26

A SLOW BURN . . .

Her worst suspicions confirmed, Mary Lisa Palmer began poring over old London telephone directories and newspaper archives. In decades of back issues of an art journal listing the exhibitions held at London’s major galleries in the 1950s, she found nothing that matched the awkward title of the O’Hana catalog Bartos had sent her, “Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World.” However, the defunct gallery had once held a show with a similar title, “Paintings by Stars of the Entertainment World.”

Palmer speculated that this show might have provided the inspiration for the bogus catalog, which had a photographer’s stamp and the name of a printer on the back. She called the printer. They had no record of any such catalog. The photographer’s stamp was from Leslie & Collier Partners, the agency that had supposedly shot the pictures and had an address that put it next door to the ICA. That was an odd coincidence, Palmer thought. She checked the records for registered British companies but could find no trace of Leslie & Collier.

Palmer held one of the catalog pages up to the light and copied down the watermark, which consisted of the word “Conqueror” over the image of a castle. Watermarks were commonly pressed onto high-grade paper to show a company’s logo or trademark and add a certain prestige to an ordinary sheet of stationery. Early artisans often “signed” their paper in this manner. Palmer had worked with countless old documents and was familiar with paper textures and watermarks. She went to the association’s files and unearthed a number of business and personal letters contemporary with the purported 1950s catalog and bearing the Conqueror logo. The design was slightly different from the watermark on the catalog pages: The letters over the castle on the association’s letters were all uppercase and included the word “LONDON.”

Palmer contacted the manufacturer of Conqueror paper and was told that the catalog watermark could not have been made in the 1950s. The design was from the 1970s, when London had been dropped from the watermark to reflect Conqueror’s growth as a global brand. Bartos’s catalog could not possibly be an original document.

But what of the illustrations, which showed works by Noël Coward, Peter Ustinov, Rex Harrison, and John Mills, mixed in with pieces by Nicholson, Dubuffet, Kandinsky, Chagall, and Giacometti? This made little sense. The whole thing must be an awkward copy of the genuine “Paintings by Stars of the Entertainment World” catalog. Palmer doubted that the forger would have gone to such lengths simply to include one fake Giacometti nude. Were the works by the other artists forgeries too?

She called Ustinov’s office in London. The catalog listed five whimsical titles by him, including Macbeth in Mexico and Mr Curtiz Directs a Battle Scene, a reference to the filmmaker Michael Curtiz, with whom Ustinov had worked. His secretary seemed surprised. She told Palmer that the actor was an amateur caricaturist who had never once exhibited his doodles. A Ustinov forgery would not have been worth much. Why go to the trouble of inventing fake titles for nonexistent paintings? Clearly, whoever was behind the operation was mocking the very art establishment he was scamming.

Palmer turned her attention to the booklet’s serious painters. With seven works Dubuffet was more heavily represented than the others, including a series of royal playing cards and a pair of cow portraits. Palmer called the Dubuffet Foundation in Paris and asked the director whether she had seen the catalog. Yes, the director said, she had seen a copy made from the original in the archives of the National Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The director had a good reputation in the art world, and Palmer trusted her enough to communicate her concerns about the catalog’s authenticity.

The director insisted that the Dubuffets were genuine. In fact, she had recently authenticated them, and they were about to go on sale at one of the auction houses in London. Palmer checked the records at the National Library. The “original” O’Hana catalog was indeed there, and was identical to the one Bartos had sent. Now Palmer was sure that the V&A’s security had also been breached.

Next Palmer focused on the work’s previous owners. She called Albert Loeb, whose father had owned the Paris-based Pierre Loeb Gallery. According to the Bartos provenance, the elder Loeb had bought the work directly from Giacometti and then sold it to the Hanover. Palmer asked Loeb to check his father’s files for any record of the transactions, but he could find none.

