The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘Oh, to hell with Minna,’ I said irritably. ‘What’s the Standard got to do with it?’

  ‘What have you done to annoy her?’

  ‘Nothing. It was that remark I made about the Vermeer in my lecture you came to.’

  ‘I don’t remember anything unduly outrageous that evening. I don’t even remember anything about Vermeer.’

  ‘You were probably asleep.’

  ‘Very likely. I was only there to support you, darling; you know, in case no one else came. Anyway, I wanted to say, watch out for Minna. She didn’t get where she is without fighting.’

  So I had a choice. I had made an instinctive judgement about the painting which I could now try to validate and either prove to my own satisfaction that there were grounds for doubting the attribution, or that I was mistaken in my view and acknowledge it to Minna. Or I could retreat from the field, simply abandoning the question. There were plenty of reasons for doing so. I was already very busy; I had never before involved myself in a debate about authenticity. I knew that, in persisting in questioning the work, I was taking on a formidable woman. But this reasoning carried no weight. I wanted to know if I was right.

  Judgement of the genuineness of a work of art is a complex business. In the first place authenticity is a concept which is not always useful. The painting may not be what it appears or purports to be, but the fallacy is interesting in itself, whether it lies in a forger’s intention to deceive or in the viewer’s wish to see what he desires. This area, lying close to my work on perception, has always been of interest to me. However, I was now not concerned with what the mind, subjectively, made of the picture but with the scientific evidence that objectively supported its identity.

  Such proof falls into two categories, historical provenance and scientific analysis. Once the supposed artistic quality of the work is put on one side and the baggage of association, mythical, religious, sexual and poetic, is discarded, the treatment of the object should be purely forensic. However, only in exceptional and fortunate cases can the history of a work of art be traced without doubt, from its source to the present day. Painstaking historical research is needed to trace its passage in contracts and wills, bills of sale and bankruptcy papers, inventories and travelogues.

  For most paintings, documentary references, often uncertain ones, have to be supplemented by scientific analysis to produce a balance of probability, which is combined with the experience and judgement of the critic. However, scientific tests promise more than they can deliver in many cases. Experts argue about the interpretation of the data. They do not even agree on some of the basic criteria. One will say that a certain pigment was not used before or after a certain date; another will insist it was. So its presence or absence need not necessarily prove conclusive.

  The forger has existed as long as men have valued art and when there is an abundance of money in the hands of wealthy patrons, private or public, there will be forgers willing to supply them with what they are looking for. Museums have sometimes spent millions on a work that later has had to be quietly transferred to the basement, with its label removed.

  A modern forger’s purpose is straightforward: to deceive for financial gain. All the scientific techniques of analysis are available for him to bend to his contrary purpose. He can use old panels and scrape down old canvases. He can mix his paints according to ancient receipts. However, earlier painters had less mercenary motives for doing much the same thing as the forger, copying masterpieces. Artists themselves, their studios and followers, often made copies of admired paintings, with no thought of fraud. Authenticity is a spectrum that runs from a Leonardo fresco, still on the wall for which it was commissioned, to a Tom Keating forgery. One is undeniably what it is meant to be, the other painted to deceive. On the line between these points come many stages: the honest copy, restoration, touching up, adding new to old, fusing two separate works. A large space is left for disagreement in which the reliability of scientific tests, as well as artistic judgement, can be violently disputed and the reputations of academics and the prestige of museums are at stake. This would be the battlefield on which Minna and I would be fighting. And it was war. Her campaign, which had begun with the Standard diary article, was getting out of hand.

  There were two more articles, in the Standard and the Mail, and then a longer and much more reasoned piece appeared in one of the weekend broad sheets, discussing how a painting, like the Lady in a Pelisse becomes an icon, rather than examining its authenticity. Newspapers love a forgery or misattribution. There are wonderful opportunities to mock authority for wasting public money on a worthless square of canvas, and for being caught out by a con. However, in this case there was little to be done on these lines. The painting had been in the public domain for decades and had been a gift, too. So no one had been fooled, at least recently, and no public money wasted. There was no incentive to ask any questions. The article ended with a brief paragraph on the question of attribution, personalising it into rivalry between Minna and me. She was depicted, approvingly, as the clear voice of traditional scholarship, while I was a dilettante media ‘personality’ bringing the fuzzy thinking of psychology and relative values to the matter. This was an infuriating distortion. It was I, after all, who was looking for scientific clarification of the hazy view of connoisseurship. I was irritated, too, by the inverted commas, which suggested a fraudulent claim on my part.

  I spent a day in the Courtauld Library gathering references to the literature that accumulates around any work of art, discussing its physical and metaphysical properties. I had imagined that a painting belonging to the Litvak, an institute of world reputation, must have an impeccable provenance, a virginal past accounted for in every detail, or, at the very least, a respectable history. My reading suggested that this was not the case. The Lady in a Pelisse had only appeared on the scene in the 1920s and had been acquired from a ‘private collection’ by the fashionable Parisian dealer, Schall. He had sold the work to Litvak; that was all there was to it.

  Here another warning bell rang. Between the wars Schall had been one of the great dealers. Only in the ’fifties had the genuineness of his old masters been questioned. Some of them, five I could recollect, and three of them Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, had been exposed, not simply as misattributions, but outright frauds. The fact that he had been misled, like other experts, did not necessarily make him a cheat. But few other dealers had so high a score of forgeries, suggesting he was particularly unlucky, particularly unskilful or had his own supplier of fakes.

