Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [44]
When Palmer, a petite Connecticut woman with flyaway hair, walked into Annette’s office in 1974, the two women got along right away. Palmer had a quiet industriousness and was almost obsessively attentive to detail, two traits particularly suited for a catalogue raisonné. She shunned “art world black,” wore little or no makeup, favored functional shoes, and avoided the long, expensive lunches that were so common in the trade. A strong cup of coffee in the morning saw her through to noontime, and then she had a croque-monsieur at a local café or a sandwich at her desk.
The tables in her office were invariably piled high with material to be examined, classified, and filed away. Over the previous few years she had discovered among Annette’s files dozens of casual sketches Giacometti liked to draw on whatever material was to hand. She examined them for information that might be useful for the catalogue raisonné and for a book in progress on Giacometti’s writing. She had deciphered and transcribed hundreds of tiny scribbled notations, in French and Italian, he had made on drawing-paper table mats, in sketchbooks, and in notebooks, the words leaping sideways and upside down from one notebook page to the next. The book, Ecrits, was finally published in 1990, but work on the catalogue raisonné continued.
Once published, the catalogue would be the bible for all things Giacometti.It would include every known fact on each work—materials, dimensions, exhibition histories, provenances, scholarly analyses—and stand as the single most important defense against the addition of frauds to the artist’s oeuvre. For those in the trade, the catalogue raisonné was the ultimate arbiter: The inclusion or exclusion of a work could mean the difference between a high offer and a pass.
A catalogue raisonné could take years to compile: Dozens of dealers had to be contacted, old bills and receipts traced, records of defunct galleries resurrected, and libraries searched for references. Unlike Giacometti, Pablo Picasso had kept meticulous records and was still alive when his catalogue was being assembled. At thirty-three volumes, it was still incomplete more than three decades after the artist’s death in 1973, yet at one time copies were selling for about $100,000. Jean Dubuffet was just as meticulous, and he edited the thirty-nine volumes of his own catalogue.
Palmer put everything she had into the job, and Annette treated her as part of the family. Through studying his work and long conversations with friends of Giacometti, Palmer got to know the artist whose deeply lined face she had never seen in the flesh. His work had a raw, unadulterated, mystical quality that spoke to her, and the very notion that someone would try to forge it offended her to the core. From the start she and Annette had kept careful files on the dozens of attempts to market spurious Giacomettis after his prices began to skyrocket in the 1950s, but the majority of these were fake sculptures and unauthorized bronze castings made from illegally obtained molds of the genuine works. The castings were particularly difficult to spot because they were nearly identical to the originals, except that the originals were always a hairbreadth larger, because the molten bronze in which the fakes were cast shrank slightly as it cooled. With caliper in hand, Palmer had tracked down each suspect piece until it was out of circulation.
To Palmer, any forgery was an insult to Giacometti’s memory and craft. He had been a perfectionist who worked and reworked his pieces obsessively. At one point his sculptures in progress were so tiny that, according to one of his biographers, James Lord, they fit into a matchbox he carried in his pocket. An early acquaintance once said of the bushy-haired