• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Unlike the Mafia, the art world glitters,” he liked to say.

Gimpel sent the painting to his longtime restorer, Jane Zagel, ostensibly to have a damaged section of the work repaired. What he was really after was her unbiased opinion. If she thought the work was off, he would definitely hear about it.

Zagel was one of London’s top restorers. A gregarious woman with short red hair and rosy cheeks, she had been in business for thirty years. She was familiar with most forgery methods and had worked briefly in the same restorer’s studio once used by Eric Hebborn, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous fakers. Whenever a new piece came in, she liked to have it around the house for a few days before she touched it. She would hang it up in her studio or in the bedroom and take in the draftsmanship and brushwork, as if trying to decipher a code.

Shortly after receiving the Nicholson from Gimpel, she awoke in the middle of the night with a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. She went up to the third-floor studio, switched on the light, and examined the watercolor, which was propped on an easel in the corner. The geometric shapes seemed flat and motionless, like toys in an empty playground. There was none of the lively interplay that characterized Nicholson’s abstracts. He had used layer upon layer of paint to bring his figures to life, but the shapes in Gimpel’s piece had a paint-by-numbers look.

Even the most mediocre artist has his own approach, a particular variation of pressure that thins the line while rounding a curve or thickens it when it runs free, but the underlying pencil marks in the Nicholson were mechanical and unwavering. They had been made with a 3B or 4B pencil, a dark grade of lead nearly as soft as charcoal that smudged easily and tended to dull over time, but they were shiny and distinct even though the piece was supposedly painted in 1938.

Of the thousand or so pieces Zagel worked on each year, only about five of them turned out to be fakes, a relatively small number compared to the percentage of fakes in the overall art market. She was almost certain that the Nicholson was a forgery, but to prove it she would have to pick the work apart in the least invasive manner possible.

She turned the watercolor over and put it back up on the easel. It was mounted on a piece of hardboard. She removed the tacks, which she suspected had been artificially rusted with saltwater, an old forger’s trick. Then she removed the hardboard and examined the paper on the back.

It was fairly common practice to use a false backing on a forgery. The forger would take a sheet of antique paper contemporaneous with the purported age of the work, then glue it on in order to disguise the modern paper or canvas. The paper on the Nicholson had an off-white tone that was appropriate to an older work, but it certainly didn’t date back to the late 1930s. Zagel could tell by the texture and weave that it had been produced after World War II. She dabbed at the edges with a wet Q-tip and watched as a transparent jellylike substance oozed out—the typical reaction of modern conservation glue when it was moistened. Carefully, she peeled the paper back, revealing another sheet of paper, this one thick and pure white, with a scrawled notation that read, “TOP—BEN NICHOLSON 1938.”

This sent her into a tizzy. Top? Wouldn’t Nicholson have known which side was up and which was down on his own painting? She filled an eyedropper with water and squeezed gently. A single drop landed on the paper and wobbled for a moment before it steadied itself into a perfect sphere. As paper ages, it becomes more and more absorbent. If this paper had been made in 1938, its weave would have broken down by now and the drop of water would have melted into it. The Nicholson’s paper was still water-resistant, as if it had just come from an art supply shop—which it probably had, Zagel thought.

She flipped the work over and studied the composition again. Although