Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [49]
Sperr checked the contact information the professor had given him and discovered that the Duke Street address did not match the postal code. When he dialed the phone number, he got an answering machine with a generic greeting. He dialed directory inquiry and found that there was a listing for a John Drewe, but at a different number.
The next time Drewe came in, Sperr was waiting for him. As usual, the professor asked to be let upstairs, but Sperr stood by the staircase to block his way.
“The rare books section is closed for renovations,” he said.
Drewe was not disappointed. He had what he needed. Forging provenance had become a full-time job, and the letter from the priory could be used for dozens of fakes. When the time came for another “owner,” he was confident he’d find a mark. He thanked Sperr and let himself out.
14
THE PAPER TRAIL
When the material she had requested from the Tate arrived in Paris in the fall of 1992, Mary Lisa Palmer examined it closely. Among the documents was a conservator’s report on the two suspect photographs in the Hanover album, of the Footless Woman and the portrait of a woman from the waist up. As she had surmised, neither bore the stamp of the Hanover Gallery’s photographer. Furthermore, both were printed on a shiny resin-coated paper that had not been in use until the mid-1970s, decades after the works were supposedly painted. Palmer knew that Erica Brausen had donated her records to the Tate in 1986 and strongly suspected that the phony pictures had been slipped into the archives in the intervening years.
In the Footless Woman’s provenance was a handwritten letter from the owner, Peter Harris, authorizing his agent, John Drewe of Norseland Research Ltd., to sell the work on his behalf.
The names rang a bell. For years Palmer had kept a log of the calls and letters that came to her attention, as well as the dozens of attempts to forge the master’s work. In the association’s records she found a batch of letters dating back to the late 1980s requesting certificates of authenticity and archival information on Giacometti. At the time, something about them rang false, and she had filed them for future reference. Now, nearly five years later, she reread them. Each one appeared to have been mailed by a different collector, but the style was very similar. Each envelope also contained a photograph of at least one dubious-looking painting.
The first letter, from a Dr. John Drewe, was addressed to Annette. Drewe identified himself as a collector of early Dutch works who had recently inherited several modern paintings, including two Giacomettis. He planned to loan these to a British gallery and needed certificates of authenticity.
Generally, such requests consisted of a few succinct explanatory paragraphs and a picture or slide of the work. Drewe’s letter was three pages long and elaborate in the extreme, vague on certain key points and all too specific on others. It had a slightly unpleasant tone, by turns submissive and threatening.
Drewe was aware that the association would never certify the works without seeing them, and he volunteered to ship them to Paris. However, he said, he would agree to do so only through the auspices of the diplomatic service to protect the paintings from confiscation “according to the Geneva Convention.”
“It is absolutely correct that any work which is definitely established to be a fraud should immediately be confiscated and then eventually destroyed,” he wrote. “I would have to accept your judgment as the ultimate authority in this matter . . . and would be prepared to guarantee that these two paintings would then be burned in front of any witnesses you might wish to nominate.”
First the disarming carrot, then the