Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [42]
She reminded herself of her own mantra: Where there’s one fake there’s another.
She turned the pages of the album until she came across a second “Giacometti,” a portrait of a woman from the waist up. It was as bogus as the first one. How on earth had the two pictures ended up in the Tate’s files?
Palmer doubted that Brausen would have fallen for a fake. The dealer’s eye was too good, and she had bought directly from the galleries that represented Giacometti. Palmer asked to see the Hanover’s sales ledgers and found the Sotheby’s nude. It had the same reference number, G67/11, and the details were the same as those in the Sotheby’s catalog. The ledgers also listed ICA cofounder Peter Watson, who had purportedly sold the nude to the Hanover, as the owner of three other Giacomettis. Palmer knew nearly every Giacometti in the world, and was sure Watson had never owned that many of the artist’s works.
Were those other Giacomettis fakes too?
Palmer studied the ledgers, loose-leaf leather volumes held together by a thong. They reminded her of nineteenth-century accounting books. It would be easy enough to slip a page out and then replace it. Palmer scrutinized Watson’s name, which had been written alongside the entries for the four works. The ink appeared to be fresh. Then she examined the entry for the Hanover’s sale of the Sotheby’s nude. Here a name had been scratched out and replaced with the words “R.D.S. May, Obelisk Gallery.” Again the ink looked fresh.
In the archivist’s parlance, the files had been contaminated.
Palmer asked Booth for the Hanover daybooks, which tracked the movement of paintings in and out of the gallery. She found a listing for G67/11, but here it was a painting that had been done in 1951. The Sotheby’s catalog listed the Standing Nude as having been painted in 1954. The forger was off by three years. He probably hadn’t bothered to doctor the daybooks, which were hard to decipher, and thus the least likely of records a dealer would consult to verify a work’s provenance.
Palmer was now certain that whoever was behind the Sotheby’s nude had slipped a photograph of it into the Hanover album and falsified the sales ledger. She resisted going through all of the Hanover records to check the other possible forgeries. Her immediate priority was to keep the nude from the auction block.
No doubt the Tate would not take kindly to the suggestion that its security had been breached, and Palmer still lacked absolute proof. Nevertheless, she took Booth aside, told her what she suspected, and asked for copies of the photographs of every Giacometti in the Hanover files, and of all the Hanover records that referred to Giacometti transactions. In addition, she asked Booth to check the backs of the two suspicious Giacometti photographs she’d seen and find out if they’d been stamped by the Hanover Gallery’s official photographer.
To Palmer’s surprise, the archivist was more than willing to accommodate her.
Jennifer Booth had been watching Professor Drewe for the better part of a year. There was something odd about him, and she felt uneasy whenever he came into the reading room. He dressed beautifully and spent hours at the archives, but she sensed that behind his refined and articulate exterior he was out of his element, not quite sure how to behave. It wasn’t that he lacked confidence but that he could be so annoyingly obsequious.
“I’m so sorry to be a nuisance, but could you be terribly kind and get this material?” he’d ask in a stage whisper, ostensibly to avoid distracting the other researchers. Instead, he only drew attention to his exaggerated mannerisms. Her staff had complained; they disliked him and preferred not to be on duty when he was around.
Booth’s regulars were serious researchers who didn’t think twice about sending her staff into the darkest