Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [43]
After her disquieting conversation with Mary Lisa Palmer, Booth decided it was time to sound the alarm. She walked into the office of her supervisor, the head of the library and archives, Beth Houghton, and told her about Palmer’s visit. She said Palmer suspected that the archives had been compromised, and that they contained photographs of fake paintings.
Booth told Houghton that she too was suspicious. “I think Professor Drewe is involved in something here, but I’m not quite sure what it is,” she said. “I suggest we open a formal investigation.”
Houghton stared at her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told Booth. “He’s a benefactor. He’s given the archive £20,000, and the Tate can’t risk alienating him on nothing more than a hunch.”
Booth was undeterred. She was guided by a code of ethics and considered herself both a scientist and a keeper of memory. She had spent her entire career safeguarding historical documents, and she could still remember the excitement and wonder of the first few years. The first time she had examined a three-hundred-year-old document, she’d felt in its delicate confection of old ink and paper an immediate and tactile connection to history.
Booth went to the stacks, pulled out the Hanover album, and began making copies for Palmer.
12
A SINISTER MESSAGE
From her office, Mary Lisa Palmer called Sotheby’s and said she had spent hours at the Tate archives examining the records of the 1954 nude. It was her considered opinion that something was wrong with the photograph of the painting. She had no doubt whatsoever that the painting was a fake. Then Annette sent a fax to Sotheby’s demanding it hold off the sale and send the nude to Paris.
The anonymous owner, however, refused to grant Sotheby’s authority, and the work was never sent. The auction house still thought the provenance was solid, but Palmer wouldn’t budge. The provenance material was as phony as the painting, she thought.
Sotheby’s cited two experts who believed the work was authentic. One was the London art dealer Thomas Gibson, who had bought several Giacomettis from Annette in the past. The other was Erica Brausen.
Palmer telephoned the eighty-three-year-old Brausen, who sounded weak and out of sorts. She had been down with the flu for several weeks and couldn’t remember the details of the sale, but she thought it was possible she’d bought the painting from Watson.
“The provenance is good,” she said. “If it’s in my record, then it’s right.”
Palmer was hoping that Brausen would look at the painting, but the old woman’s breathing sounded labored and she seemed too ill to travel. (She would die the next year.) Palmer thanked her, rang off, and called Thomas Gibson.
“The painting’s a bit fishy, but the provenance is respectable enough,” he told her.
“What about the varnish?” Palmer asked.
“Shouldn’t be put off by that,” he said, adding that aesthetic gaps and failures of judgment might exist in any given piece. While this certainly wasn’t the greatest work, Gibson thought the provenance was solid.
“Anyone can fake a document,” Palmer argued.
“Granted,” said Gibson. “But if someone wanted to fake a Giacometti, why choose such an unattractive composition?”
Palmer asked whether he had approved the piece for Sotheby’s, as the auction house had claimed.
“They have a vivid imagination,” he said.15
Mary Lisa Palmer was not one to give up. She had devoted too much of her life to the task of bringing order to Giacometti’s legacy. At his death in 1966 he left behind an estate that would later be evaluated at $200 million, but he left behind practically no documents
on what he had produced and where it went. With the help of an assistant, Annette immediately began writing galleries, collectors, and museums around the world in search of files and photographs of Giacometti