby’s cited two experts who believed the work was authentic. One was the London art dealer Thomas Gibson, who had bought several Giacomettis from Annette in the past. The other was Erica Brausen.

Palmer telephoned the eighty-three-year-old Brausen, who sounded weak and out of sorts. She had been down with the flu for several weeks and couldn’t remember the details of the sale, but she thought it was possible she’d bought the painting from Watson.

“The provenance is good,” she said. “If it’s in my record, then it’s right.”

Palmer was hoping that Brausen would look at the painting, but the old woman’s breathing sounded labored and she seemed too ill to travel. (She would die the next year.) Palmer thanked her, rang off, and called Thomas Gibson.

“The painting’s a bit fishy, but the provenance is respectable enough,” he told her.

“What about the varnish?” Palmer asked.

“Shouldn’t be put off by that,” he said, adding that aesthetic gaps and failures of judgment might exist in any given piece. While this certainly wasn’t the greatest work, Gibson thought the provenance was solid.

“Anyone can fake a document,” Palmer argued.

“Granted,” said Gibson. “But if someone wanted to fake a Giacometti, why choose such an unattractive composition?”

Palmer asked whether he had approved the piece for Sotheby’s, as the auction house had claimed.

“They have a vivid imagination,” he said.¹⁵

 

 

Mary Lisa Palmer was not one to give up. She had devoted too much of her life to the task of bringing order to Giacometti’s legacy. At his death in 1966 he left behind an estate that would later be evaluated at $200 million, but he left behind practically no documents on what he had produced and where it went. With the help of an assistant, Annette immediately began writing galleries, collectors, and museums around the world in search of files and photographs of Giacometti’s works. Her work laid the foundation for a catalogue raisonné, a scholarly listing of all of an artist’s known works. Annette had several loyal assistants, two of whom would later play a larger role in the association, one Martine Neeser—today the association’s president—and the fourth and last, Mary Lisa Palmer.¹⁶

When Palmer, a petite Connecticut woman with flyaway hair, walked into Annette’s office in 1974, the two women got along right away. Palmer had a quiet industriousness and was almost obsessively attentive to detail, two traits particularly suited for a catalogue raisonné. She shunned “art world black,” wore little or no makeup, favored functional shoes, and avoided the long, expensive lunches that were so common in the trade. A strong cup of coffee in the morning saw her through to noontime, and then she had a croque-monsieur at a local café or a sandwich at her desk.

The tables in her office were invariably piled high with material to be examined, classified, and filed away. Over the previous few years she had discovered among Annette’s files dozens of casual sketches Giacometti liked to draw on whatever material was to hand. She examined them for information that might be useful for the catalogue raisonné and for a book in progress on Giacometti’s writing. She had deciphered and transcribed hundreds of tiny scribbled notations, in French and Italian, he had made on drawing-paper table mats, in sketchbooks, and in notebooks, the words leaping sideways and upside down from one notebook page to the next. The book, Ecrits, was finally published in 1990, but work on the catalogue raisonné continued.

Once published, the catalogue would be the bible for all things Giacometti. It would include every known fact on each work—materials, dimensions, exhibition histories, provenances, scholarly analyses—and stand as the single most important defense against the addition of frauds to the artist’s oeuvre. For those in the trade, the catalogue raisonné was the ultimate arbiter: The inclusion or exclusion of a work could mean the difference between a high offer and a pass.

A catalogue raisonné could take years to compile: Dozens of dealers had to be contacted, old bills and receipts traced, records of defunct galleries resurrected, and libraries searched for references. Unlike Giacometti, Pablo Picasso had kept meticulous records and was still alive when his catalogue was being assembled. At thirty-three volumes, it was still incomplete more than three decades after the artist’s death in 1973, yet at one time copies were selling for about $100,000. Jean Dubuffet was just as meticulous, and he edited the thirty-nine volumes of his own catalogue.

