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Bartos readily agreed to the Korean’s demand. He made copies of the provenance material, removed the transparency of Standing Nude, 1955 from his files, and sent it all to the Giacometti Association by courier, along with a letter offering the work for inclusion in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné.

He fully expected a prompt response, and then the deal would be a snap.

24

EXTREME PRUDENCE

In her office in Paris, Mary Lisa Palmer opened the package from Bartos and held the transparency up to the light.

“Stand up straight!” she told the nude.

The figure was all wrong. It slouched slightly, with one foot in front of the other. That was a clear tip-off, because when Annette Giacometti modeled for her husband, she stood erect, like a sentry, with her feet together. She would pose for hours in his drafty studio, taking a break only to stoke the stove. Over the years Alberto had captured her unflagging and intense stance time and again. Bartos’s figure was too casual and lacked gravity. Also, Giacometti knew anatomy very well and constructed his nudes carefully upon the skeleton. In contrast, Bartos’s figure was “wishy-washy.”

I can’t feel the bones, Palmer thought.

The transparency’s high resolution provided a good sense of the brushwork—too good, as it turned out. Giacometti used a very fine brush to build up his figures with a series of frenetic strokes. While Bartos’s piece possessed some of that same energy, the brushstrokes suggested an attempt to fill in a predetermined form rather than to build the figure up from the core.

Palmer examined the transparency again. The signature in the bottom right-hand corner wasn’t right either. Giacometti hated signing his name and often did so in a hurry. He rarely bothered to dip his brush for a final flourish, and many of his signatures were not perfectly legible. This one seemed studied and unwavering, as if it had been traced in pencil and then copied over with a wet brush.

More disconcerting still was the painting’s all too perfect provenance. Giacometti’s attitude toward business was informal in the extreme, and occasionally the association would find gaps in provenances for paintings or identical numbering for sculptures cast in bronze. By contrast, the chain of provenance accompanying Bartos’s Standing Nude was a wonder of documentary diligence. It was too perfect. It included a stack of invoices, receipts, and personal correspondence from previous owners. Palmer examined each item carefully and recognized a familiar pattern: The provenance was strikingly similar to that of the Footless Woman at Sotheby’s. In both cases the provenance documents bore the Tate’s rectangular stamp—“For Private Research Only/Tate Gallery Archive”—and both paintings had purportedly been owned by the Hanover Gallery.

Palmer turned to the catalog Bartos had included in his package, “Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Stage Designs with Contributions from Members of the Entertainment World,” from a 1950s show at the O’Hana Gallery. In it was an illustration of Bartos’s painting. Palmer reread his letter: “I trust that the above information is sufficient for verification and inclusion [in the catalogue raisonné].”

Far from it, she thought.

As Palmer was preparing her response to Bartos, she received a request from a French media company to reproduce for a poster a Giacometti drawing titled Standing Man and Tree, which had recently been featured in a Phillips auction catalog. She recognized immediately that this too was a fake.

She contacted Phillips and learned that in 1990 the drawing had been “generously donated” by Norseland Industries, along with a Le Corbusier, for an ICA benefit auction organized by Sotheby’s. According to the provenance, it had been owned by Peter Watson and Peter Harris, whose names Palmer recognized as previous owners of the Footless Woman. She called the ICA to see if they had any information on Norseland or Harris and was told that they did not. Then she called a curator at the Tate who told