24

EXTREME PRUDENCE

In her office in Paris, Mary Lisa Palmer opened the package from Bartos and held the transparency up to the light.

“Stand up straight!” she told the nude.

The figure was all wrong. It slouched slightly, with one foot in front of the other. That was a clear tip-off, because when Annette Giacometti modeled for her husband, she stood erect, like a sentry, with her feet together. She would pose for hours in his drafty studio, taking a break only to stoke the stove. Over the years Alberto had captured her unflagging and intense stance time and again. Bartos’s figure was too casual and lacked gravity. Also, Giacometti knew anatomy very well and constructed his nudes carefully upon the skeleton. In contrast, Bartos’s figure was “wishy-washy.”

I can’t feel the bones, Palmer thought.

The transparency’s high resolution provided a good sense of the brushwork—too good, as it turned out. Giacometti used a very fine brush to build up his figures with a series of frenetic strokes. While Bartos’s piece possessed some of that same energy, the brushstrokes suggested an attempt to fill in a predetermined form rather than to build the figure up from the core.

Palmer examined the transparency again. The signature in the bottom right-hand corner wasn’t right either. Giacometti hated signing his name and often did so in a hurry. He rarely bothered to dip his brush for a final flourish, and many of his signatures were not perfectly legible. This one seemed studied and unwavering, as if it had been traced in pencil and then copied over with a wet brush.

More disconcerting still was the painting’s all too perfect provenance. Giacometti’s attitude toward business was informal in the extreme, and occasionally the association would find gaps in provenances for paintings or identical numbering for sculptures cast in bronze. By contrast, the chain of provenance accompanying Bartos’s Standing Nude was a wonder of documentary diligence. It was too perfect. It included a stack of invoices, receipts, and personal correspondence from previous owners. Palmer examined each item carefully and recognized a familiar pattern: The provenance was strikingly similar to that of the Footless Woman at Sotheby’s. In both cases the provenance documents bore the Tate’s rectangular stamp—“For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive”—and both paintings had purportedly been owned by the Hanover Gallery.

Palmer turned to the catalog Bartos had included in his package, “Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World,” from a 1950s show at the O’Hana Gallery. In it was an illustration of Bartos’s painting. Palmer reread his letter: “I trust that the above information is sufficient for verification and inclusion [in the catalogue raisonné].”

Far from it, she thought.

 

 

As Palmer was preparing her response to Bartos, she received a request from a French media company to reproduce for a poster a Giacometti drawing titled Standing Man and Tree, which had recently been featured in a Phillips auction catalog. She recognized immediately that this too was a fake.

She contacted Phillips and learned that in 1990 the drawing had been “generously donated” by Norseland Industries, along with a Le Corbusier, for an ICA benefit auction organized by Sotheby’s. According to the provenance, it had been owned by Peter Watson and Peter Harris, whose names Palmer recognized as previous owners of the Footless Woman. She called the ICA to see if they had any information on Norseland or Harris and was told that they did not. Then she called a curator at the Tate who told her that Harris’s name had appeared in the provenance of two Bissières that had been donated to the Tate and subsequently withdrawn. The curator had met the donor, an arts patron named John Drewe, who was interested in the Tate archives. He was an odd fellow, she said, and the whole Bissière business had left an unpleasant aftertaste.

Palmer felt queasy. More than two years earlier she had accumulated enough evidence to be reasonably certain that John Drewe was involved with one or more Giacometti fakes. She had tried but failed to get Sotheby’s to send her the Footless Woman. Without an actual forgery in hand, she couldn’t move on the information she had because there was no definitive proof. Nor could she call the police and ask them to raid a private gallery where she suspected there might be a fake. Now she had to face the fact that the scam was much bigger than she had imagined. This was no longer a case of a single forged painting or artist. If her instincts were correct, someone—very possibly Drewe—had managed to penetrate the art world’s inner sanctum. While forgeries were as old as art itself, the genius of this particular scam did not lie solely in the forger’s skill with a brush. It was a complex plot to corrupt the provenance process, to control the system that collectors and curators relied on to authenticate a piece of art. Whoever was behind it had gained access to the most secure databases, doctored exhibition catalogs and other historical documents, and altered important art archives.

Dealers and experienced collectors are usually wary about relying on their own critical judgment alone when it comes to a piece of art. However, when the piece has a seemingly impeccable provenance, supported by references to prestigious galleries and archives, the prospective buyer can be lulled into a false sense of confidence. In regard to Giacometti, Palmer realized, dealers and auctioneers were now more concerned with provenance than the work itself. They thought they had an option to bypass the association entirely to set up a quick sale. They could rely on the phenomenal provenance that accompanied the fraudulent art. And why shouldn’t they? Good provenance was like liability insurance. If the paperwork checked out, who could accuse a dealer of knowingly selling a fake?

While Palmer was mulling over this new flurry of revelations, Bartos was bombarding her with faxes and phone calls from New York. He had a deal pending, and he needed an answer on his Standing Nude. Finally she wrote back and asked him to send the painting to Paris for her inspection.

Seeing the work itself only confirmed her opinion that it was a forgery. She contemplated initiating the seizure of the work but quickly decided against it. It would not be effective or efficient. Bartos and others would simply point to the paperwork as evidence of the painting’s authenticity and complicate the matter.

Soon Bartos had his painting back, but no certificate of authenticity. His calls and faxes continued unabated. “I am really disappointed that each time I call you, you are too busy to speak to me,” he wrote on one occasion. “I have tried to make it clear to you that time is of the essence. I have asked you by fax and by telephone what is your procedure in terms of a certificate or letter, and I have to ask why I am not getting any response from you. Is there something else I should do? You asked me to send the painting, which I did.”

Palmer wondered if he actually had a deal pending. She considered the possibility that her correspondent might in fact be John Drewe, Peter Harris, or a renegade dealer working for Drewe. An operation of this size surely required the cooperation of others. How many were involved?

Bartos had a right to expect Palmer to play by the rules and either authenticate the painting or tell him the basis for her reservations. If she was to persuade the art world’s experts that the nude was a fake, she had to play the game their way, not hers. She could point to the brushstrokes or the signature, but she knew these would be considered subjective judgments by some. Instead, she had to use objective standards to prove that the provenance was bogus beyond question. She had to buy time, and the best way to do that without showing Bartos her hand was to stall him.

She decided to ask for the original documentation. In her request for the material, however, she added a key sentence. If he was honest, there would be no harm done. If he was not, she understood she was taking a calculated risk.

“I cannot yet confirm the actual state of my research. I can only advise you to use extreme prudence with this painting,” she wrote.

Then, she got in touch with Jennifer Booth at the Tate: “I am again confronted with a certain number of documents which perplex me . . . and need your assistance.”