Palmer put everything she had into the job, and Annette treated her as part of the family. Through studying his work and long conversations with friends of Giacometti, Palmer got to know the artist whose deeply lined face she had never seen in the flesh. His work had a raw, unadulterated, mystical quality that spoke to her, and the very notion that someone would try to forge it offended her to the core. From the start she and Annette had kept careful files on the dozens of attempts to market spurious Giacomettis after his prices began to skyrocket in the 1950s, but the majority of these were fake sculptures and unauthorized bronze castings made from illegally obtained molds of the genuine works. The castings were particularly difficult to spot because they were nearly identical to the originals, except that the originals were always a hairbreadth larger, because the molten bronze in which the fakes were cast shrank slightly as it cooled. With caliper in hand, Palmer had tracked down each suspect piece until it was out of circulation.

To Palmer, any forgery was an insult to Giacometti’s memory and craft. He had been a perfectionist who worked and reworked his pieces obsessively. At one point his sculptures in progress were so tiny that, according to one of his biographers, James Lord, they fit into a matchbox he carried in his pocket. An early acquaintance once said of the bushy-haired artist, “He will either go very far or go mad.”¹⁷ Palmer was certain that Giacometti would have been furious had he lived to see his painstakingly made sculptures—and now his paintings—forged with such élan.

Palmer’s confidence in her own judgment was well earned. Over the years she had handled and cataloged hundreds of Giacometti’s sculptures and canvases, and had developed an uncanny knack for honing in on the bogus. By inspection alone she could determine if a piece had come from the master’s hand. If she felt even the slightest nudge of a doubt, there was no talking her out of it. Hapless dealers or collectors who brought in a piece that seemed slightly off could expect no niceties. When she or Annette determined that a work was fake, they did their best to have it seized by the police in order to start the required legal verification process. Once declared a fake by the court on the basis of independent expert testimony, the court can either have the work destroyed or placed in the custody of the plaintiff, usually the association in the case of a Giacometti. The association preferred custody for purposes of evidence for future cases. So far, the courts have always sided with the association.

“I’ve never been wrong, yet,” she once told an interviewer.

Palmer’s critics thought her self-assuredness verged on arrogance, but she paid them no mind. Now she was determined to put the Footless Woman away.

 

 

After Palmer hung up with Gibson she sat drumming her fingers on the desk for a moment. There was one more call to make. She phoned David Sylvester, an art critic and Giacometti scholar, and told him she was sure there was a fake in the Sotheby’s catalog. Sylvester had already seen it.

“I agree completely,” he said. “It’s wrong.”

He recounted a recent visit to a New York gallery, where he had seen another, similar fake, a portrait of a woman from the waist up. The model resembled Annette, but the head was a dreadful botch-up. “Looks more like Diego,” he joked, referring to Giacometti’s brother.

Palmer asked him about the provenance.

He told her that the Avanti Galleries had apparently bought the piece in London for a Swedish client. The dealer had paid $325,000 for it, and had recently put it back on the market. The provenance included personal letters from Giacometti and Peter Watson, the initial owner.

“The paperwork is astonishing,” Sylvester said, “but it’s still a fake. One of the Watson letters is dated two months after Watson’s death.”

Palmer told him that she had also seen a portrait of a woman from the waist up, in the Hanover photo album, and that she believed it was a forgery. Could it be the same piece?

A few days later Sylvester called her from the Tate.

“I’m ninety-nine percent sure it’s the same painting,” he said. “It’s a conspiracy, a swindle.”

The following day, at Palmer’s urging, Sylvester called Sotheby’s to say that he concurred with her opinion that the nude in the catalog was a fake. The auction house agreed to “postpone” the sale, which Palmer knew was a polite phrase for pulling the work, but turned down Palmer’s request that they ship it to her. Instead, they returned the piece to the unnamed consignor.

On December 4, 1991, a day after the auction, Palmer found a sinister message on her answering machine.

“Good morning,” said the caller. “I would like to notify you of the following facts concerning the Giacometti entered at Sotheby’s for auction.”

The work was genuine, the caller said. Furthermore, he knew that she had blocked the sale. She had seven days to inspect and certify the piece. If she failed to do so, the caller would “commence a prosecution in both the United States and France.”

The man sounded polite, well-spoken, and determined. She replayed the call several times and transcribed it. She was sure she would hear from him again.