Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [87]
Mock then picked apart a January 1958 letter that Brausen had allegedly written to Jacques O’Hana. “Dear Sir,” the letter began, and went on to say, “We have two paintings by Alberto Giacometti which you could show to your client. [One is a] Nu Debout 1955, 47 3/4 × 35 1/4 ins at pounds 1650—which we purchased from Pierre Loeb in 1955.” The letter bore the Tate archive stamp and was the one Booth had said predated the Tate’s files on O’Hana.
Mock told Palmer that her suspicions were well-founded. He had redesigned the gallery stationery shortly after his arrival in 1956, but the writer of this 1958 letter had used the old stationery. The salutation was another giveaway. O’Hana was a charming and quirky man who had built a small swimming pool in the center of his gallery. He and Brausen had been good friends, and she always addressed him as “Dear Jacques” in her letters, never “Dear Sir.” The signature looked right to Mock, but it could easily have been cut from one document and pasted onto another.
Neither Palmer nor Mock believed that Brausen would have fallen for a forgery in the 1950s. As Giacometti’s principal dealer in London, she had bought and sold more than six dozen of his works. They had all come from the galleries that represented him, either Gallery Maeght in Paris or Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. She knew the material too well to let a fake slip by her. In addition, forgeries of Giacometti’s paintings were rare, if not nonexistent, in the 1950s. The artist was much more famous for his sculptures, which commanded far higher sums and were thus the first works targeted by forgers.
Palmer now felt she had a strong case that Bartos’s painting was a fake, but she wanted to nab the other Giacometti forgeries as well, both those she’d seen at the Tate and those that had recently come to her attention. With Mock sitting next to her, she carefully spread out the small stack of letters, photographs, and ledger pages she had collected over the past several years. Mock was unable to recognize the handwriting on several of the ledger entries, and as they studied the material together it occurred to Palmer that they were looking at both the puzzle and its solution.
Meanwhile, in New York, Armand Bartos was doing a slow burn. Palmer’s delays were inexcusable. He had bent over backward to provide her with all the necessary documentation. Early on she had hinted that she was deeply concerned about the painting, but she had failed to give a good reason. In Bartos’s opinion, the provenance was impeccable and the work was first-rate. He had contacted two other respected experts, and they had confirmed his belief that Standing Nude, 1955 was genuine. On the basis of their reports, the work had already been seen by two restorers, his own in New York and another in London.
But Bartos had also called Albert Loeb, who reported that he could find no record of his father’s having bought the painting from Giacometti or sold it to the Hanover. This had shaken Bartos’s confidence, so he called his runner, Sheila Maskell, and insisted that she provide an explanation for this gap in the provenance, threatening to demand his money back if she couldn’t.
Until then, Maskell had kept mum about the name of her source, the London-based runner Stuart Berkeley. Runners and dealers tended to be circumspect about their sources so that prospective buyers couldn’t bypass them and cut them out of their commission. Now Maskell pressured Berkeley to recheck the provenance and return to his own source to ensure that the painting was authentic. Berkeley did so, and then he called Bartos, suggesting that the dealer hire an independent researcher to examine the Loeb gap. He recommended a London-based firm called Art Research Associates.
Two weeks later Bartos received a synopsis of ARA’s report. Over the course of twelve days, two purported researchers, Robin Coverdale and Bernard