A few days later Loeb bumped into the dealer and curator Jean-Yves Mock, who was out shopping for shrimp in the Sixth Arrondissement. Mock had worked at the Hanover for seventeen years as the business partner and close friend of gallery owner Erica Brausen. When she died in his arms in 1992, Mock had inherited her personal collection.

Loeb told him about Palmer’s conundrum and suggested Mock give her a call. With shrimp in hand, Mock strolled over to the association, where Palmer told him everything she knew about the forgeries and the photographs of the fake Giacomettis in the Hanover album. Mock looked over the material, inspected the Hanover label Palmer had photographed on the back of Bartos’s Standing Nude, and assured her that it was wrong. The gallery had never used the label for anything but mailing purposes.

Mock then picked apart a January 1958 letter that Brausen had allegedly written to Jacques O’Hana. “Dear Sir,” the letter began, and went on to say, “We have two paintings by Alberto Giacometti which you could show to your client. [One is a] Nu Debout 1955, 47 3/4 × 35 1/4 ins at pounds 1650—which we purchased from Pierre Loeb in 1955.” The letter bore the Tate archive stamp and was the one Booth had said predated the Tate’s files on O’Hana.

Mock told Palmer that her suspicions were well-founded. He had redesigned the gallery stationery shortly after his arrival in 1956, but the writer of this 1958 letter had used the old stationery. The salutation was another giveaway. O’Hana was a charming and quirky man who had built a small swimming pool in the center of his gallery. He and Brausen had been good friends, and she always addressed him as “Dear Jacques” in her letters, never “Dear Sir.” The signature looked right to Mock, but it could easily have been cut from one document and pasted onto another.

Neither Palmer nor Mock believed that Brausen would have fallen for a forgery in the 1950s. As Giacometti’s principal dealer in London, she had bought and sold more than six dozen of his works. They had all come from the galleries that represented him, either Gallery Maeght in Paris or Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. She knew the material too well to let a fake slip by her. In addition, forgeries of Giacometti’s paintings were rare, if not nonexistent, in the 1950s. The artist was much more famous for his sculptures, which commanded far higher sums and were thus the first works targeted by forgers.

Palmer now felt she had a strong case that Bartos’s painting was a fake, but she wanted to nab the other Giacometti forgeries as well, both those she’d seen at the Tate and those that had recently come to her attention. With Mock sitting next to her, she carefully spread out the small stack of letters, photographs, and ledger pages she had collected over the past several years. Mock was unable to recognize the handwriting on several of the ledger entries, and as they studied the material together it occurred to Palmer that they were looking at both the puzzle and its solution.

 

 

Meanwhile, in New York, Armand Bartos was doing a slow burn. Palmer’s delays were inexcusable. He had bent over backward to provide her with all the necessary documentation. Early on she had hinted that she was deeply concerned about the painting, but she had failed to give a good reason. In Bartos’s opinion, the provenance was impeccable and the work was first-rate. He had contacted two other respected experts, and they had confirmed his belief that Standing Nude, 1955 was genuine. On the basis of their reports, the work had already been seen by two restorers, his own in New York and another in London.

But Bartos had also called Albert Loeb, who reported that he could find no record of his father’s having bought the painting from Giacometti or sold it to the Hanover. This had shaken Bartos’s confidence, so he called his runner, Sheila Maskell, and insisted that she provide an explanation for this gap in the provenance, threatening to demand his money back if she couldn’t.

Until then, Maskell had kept mum about the name of her source, the London-based runner Stuart Berkeley. Runners and dealers tended to be circumspect about their sources so that prospective buyers couldn’t bypass them and cut them out of their commission. Now Maskell pressured Berkeley to recheck the provenance and return to his own source to ensure that the painting was authentic. Berkeley did so, and then he called Bartos, suggesting that the dealer hire an independent researcher to examine the Loeb gap. He recommended a London-based firm called Art Research Associates.

