18

STANDING NUDE

Armand Bartos Jr. was at work in his Upper East Side duplex in Manhattan when the long-awaited painting came in from Sheila Maskell, a New York-based private dealer and runner. Every once in a while, when she came across something really special, she would put in a call to Bartos. The last time they did business, she’d hooked him up with a Smoker, one of Tom Wesselmann’s many quintessentially American pop art pictures of erotic red lips puffing on a cigarette.

Now she had something rarer and considerably pricier: Standing Nude, 1955, by Alberto Giacometti. Pieces from this period rarely came on the market, and Bartos was delighted to have one within reach. It had been painted a few years after the struggling artist finally gained international recognition. Its source, Maskell said, was the same group of “very substantial” Britons who had sold two other Giacomettis to Bartos’s colleagues at the Avanti Galleries, a portrait of a woman from the waist up and another standing nude.

Bartos had already seen a high-resolution transparency of the work, on the basis of which he could tell that the canvas was cracked with age and might have been improperly stored. Maskell said the piece had been hidden away for years. Its condition was clearly a problem, but one within the range of a restorer’s ability. More important to Bartos was that the painting appeared to be superior in many respects to other Giacomettis of the same period. It was clear, precise, and fully articulated: Potentially, it was a real find.

Bartos had a good eye long before he went into the business. He was brought up in a cultured household, and as a young man he studied art history; for a time he considered himself a serious painter. He taught art at private schools in Manhattan, but eventually admitted to himself what he had long suspected—that he didn’t have the goods to make it as an artist. He decided to move on to the business side. If he couldn’t create art, at least he would wrap himself around the best of it. In an ideal world, he would live with Lichtensteins and Picassos and immerse himself in what another dealer described as “the last great luxury.”²¹

To ease the transition, he took a job in the print department of Christie’s New York branch, and then, after many years, struck out on his own. At six foot five he stood out even among the idiosyncratically beautiful people of the art crowd. With his thin, athletic frame and elongated Roman face, he looked rather like a Giacometti sculpture himself. He brought a genial manner and abundant knowledge to his work, and within a few years he was one of the city’s prominent dealers, with a fairly dazzling collection of modern and contemporary masters housed in his thirty-five-hundred-square-foot duplex. He had several small Picassos, a Shawn Scully, works by Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, and a Calder mobile that hung over the dining room table. Some of these he owned outright, others were on consignment. Ever since he first set eyes on the transparency of Standing Nude he’d been imagining how it might look on the wall.

He unsealed the wooden crate, pulled off the bubble wrap and brown construction paper, and removed the cardboard that protected the canvas. Once he stood it up against the wall, it was immediately apparent that the transparency had not done justice to the work itself. Emerging from the depths of the canvas, nearly four feet tall, was a two-dimensional female figure with a searching, almost haunted look. In the lower right-hand corner, in a thick script of black paint, was Giacometti’s unmistakable signature. Bartos was bowled over.

“It’s the best one I’ve ever seen,” he said to himself.

He looked through the provenance. There were receipts and invoices going back to the work’s creation, and catalogs from exhibitions where it had been shown over the years. Nearly every document was stamped “For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive.”

Before he bought the painting outright, he thought it would be prudent to show it to some of his colleagues, and to his restorer. The damage and the cracks were more extensive than the transparency had revealed. Paint cracks were quite common in older works. Bartos knew that most of the aging in an oil painting occurs during the first five years, although it takes about fifty years for it to harden thoroughly. When it does, it often develops a fine web of cracks.

This Giacometti was in far worse shape. It looked like it was flaking off in sections, perhaps because the canvas had relaxed on the stretcher over time. His restorer said he could get the painting back in shape for less than $10,000.

The initial feedback from colleagues was good. During two separate flybys, experts from Sotheby’s and Christie’s estimated that once restored, the piece could fetch between $350,000 and $550,000 at auction.

Maskell’s client was asking only $200,000 in return for a quick deal. Bartos stood to make a handsome profit. Sensing that Maskell was open to negotiation, he offered $175,000, and she accepted without hesitation.

When the work came back from the restorer several months later, it looked stunning. Bartos hung it up in the studio and decided to hold on to it until the right buyer came along. There was no hurry.

“It’s a great piece that has fallen through the cracks,” he told a friend. “It’s what every dealer dreams of.”

It was exactly what Myatt had dreamed of when, determined to make up for his failure with the Footless Woman, he stood before the easel and painted his perfect ten.