1 About $400 at the time. The exchange rate for U.S. dollars to British pounds varied widely from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, ranging from highs of well over $2.00:£1.00 to lows of less than $1.10:£1.00. For much of the period, $1.50:£1.00 is a useful if rough rule of thumb, but readers interested in more exact conversion figures can find them on the Web site research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/EXUSUK.txt.
2 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. In 1986, when an artist named J. S. G. Boggs exhibited several of his drawings of £10, £5, and £1 notes, the police seized them and arrested him on charges of counterfeiting. Two decades later, when Norwegian artist Jan Christensen made a painting consisting of Norwegian banknotes stuck on canvas, it was snapped up by a collector for $16,300, its exact face value. When the piece was shown at an Oslo gallery, thieves broke in and stole the banknotes, leaving the frame behind.
Christensen was not surprised: “I wanted to make a blunt work with the intention of creating a discussion about the value of art, and about capitalism, and how the art world works,” he told the BBC. “It proves my theory that I have made an artwork that has a value outside the gallery space.”
3 Christopher Mason. The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal. New York: Berkley Books, 2005, p. 51.
4 Mason, Art of the Steal, p. 50.
5 Just a few years later, in 1990, Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet would be auctioned off for $82.5 million to Ryoei Saito, a Japanese industrialist who spent a few hours with his purchase, then put it in a crate and locked it in a climate-controled vault in a top-secret storeroom in Tokyo.
6 Mibus no doubt knew that similar caches of artworks could be found all over the world. London, Paris, New York, and Tokyo were dotted with anonymous storage depots where dealers routinely stashed their best works until the market was ready to pay the right price. These gloomy treasure troves, which often called to mind the interior of a state prison, ranged from modest warehouses to much larger operations manned by discreet uniformed attendants riding prewar elevators. One such facility in New York was said to be filled quite literally to the rafters with thousands of priceless works, some of which had not seen the light of day in decades. The occasional thefts, almost always inside jobs, were kept quiet and in the family.
7 Neither the alleged affair, assault charge, nor prison sentence could be verified.
8 War fibbers are not confined to Britain. According to a 2001 Guardian article by Duncan Campbell, thousands of American fabricators claimed to have taken part in the Vietnam War. In a notable example, Los Angeles Superior Court judge Patrick Couwenberg was removed from the bench in 2001 after it was determined that he had lied to get his job, claiming he was a decorated Vietnam War veteran who had received the Purple Heart for a groin injury sustained in battle. He had also claimed that he had worked undercover for the CIA in Laos in the 1960s, that he had studied law at Loyola, and that he had a master’s degree in psychology. These were all lies. At hearings to determine whether he should remain on the bench, Couwenberg’s defense lawyers argued that he was suffering from pseudologia phantastica. Other well-known war fibbers include the historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Ellis, who was suspended from his university job after inventing a Vietnam War past for himself. (He said he had been a platoon commander near My Lai, the site of the notorious mass killing by U.S. soldiers.) Chicago District judge Michael O’Brien falsely claimed to be a medal of honor winner and was forced to step down in 1995, after fourteen years on the bench. Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson was fired after his claims about Vietnam War combat turned out to be bogus. War liars are often caught because of the grandiosity of their boasts—for example, that they belonged to elite units such as the Special Forces, Britain’s SAS, the U.S. Navy SEALs, or the CIA, claims that for the most part can be verified.
9 Lyn Cole. Contemporary Legacies: An Incomplete History of the ICA 1947-1990, unpublished.
10 David Mellor, ed. Fifty Years of the Future: A Chronicle of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1998.
11 See
www.genesisp-orridge.com. Web site of Genesis P-Orridge, a founding artist of COUM Transmissions, a performance art group that created the ICA show.
12 Dan Hofstadter, “A Life Unlike His Art,” New York Times Book Review, Sept. 22, 1985, a review of James Lord’s biography Giacometti.
14 Thomas Hoving. False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.
15 Although instrumental to the police investigation, Sotheby’s declined to comment for this book.
16 Annette worked on the catalogue raisonné up until her death in 1993. The catalogue raisonné for Giacometti’s paintings alone was ready to be published by the association in 2001 and as of 2008 still had not been released.
17 James Lord. Giacometti: A Biography. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983.
18 The rare Geneva Bible of 1560 was known as the Breeches Bible because it described Adam and Eve’s fig leaves as “breeches.” The Vinegar Bible, published in Oxford in 1717, was so named because the parable of the vineyard was given as “the parable of the vinegar” in the heading of Luke 20. Only twelve copies were published. One of them, worth about $30,000, was stolen from a church in southwest England in the spring of 2008.
19 The account of Belman’s dealings with Stern is based on interviews with Belman. Stern declined to comment.
20 Madeleine Marsh, “COLLECTABLES/On the Roadshow to Riches,” The Independent (London). Jan. 17, 1993.
21 Richard Polsky. I Bought Andy Warhol. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
22 Konigsberg was not formally charged with any crime.
23 The judge in a subsequent confiscation proceeding confirmed that Drewe had opened Swiss bank accounts. Although Drewe authorized the banks to provide the police with details, the police were not able to obtain precise details of the accounts and their contents.
24 Drewe has chalked up statements such as these as an indication that Goudsmid is mentally unstable.
25 In 1993, the association became engaged in a battle with the French government over Annette’s will. Annette wanted the association—whose initial board members all had close ties with Giacometti—transformed into a foundation that would inherit all of Giacometti’s artworks and documents that she had owned. While this would save substantial inheritance taxes, it required a difficult process to obtain government approval.
26 Mark Jones, ed., with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker. Fake? The Art of Deception. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
27 This comic nudge at credulous American collectors has been retold often, with wildly varying figures. In 1934, Time magazine made note of the “hoary art joke . . . that the U.S. today has no less than 30,000 Corots.” In 1940, Newsweek wrote, “Of the 2,500 paintings Corot did in his lifetime, 7,800 are to be found in America.” Later, ARTnews published slightly different figures, as did the Guardian. Time revisited the joke in 1990, in a piece by critic Robert Hughes: “It used to be said that Camille Corot painted 800 pictures in his lifetime, of which 4,000 ended up in American collections.”
29 Berenson is a controversial figure. Some scholars claim he deliberately misattributed many works to earn the substantial commissions he charged.
31 Hoving and ARTnews, September 2001.
32 Hebborn was murdered by an unknown assailant in 1996 while living in Rome.
33 Alex Wade, “Cracking Down on Art Fraud,” Guardian, May 24, 2005.
34 No relation to Robert Volpe, the New York art-fraud detective.
35 The Footless Woman would resurface on the market in 2001, only to disappear again. A prominent London dealer who had been duped by Drewe in the 1990s sent a photograph of the work to Palmer for a certificate. The dealer was selling it on behalf of a U.S. collector. When Palmer told the dealer that the painting was “a Drewe fake” and asked him to hand it over to the police, he said he would return it to the collector instead. It hasn’t resurfaced since.