Two weeks later Bartos received a synopsis of ARA’s report. Over the course of twelve days, two purported researchers, Robin Coverdale and Bernard Cockett, had interviewed numerous gallery employees and combed the Tate and the National Art Library at the V&A for copies and originals of documents and signatures relating to the work, as well as clear evidence that it had been shown at the exhibition cited. In the O’Hana file they had discovered a typed list of paintings bought by the gallery in 1955. This list included the Standing Nude and mentioned that it had originally come from P. Loeb. In addition, Coverdale had uncovered another exhibition in which the work had been shown, this one at the Hanover Gallery. The original 1956 catalog was tucked away at the V&A.

“It is our considered opinion that the exhibition record demonstrates unequivocally that the ‘Nu Debout, 1955’ must be an authentic painting,” the report stated.

Bartos was both relieved and angry. That an exhaustive investigation had found the work “unequivocally” genuine vindicated his own critical judgment, but it also stoked his anger at Palmer. She had promised to look into the authenticity of the piece and get back to him, but she had been stonewalling him for months. He had spent far too much time and money trying to prove the work’s authenticity. Meanwhile, three potentially lucrative deals had fallen apart over the issue of authentication. If the painting was indeed a forgery, where had the provenance documents come from?

Bartos knew about the legal challenges facing the Giacometti Association since Annette’s death.²⁵ He wondered if the art world gossip about Palmer was true, that she was stubborn and deficient in scholarship.

He sent her a copy of the newly discovered 1956 Hanover catalog, the list of paintings mentioning Loeb, and a curt letter. “It is your responsibility to state clearly the reason why you believe this work is not genuine.”

Palmer replied that she was still researching the documents.

Exasperated, Bartos called Sotheby’s in London and consigned the painting for auction. Nearly seven months had passed since his first request for a certificate, and nothing seemed good enough for Palmer. If the auction didn’t force her hand, at least he’d finally be rid of the piece.

 

 

What Palmer didn’t tell Bartos was that the Hanover catalog was yet another forgery. Predictably, it bore the stamp of the V&A and contained an illustration of Bartos’s Standing Nude. On the back cover was a photograph of another suspicious Giacometti, a 1956 Standing Nude, featured in an advertisement for an upcoming exhibition—also phony, no doubt.

In fact, a photograph of this same 1956 work had just crossed Palmer’s desk.

David Sylvester, who was a board member of the Giacometti Association, had sent her a photograph of the nude that he had received from a man named Howard Sussman, who lived in Reigate, a London suburb twenty-five miles south of the capital. Sussman said he represented the painter’s owner and wanted Sylvester to intercede on their behalf and get a certificate of authenticity from Palmer. The owner, Barbara Craig, the widow of a well-known collector, had been repeatedly rebuffed by Palmer’s office, Sussman claimed. His letter played on the legal problems Palmer was having with Giacometti’s heirs and hinted that if Sylvester didn’t help, Craig would take the “scandalous state of affairs” at the association to her cousin, “a newspaper proprietor who wishes to help her.” Craig was understandably “distraught,” wrote Sussman. “She is an elderly lady, and infirm. . . . [T]he sale of the painting is crucial for her.”

Sylvester asked Palmer if she thought the Sussman material was from the same family of fakes they had spoken about a few years earlier. It had all the telltale signs: an impeccable provenance attached to a fake and a letter reminiscent in tone and style of the ones she had received from Drewe, Cockcroft, and Norseland chairman Cockett. Now it was connected to Bartos through the Hanover catalog.

And yet Sussman’s 1956 nude was backed up by two other illustrated catalogs from two separate galleries. One of them had a stamp from St. Philip’s Priory, and the second, which bore the official Tate stamp and was titled “The Contemporary Nude,” was from a Gallery One exhibition. Palmer double-checked with a Tate curator and was told that the Gallery One catalog was indeed in the Tate stacks.

She was sure this was another forged piece of provenance. She would have been surer if she’d known that Sussman was the surname of Drewe’s new wife.