Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [86]
Palmer contacted the manufacturer of Conqueror paper and was told that the catalog watermark could not have been made in the 1950s. The design was from the 1970s, when London had been dropped from the watermark to reflect Conqueror’s growth as a global brand. Bartos’s catalog could not possibly be an original document.
But what of the illustrations, which showed works by Noël Coward, Peter Ustinov, Rex Harrison, and John Mills, mixed in with pieces by Nicholson, Dubuffet, Kandinsky, Chagall, and Giacometti? This made little sense. The whole thing must be an awkward copy of the genuine “Paintings by Stars of the Entertainment World” catalog. Palmer doubted that the forger would have gone to such lengths simply to include one fake Giacometti nude. Were the works by the other artists forgeries too?
She called Ustinov’s office in London. The catalog listed five whimsical titles by him, including Macbeth in Mexico and Mr Curtiz Directs a Battle Scene, a reference to the filmmaker Michael Curtiz, with whom Ustinov had worked. His secretary seemed surprised. She told Palmer that the actor was an amateur caricaturist who had never once exhibited his doodles. A Ustinov forgery would not have been worth much. Why go to the trouble of inventing fake titles for nonexistent paintings? Clearly, whoever was behind the operation was mocking the very art establishment he was scamming.
Palmer turned her attention to the booklet’s serious painters. With seven works Dubuffet was more heavily represented than the others, including a series of royal playing cards and a pair of cow portraits. Palmer called the Dubuffet Foundation in Paris and asked the director whether she had seen the catalog. Yes, the director said, she had seen a copy made from the original in the archives of the National Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The director had a good reputation in the art world, and Palmer trusted her enough to communicate her concerns about the catalog’s authenticity.
The director insisted that the Dubuffets were genuine. In fact, she had recently authenticated them, and they were about to go on sale at one of the auction houses in London. Palmer checked the records at the National Library. The “original” O’Hana catalog was indeed there, and was identical to the one Bartos had sent. Now Palmer was sure that the V&A’s security had also been breached.
Next Palmer focused on the work’s previous owners. She called Albert Loeb, whose father had owned the Paris-based Pierre Loeb Gallery. According to the Bartos provenance, the elder Loeb had bought the work directly from Giacometti and then sold it to the Hanover. Palmer asked Loeb to check his father’s files for any record of the transactions, but he could find none.
A few days later Loeb bumped into the dealer and curator Jean-Yves Mock, who was out shopping for shrimp in the Sixth Arrondissement. Mock had worked at the Hanover for seventeen years as the business partner and close friend of gallery owner Erica Brausen. When she died in his arms in 1992, Mock had inherited her personal collection.
Loeb told him about Palmer’s conundrum and suggested Mock give her a call. With shrimp in hand, Mock strolled over to the association, where Palmer told him everything she knew about the forgeries and the photographs of the fake Giacomettis in the Hanover album. Mock looked over the material, inspected the Hanover label Palmer