Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [81]
Through a microscope Zagel could see that the paint on the Nicholson was a gouache, an opaque type of watercolor. It was a cheap version, heavy in chalk of the same grade and in the same proportion found in children’s poster paint. Gouache fades as it ages, many of its colors tending toward a light gray. Some gouaches are more fugitive—fade more quickly over time—than others, particularly the yellows, and ever since she had first seen the Nicholson Zagel had been suspicious of the brilliant sunburst at the edges of the composition. She zeroed in on a lemon-yellow orb.
Dabbing a #1 sable brush in distilled water—the brush was the smallest in her armory, just five hairs thick—she peered through a magnifying glass, leaned over the small sun, and touched it. The paint shifted. It was so fresh that it hadn’t even bled into the fibers of the paper. Paint, paper, conservation glue—all were of about the same vintage, going back two years at most.
Gimpel had been conned.
Zagel was curious about the labels on the hardboard, which bore the names of various galleries and collectors dating back several decades and were brown with age. Labels are generally made of cheap paper with a high acidity; after a few years they turn brittle and scratch easily. Zagel moved her finger along the surface of the Nicholson labels and felt a cottony, elastic surface. They were brand-new. When she wiped them with a kitchen sponge, the dark brown color washed off. She guessed that they had been soaked in tea or coffee. Whoever had forged the painting had also tried to fake the provenance.
It had been Zagel’s experience that dealers could turn nasty when a painting’s authenticity was questioned, but she didn’t hesitate to give Gimpel the bad news. She had known him for years and respected his erudition and integrity.
“The Nicholson’s a fake,” she told him. “I’m sorry.”
He had paid £18,000 for it, and Zagel decided not to charge him for her work. She told him she hoped he’d get his money back. It wasn’t a very good forgery, she said, but a lot of effort had gone into it. The tacks, the labels, the false backing—even the visible pencil marks that Nicholson often left on his work—were clear signs that the forger had done his research. In fact, he had taken so much trouble with it that Zagel was sure it wasn’t a one-off; there must be other similar works on the market.
Gimpel took note. Forgeries were part of the risk of doing business. They often changed hands in the shadowy parts of the art world when a new buyer tried to fob off a suspected dud on the next unwitting collector. Ironically, the longer a fake circulated and the more owners it had had, the more authentic it appeared to be. Coincidentally, Gimpel had been working on the reissue of his grandfather’s Diary of an Art Dealer and had just come across a reference to a counterfeit in an entry dated March 12, 1918: “A fake Gainsborough, a Blue Boy, has just been knocked down [sold] at the Hearn sale in New York for more than $32,000. It’s harder to sell a genuine painting.”
Every generation had its fakes, Gimpel thought. Little did he know that this one would play an important role in one of the great forgery trials of the century.
By the spring of 1995, Armand Bartos Jr. was ready to part with his flawless Giacometti. He found a prominent Korean dealer willing to pay $330,000 for the piece, with one caveat: The Korean insisted on a certificate of authenticity from the Giacometti Association in Paris. Generally, the American and British markets were less rigorous about such documentation, so Bartos hadn’t gone to the trouble of securing a certificate when he bought the piece, but in Europe and Asia