Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [79]
The letter made reference to other works of art that would soon be available and asked whether Nahum was still interested in Barndance. “We have an urgent need to raise some money quickly. We would very much appreciate a quick settlement, or a deposit with the final payment at a time convenient to you. We have a guarantee of a substantial contribution ($50,000) being made at the end of January from a member in America, yet in the meantime we are scraping around for funds!”
Nahum called Meyer and asked him to send Barndance over. As soon as he unwrapped it, his suspicions were confirmed: It was a fake. On the reverse were two familiar labels, identical to those on the back of Mexican.
Nahum had spoken to other dealers and was aware of several bogus Nicholsons on the market that had come from the collection of a John Cockett. He suspected that Belman, Drewe, Meyer, and Cockett were connected. The provenances of the works were similar: They each included receipts and catalogs from the 1950s and stamps from the National Art Library or the Tate Gallery. One receipt in particular stood out. It detailed the purchase by the painter Norman Town of two works by Nicholson; one of them was Barndance, purportedly made in the 1950s. Nahum knew Norman Town and thought it unlikely that the impoverished artist had ever been able to afford a Nicholson.
Fakes were nothing new to Nahum. A quarter of the works he saw every year were fakes or had serious problems of authenticity. There were several distinct levels of forgery or misattribution: the outright fake; the genuine but unsigned work to which a dealer or a restorer added the artist’s signature in order to increase the price; and the piece that had been incorrectly ascribed to the artist, knowingly or not.
So many works of art flooded the auction houses that there was never enough time to catalog and check each one properly. Occasionally, the auction houses would turn a blind eye to a questionable item. In April 1989, a Russian offering in London featured two outright fakes and one dubious picture that had been badly restored and then signed by a forger. The auction house had been warned about these but had gone ahead with the sale.
In Nahum’s considered opinion, it was the dealer’s job, in this new world of mass-marketed art, to protect the public from fakes of every kind. Most of London’s reputable dealers were dependable: If one of them sold Nahum a fake, or vice versa, the money was refunded immediately, no matter how many years had passed since the sale. Nahum didn’t pull his punches when he came across a fake. Certain gallery owners might politely back out of a deal, claiming a lack of interest, but Nahum had no qualms about denouncing a work on the spot. He called Hans Meyer.
“Did John Drewe give you these paintings?” he asked point-blank.
Meyer confirmed that Drewe was the source.
Nahum said he thought the paintings were fake and ordered Meyer to take them off the market. Then he photocopied the provenance documents, photographed the front and rear of Barndance, gathered all the material he had on the Lowry works and the pieces from Clive Belman, and called a detective he knew on the Art and Antiques Squad. With the casual grace derived from his years at Sotheby’s, he said that he had come across evidence of a large-scale conspiracy to deceive the art market. He offered to share it with the Art Squad, and invited them to pop down to the gallery.
“I think you might want to see this,” he said.
A few blocks away Rene Gimpel was having trouble selling his 1938 Ben Nicholson watercolor. He had taken it to several art fairs, shown it to clients, and hung it up in the gallery, all to no avail. He began to suspect that something was wrong with it. Gimpel knew as well as anyone that fakes were a perennial problem, and that certain