Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [88]
“It is our considered opinion that the exhibition record demonstrates unequivocally that the ‘Nu Debout, 1955’ must be an authentic painting,” the report stated.
Bartos was both relieved and angry. That an exhaustive investigation had found the work “unequivocally” genuine vindicated his own critical judgment, but it also stoked his anger at Palmer. She had promised to look into the authenticity of the piece and get back to him, but she had been stonewalling him for months. He had spent far too much time and money trying to prove the work’s authenticity. Meanwhile, three potentially lucrative deals had fallen apart over the issue of authentication. If the painting was indeed a forgery, where had the provenance documents come from?
Bartos knew about the legal challenges facing the Giacometti Association since Annette’s death.25 He wondered if the art world gossip about Palmer was true, that she was stubborn and deficient in scholarship.
He sent her a copy of the newly discovered 1956 Hanover catalog, the list of paintings mentioning Loeb, and a curt letter. “It is your responsibility to state clearly the reason why you believe this work is not genuine.”
Palmer replied that she was still researching the documents.
Exasperated, Bartos called Sotheby’s in London and consigned the painting for auction. Nearly seven months had passed since his first request for a certificate, and nothing seemed good enough for Palmer. If the auction didn’t force her hand, at least he’d finally be rid of the piece.
What Palmer didn’t tell Bartos was that the Hanover catalog was yet another forgery. Predictably, it bore the stamp of the V&A and contained an illustration of Bartos’s Standing Nude. On the back cover was a photograph of another suspicious Giacometti, a 1956 Standing Nude, featured in an advertisement for an upcoming exhibition—also phony, no doubt.
In fact, a photograph of this same 1956 work had just crossed Palmer’s desk.
David Sylvester, who was a board member of the Giacometti Association, had sent her a photograph of the nude that he had received from a man named Howard Sussman, who lived in Reigate, a London suburb twenty-five miles south of the capital. Sussman said he represented the painter’s owner and wanted Sylvester to intercede on their behalf and get a certificate of authenticity from Palmer. The owner, Barbara Craig, the widow of a well-known collector, had been repeatedly rebuffed by Palmer’s office, Sussman claimed. His letter played on the legal problems Palmer was having with Giacometti’s heirs and hinted that if Sylvester didn’t help, Craig would take the “scandalous state of affairs” at the association to her cousin, “a newspaper proprietor who wishes to help her.” Craig was understandably “distraught,” wrote Sussman. “She is an elderly lady, and infirm. . . . [T]he sale of the painting is crucial for her.”
Sylvester asked Palmer if she thought the Sussman material was from the same family of fakes they had spoken about a few years earlier. It had all the telltale signs: an impeccable provenance attached to a fake and a letter reminiscent in tone and style of the ones she had received from Drewe, Cockcroft, and Norseland chairman Cockett. Now it was connected to Bartos through the Hanover catalog.
And yet Sussman’s 1956 nude was backed up by two other illustrated catalogs from two separate galleries. One of them had a stamp from St. Philip’s Priory, and the second, which bore the official