Provenance

A fixture on the lecture circuit, Nahum knew the art world intimately, having spent seventeen years at Sotheby’s working the gavel and the sales floor. It was said that Sotheby’s was filled with dealers fobbing themselves off as gentlemen while Christie’s was a bastion of gentlemen who desperately wanted to be dealers. As a teenager Nahum had aspired to both. He started at Sotheby’s at age eighteen, earning eight pounds a week as a clerk on the bustling auction floor. It was hair-raising, adrenaline-fueled work. A first-rate auctioneer could sell nearly two hundred lots in an hour, and it was Nahum’s job to stay abreast of the bids, convert currencies, and keep the sale ledgers up-to-date while he kept an eye on the room. He memorized the faces of important clients, and was occasionally asked to bid on their behalf. The learning curve was sharp, and he quickly rose in rank to become a senior director and department head.

After nearly two decades of feeding the art machine and pulling paintings off old ladies’ walls, Nahum left Sotheby’s in 1984 and opened the Leicester Galleries on Ryder Street. The timing was good, for the market was soaring. He was as tough as his clients, none of whom were pussycats, and he kept a constant watch on the auction houses, where he had witnessed toe-curling manifestations of greed and cunning. During his career he had experienced moments of fantastically good fortune as well as downturns so nasty—particularly in the early 1990s—that his bankers found reason to doubt his capacity to perform miracles.

Nahum’s gallery, whose centerpiece was a plush velvet showroom hung with placid landscapes and seascapes, sat off one of the main thoroughfares of central London, in an elegant district of high-end shops and boutiques crammed with tourists carrying turquoise bags filled with chocolates and teas from Fortnum & Mason. There were frequent drop-ins at the gallery, and Nahum kept his ear cocked for the telltale accent of cash-heavy Americans, Germans, and Japanese. His experience had taught him that the rarest treasures could be found in the most unlikely places, so when Clive Belman walked in with a painting under his arm one day in the fall of 1993, Nahum went up to him and politely asked what he could do for him.

With all the patience in the world, he helped Belman unwrap a small wooden panel of the Crucifixion by Graham Sutherland. Christ was depicted as an emaciated figure against a yellow background, and Belman explained that the panel was one of a series of working sketches for the Crucifixion scene in Sutherland’s famous tapestry in Coventry Cathedral. He told Nahum he was selling the work on behalf of his neighbor, John Drewe, a physicist who was conducting research into long-hidden Holocaust archives.

In Nahum’s opinion, the work was unremarkable, but it had a solid provenance. He remembered that not long ago Christie’s had auctioned a similar group of Sutherland Crucifixions with identical provenance: They had all come from St. Philip’s Priory in Begbroke. On the back of Belman’s panel was the priory stamp and the inscription “Father Bernard F. Barlow, Graham Sutherland, Crucifixion of our Lord—study in oil—loaned Jan 1972 to Oxford University Bod Library reference R203.”

Nahum assumed that Christie’s had checked with the monastery and vetted the provenance of the other Crucifixions, but to be on the safe side, he decided to take Belman’s over there for an informal evaluation—which was easy enough to do, since his gallery was right next to Christie’s back door. Sometimes, when he opened up shop in the morning, he found boxes of spent champagne bottles that had been left outside overnight. Nahum believed that such luxuries, which were financed by the auctioneers’ usurious commissions, were outrageous. Still, the auction houses were useful when he needed to unload mediocre works that he considered unworthy of his own clientele.

Christie’s estimated Belman’s Sutherland panel at about £15,000. Nahum thought that was high and offered Belman £5,500. Belman accepted and made out a receipt in the name of John Drewe at Airtech Systems.

A few weeks later Belman was back with two more pieces, both by Ben Nicholson and both from the collection of John Cockett. Nahum remembered that he had seen one of them a year or so earlier in a vault in Golders Green, where he had gone with an artist and runner named Stuart Berkeley. At the time Nahum thought the work was either badly restored or the product of one of Nicholson’s off days, and his opinion hadn’t changed.

The second painting, titled Mexican, was no better than the first, but it was commercial enough, with skewed geometrical shapes and an abundant palette. Nahum thought he could probably find an American buyer for it. The back of the stretcher was signed and dated by the artist, and there were two labels, one from Galerie de Seine in Belgrave Square, London, the other from New York’s Willard Gallery. The documentation seemed solid. The piece was dated 1953 and had been bought from Nicholson by E. J. Power, a businessman and future Tate Gallery trustee. Belman showed Nahum an old receipt for the work, along with a 1950s catalog from the Galerie de Seine that was titled “Paintings by Five Artists From St. Ives” and contained a photograph of the painting. Finally, the provenance included a letter to Belman from the Nicholson scholar and former Tate head Alan Bowness, who had seen a transparency of the work and accepted it as genuine.

Belman told Nahum he wanted £40,000 for Mexican. Nahum sought a second opinion from a curator at the Tate, who thought the piece was genuine but second-rate. After a third expert confirmed that Nicholson’s signature on the stretcher was authentic, Nahum pooled his resources with another dealer and paid Belman £35,000 for the painting. Then he put it in storage and decided to wait until the next auction at Sotheby’s in New York.

Shortly after the purchase, Nahum got a phone call from Drewe, who wanted some information on a painting Nahum had on consignment, Claude Monet’s Cleopatra’s Needle and Charing Cross Bridge. Drewe had a private client for the piece, and asked whether he could borrow a transparency. Nahum declined. Dealers rarely shared transparencies with intermediaries, particularly unfamiliar ones. Top-tier dealers observed certain trade rules, and it was Nahum’s experience that runners often felt free to break them. A clever middleman with a borrowed transparency could slice a dealer’s commission in half. Nahum preferred to conduct his business with a work at its source.

The Monet was at the restorer’s, he told Drewe, but the professor was welcome to take his client there to examine it. Collectors love private viewings, the more remote the location the better. It gives them a sense of exclusivity and a feeling that they are getting a jump on the market.

Drewe said he would bring his client to the restorer’s that afternoon, but he asked Nahum to stay away from the showing. This was not an unusual request in the business, and Nahum agreed to it. He told Drewe that he had another appointment in any case and would be busy all afternoon.

By sheer coincidence, Nahum’s meeting was canceled, and he went back to the gallery to finish up some work. As he was reading his mail, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform came in and announced that he was there to pick up the Monet transparency for Dr. Drewe.

An hour later the phone rang. It was Nahum’s restorer, calling to say that he had recognized Drewe’s “private client” as a former auction house employee who had been fired for stealing. Nahum had been expecting a call from Drewe with an update on the Monet, but he never heard from him. Just as well, he thought.

In a matter of weeks Belman was back at the gallery with another painting for Nahum from Drewe’s collection. The dealer took him aside and told him he wanted nothing more to do with the professor.