Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [57]
“The fact that it was shown at a reputable gallery and illustrated in the catalogue would seem to confirm the attribution,” Bowness wrote.
Belman told Nahum he wanted £40,000 for Mexican. Nahum sought a second opinion from a curator at the Tate, who thought the piece was genuine but second-rate. After a third expert confirmed that Nicholson’s signature on the stretcher was authentic, Nahum pooled his resources with another dealer and paid Belman £35,000 for the painting. Then he put it in storage and decided to wait until the next auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
Shortly after the purchase, Nahum got a phone call from Drewe, who wanted some information on a painting Nahum had on consignment, Claude Monet’s Cleopatra’s Needle and Charing Cross Bridge. Drewe had a private client for the piece, and asked whether he could borrow a transparency. Nahum declined. Dealers rarely shared transparencies with intermediaries, particularly unfamiliar ones. Top-tier dealers observed certain trade rules, and it was Nahum’s experience that runners often felt free to break them. A clever middleman with a borrowed transparency could slice a dealer’s commission in half. Nahum preferred to conduct his business with a work at its source.
The Monet was at the restorer’s, he told Drewe, but the professor was welcome to take his client there to examine it. Collectors love private viewings, the more remote the location the better. It gives them a sense of exclusivity and a feeling that they are getting a jump on the market.
Drewe said he would bring his client to the restorer’s that afternoon, but he asked Nahum to stay away from the showing. This was not an unusual request in the business, and Nahum agreed to it. He told Drewe that he had another appointment in any case and would be busy all afternoon.
By sheer coincidence, Nahum’s meeting was canceled, and he went back to the gallery to finish up some work. As he was reading his mail, a man in a chauffeur’s uniform came in and announced that he was there to pick up the Monet transparency for Dr. Drewe.
Nahum told him the transparency wasn’t available. The chauffeur bristled and said Mr. Nahum had specifically left instructions for him to pick it up.
“Awfully bad luck,” said the dealer. “I’m Peter Nahum, and I told Dr. Drewe very clearly that he couldn’t have it.”
The driver skulked off.
An hour later the phone rang. It was Nahum’s restorer, calling to say that he had recognized Drewe’s “private client” as a former auction house employee who had been fired for stealing. Nahum had been expecting a call from Drewe with an update on the Monet, but he never heard from him. Just as well, he thought.
In a matter of weeks Belman was back at the gallery with another painting for Nahum from Drewe’s collection. The dealer took him aside and told him he wanted nothing more to do with the professor.
“I’ll never do business with him again,” he said.
17
INTO THE WHIRLWIND
These people are all barking mad,” Belman muttered to himself as he left Nahum’s gallery. By now, he’d been around the art business long enough to know that it was a small world, rife with competition, vile gossip, and eccentricity of every sort, and that it was almost entirely unregulated. Many of the dealers he’d worked with wouldn’t last five minutes in another business. They would be blacklisted, fined, or jailed. Drewe fit in perfectly.
Belman had been selling paintings for him for two years now. The professor seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of them, as well as an array of personal causes ranging from Holocaust archives to student grants and religious orders. Drewe was fond of peppering the newspapers with letters to the editor, and one of them, published in the London Times, made reference to art that had been confiscated by the Nazis from European Jews. It had helped Belman sell a painting whose proceeds were destined for Drewe’s latest pet project, an Auschwitz