14
THE PAPER TRAIL
When the material she had requested from
the Tate arrived in Paris in the fall of 1992, Mary Lisa Palmer
examined it closely. Among the documents was a conservator’s report
on the two suspect photographs in the Hanover album, of the
Footless Woman and the portrait of a woman from the waist up. As
she had surmised, neither bore the stamp of the Hanover Gallery’s
photographer. Furthermore, both were printed on a shiny
resin-coated paper that had not been in use until the mid-1970s,
decades after the works were supposedly painted. Palmer knew that
Erica Brausen had donated her records to the Tate in 1986 and
strongly suspected that the phony pictures had been slipped into
the archives in the intervening years.
In the Footless Woman’s provenance was a
handwritten letter from the owner, Peter Harris, authorizing his
agent, John Drewe of Norseland Research Ltd., to sell the work on
his behalf.
The names rang a bell. For years Palmer had kept a
log of the calls and letters that came to her attention, as well as
the dozens of attempts to forge the master’s work. In the
association’s records she found a batch of letters dating back to
the late 1980s requesting certificates of authenticity and archival
information on Giacometti. At the time, something about them rang
false, and she had filed them for future reference. Now, nearly
five years later, she reread them. Each one appeared to have been
mailed by a different collector, but the style was very similar.
Each envelope also contained a photograph of at least one
dubious-looking painting.
The first letter, from a Dr. John Drewe, was
addressed to Annette. Drewe identified himself as a collector of
early Dutch works who had recently inherited several modern
paintings, including two Giacomettis. He planned to loan these to a
British gallery and needed certificates of authenticity.
Generally, such requests consisted of a few
succinct explanatory paragraphs and a picture or slide of the work.
Drewe’s letter was three pages long and elaborate in the extreme,
vague on certain key points and all too specific on others. It had
a slightly unpleasant tone, by turns submissive and
threatening.
Drewe was aware that the association would never
certify the works without seeing them, and he volunteered to ship
them to Paris. However, he said, he would agree to do so only
through the auspices of the diplomatic service to protect the
paintings from confiscation “according to the Geneva
Convention.”
“It is absolutely correct that any work which is
definitely established to be a fraud should immediately be
confiscated and then eventually destroyed,” he wrote. “I would have
to accept your judgment as the ultimate authority in this matter .
. . and would be prepared to guarantee that these two paintings
would then be burned in front of any witnesses you might wish to
nominate.”
First the disarming carrot, then the stick. Drewe
followed his offer of accommodation with a veiled threat that the
reputation of the association itself might be compromised.
“An American industrialist, a prominent man of
great integrity, has an affidavit and documents contending that a
painting now in the vaults of a gallery, and known indubitably to
be by Alberto Giacometti, was stated to be a fraud” by the
association.
“I am rather anxious that, unless I am careful, an
elegant and delightful painting might be destroyed needlessly. . .
. Please accept my assurances that I do not believe that you could
be personally responsible for such a decision: in a busy office
mistakes occur easily, and art, particularly, depends so much on
intuition and subjective responses, rather than formal scientific
measurements.”
After studying the enclosed photographs of the two
works, Palmer and Annette had decided not to respond to Drewe’s
request. They agreed that the paintings looked fake and that the
florid letter was the work of a loose cannon. They were confident
that without the certificates he would never be able to sell the
fakes.
Three weeks after getting Drewe’s letter, however,
they received a note from Phillips auction house in London asking
for information on a piece that was about to go on the block.
Attached was a copy of a letter from a Richard Cockcroft and a
photograph showing one of the very works Drewe had tried to have
authenticated. Titled Deux Figures, it was purportedly owned
not by Drewe but by Cockcroft, who said he had bought it from E. C.
Gregory. Cockcroft had helpfully provided the auction house with a
purported letter from Giacometti’s biographer, James Lord, stating
that the work was genuine.
Palmer was livid. Cockcroft or Drewe or both were
trying to go around the association, and she knew that it in the
end it would just cause her more work. Eventually, all of
Giacometti’s works end up on her desk.
She wrote back to Phillips, told them the work was
wrong, and asked them to send it to the association. Phillips
replied that they no longer had it because it had been
reclaimed.
Palmer remembered another work titled Deux
Figures from the catalogue raisonné. She consulted her records
and found a picture of the original, which had been bought from the
artist by E. C. Gregory, who had bequeathed it to the Tate Gallery
in 1959. As far as she knew, Gregory had owned only one Deux
Figures in his life.
Clearly, this “Richard Cockcroft” was not only
copying the work but also forging part of its provenance, cleverly
embroidering fact with fiction.
Three months after the arrival of Cockcroft’s
letter, Palmer received a bizarre phone call. In a measured tone, a
Londoner identifying himself as Viscount Chelmwood said he had been
referred to her by a mutual acquaintance at the renowned
Wildenstein Gallery.
Chelmwood launched into a complicated story,
claiming he owned a portrait that had once belonged to E. C.
Gregory and was now mired in legal wrangling over its ownership.
Chelmwood needed her help.
She listened quietly. The mention of E. C. Gregory
made her leery, and there was something odd about the viscount’s
manner. He was asking too many questions about Giacometti and his
acquaintances, she thought, as if he were trolling for inside
information. Like any other researcher working on a catalogue
raisonné, Palmer was wary of sharing information with possible
competitors or dealers who might be wondering whether their
paintings were going to make it into the catalogue. Depending on
what ends up in a catalogue raisonné, fortunes can be lost or
gained, and researchers have occasionally been threatened or
offered bribes.
Finally, the viscount told her that he owned
several Giacometti sketches and documents and wondered whether she
would be interested in including them in her catalogue
raisonné.
Palmer thanked him, said she would be in touch, and
hung up. She opened her logbook and made a note next to Chelmwood’s
name:
“Weird.”
Next she rang up their mutual acquaintance at the
Wildenstein, David Ellis-Jones, to ask if he had ever heard of
Chelmwood.
He had not.
Had he had a recent visit from someone interested
in a Giacometti?
Indeed he had.
Several weeks earlier, a “nice, modest man” named
Drewe had wandered in. He was a doctor and a distant relative of
the architect Jane Drew, and he had inherited a 1956 portrait of
Peter Watson from his mother. It was purportedly by Giacometti, but
Drewe was trying to fill in the gaps in the provenance. He showed
Ellis-Jones a letter indicating that the painting had been sold
through Wildenstein as part of an exchange for a Modigliani. He had
several other letters referring to the Giacometti’s past ownership,
and he wanted to verify his research.
“Drewe’s a timid amateur, ignorant but sincere,”
said Ellis-Jones. The painting could never have come through
Wildenstein because the gallery did not deal in modern art. Worse
still, Ellis-Jones thought the piece looked dubious, and he’d told
Drewe to contact Palmer and ushered him out the door.
The connection between Peter Watson, E. C.
Gregory, and Jane Drew was clear: They were all spokes of the ICA
wheel. Each one had been an important figure in the British modern
art movement.
Palmer wondered whether the inclusion of these
notables in the provenances was intended to take the focus away
from the fakes, to distract potential buyers with the luster of
owning a work that had once been in the hands of such luminaries.
She also wondered whether Cockcroft, Drewe, and Viscount Chelmwood
were somehow connected. Could they be one and the same
person?
She went back to her files, found the original
letter from Dr. Drewe, and laid it out on her desk next to Richard
Cockcroft’s letter to Phillips. Her eye settled on the return
addresses: Drewe lived at 30 Rotherwick Road, and Cockcroft at 20
Rotherwick. Their phone numbers were almost the same, off by just a
single digit. The signatures were similar, and beneath each one the
writer had typed his name and then underlined it.
Palmer checked her notes on the viscount’s phone
call. His complicated explanations echoed the tone of the letters:
an abundance of detail coupled with a certain overall vagueness. At
the bottom of her phone log she had jotted down the viscount’s
number. It was identical to Drewe’s.
From her files she dug up a third letter containing
a photograph of the same suspicious Portrait of a Woman that
she and David Sylvester had seen in the Hanover album at the Tate.
The letter was signed by John Cockett, chairman of Norseland
Research, the firm Dr. Drewe had claimed to be representing as
agent for the Footless Woman.
Were Drewe and Cockett colleagues? Was Cockett an
alias?
This third letter had the same discursive quality
as the others. Cockett said he would bring the painting to Paris
for Palmer’s review, but that the trip would coincide with a
business venture in which he was “co-operating with the French on a
project to develop new propulsion systems.”
“It might not be possible to get the painting on
board our aircraft if the customs indicate that it would complicate
the clearance of the industrial equipment we are bringing with us,”
he wrote.
Cockett’s signature was underlined, and the letter,
like the others, contained several cc’s at the bottom. Palmer
suspected that these were deceptive flourishes, and that he had no
intention of copying anyone. The letter was typed on what looked
like expensive stationery, with fancy heraldic signs at the top,
but when she ran her fingertip across the letterhead, she could
tell it was not embossed. The type was smooth to the touch, a mere
photocopy. Suddenly she thought she had a clearer picture of the
man: He was arrogant, a risk taker, and a cheapskate.
Curious about Norseland, Palmer phoned the Trade
and Industry Department in London, which kept records of all
registered British companies. She learned that Norseland was
registered to a physicist, John Drewe, and his secretary and art
historian, John Lawrence Myatt. The firm had never earned a cent or
filed a tax return. It was a shell.