  There were no scientific data, as far as I could see, and all discussion so far had been based on historical and aesthetic discrimination: old-fashioned connoisseurship. In the past the question of judgement often had a moralistic tone to it. Can you recognise an authentic Vermeer, or are you taken in by the meretricious imitation of a minor artist? Can you recognise integrity in a fellow human being or are you deceived by a deceitfully beautiful face?

  It was at this point that I made my decision to continue with my research. I had doubts about the painting on stylistic grounds; it had passed through the hands of a questionable dealer; there was no scientific support for its date or attribution. I had seen how lightweight was the evidence that permitted the Foundation to attach the label of ‘Jan Vermeer of Delft’ to the painting. It was enough, it seemed, that an authoritative person said so for everyone to accept the declaration.

  6

  I made a point of asking Victor every evening if there was any news of Julian’s return. One evening later that week he looked up from his book when I came in.

  ‘She’s back,’ he said.

  The next morning I scribbled a note to congratulate her on her return from hospital. I had planned what I would do that evening, but my excuse of delivering her key was redundant. When I opened my door, I found a message with her telephone number, asking me to ring her when I was free to allow her to thank me, et cetera. I had no objection to being thanked, et cetera. The key lay
on the hall table, waiting to be redeemed. I picked it up and rang her doorbell.

  Seeing her again, this time in normal circumstances, confirmed those first disjointed impressions I had received at the time of the attack. Although she was not strictly beautiful because she lacked symmetry, she was enormously beguiling in both appearance and personality. Her face, with its strong jaw and full mouth was uneven in its expression. When she smiled one corner of her mouth stretched wider than the other; when she laughed, one eyebrow rose higher.

  She led me through the hall, which was lit by lamps trained on each of the statues, to the drawing room where a fire burned. As she poured us both a drink, I noticed only a slight stiffness in her movements and a precaution in lowering herself into her chair. She evidently wished to make light of what had happened to her.

  ‘It was mad,’ she said. ‘I was hurt because I held onto my bag. I know in theory you should give them anything they want in order to save your skin. But I didn’t have time to act reasonably. By instinct, I clutched my bag closer. I was damned if anyone was going to take it away from me. Insane. Do you know what it contained? About fifty pounds in cash, my credit cards and a lipstick. All this to save fifty pounds.’

  So it was settled between us: it was a failed bag-snatch, the motive: money. The idea that someone was trying to kill her was absurd, a product of Victor’s nervous imagination.

  I looked round at the room I had explored a few days earlier. No reference had been made to a husband or partner, but the masculine style of the furnishings confirmed my illicit knowledge of the other occupant. You would not assume that the owner was a single woman. I leaned back to look at the double height of the hall and said, ‘Your flat is a stunning contrast to my own. I had somehow assumed that all the apartments in this block were as old-fashioned as mine.’

  ‘Your flat suited your mother very well, though I can imagine you might feel a bit out of place in it.’

  ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘About four years. I bought two apartments, one above the other, and put them together. I did them myself, about three years ago.’

  ‘You designed them?’

  ‘Yes. It’s my profession: I’m an interior designer.’

  ‘Ah, well, that explains it then.’ In fact, it explained nothing. It did not explain the Hepworth statue or the Matisse on the wall behind her, which drew my eyes upward when I felt I had been staring too fixedly at her. When I left, I realised that I had told her all about myself without receiving any information in return. Nor had I given back her key. I hesitated on the landing, wondering whether to knock on the door that had just closed and decided it would be importunate. There would be another opportunity.

  But seeing your neighbour in a London apartment block is not a casual matter, as I had proved, so I had to invent excuses to see her again. Calls about her health provided the occasions I needed over the next week. I asked her advice on what to do with my mother’s flat. I was perfectly capable of deciding what I needed, but that was not the point. She came and listened to my ideas, but evinced no eagerness for the commission. I asked her what she was working on; she replied vaguely that she had just finished a project in Paris, for ‘a friend’.

  ‘I don’t do anything in a big way,’ she said, ‘just for people I know.’ She paused, then said, ‘I started off wanting to be an architect and I began the training, but I dropped out.’

  We fell into the habit of having a drink together in the evening, usually in her flat, several times a week. This was not simply by my manoeuvring. Very often she would say as I left, ‘What about Wednesday, about eight?’ It was never a matter of more than an hour or so and never more than a drink. She didn’t suggest dinner and indeed didn’t look like the sort of woman who cooked very much. If we didn’t meet for a drink, we would call one another in the late afternoon and talk for fifteen or twenty minutes.

  I didn’t think too hard about what I intended at this stage, although I expected to return to Emily and the children eventually. But Emily, even though she was apparently living a chaste life herself, could hardly be surprised, after the way she had behaved, if I found some temporary companionship elsewhere. As for Julian: she was beautiful, I found her deeply desirable, and she seemed as eligible as it was possible to be: unattached, independent. I refused to think about the mysterious knife attack, the man in her bed or any of the other indications that stated as clearly as possible that she was dangerous to know.

  I wanted to know her and to know about her. The former was not so difficult, I thought. Given enough time with someone you quickly build up the pattern of her character. To know about her was more difficult Her origins and her past did not feature in our conversation. Information of provenance isn’t necessary, but it is usually exchanged in the early stages of a relationship, to authenticate and solidify it.

  Julian contributed nothing. She existed now, without a past, without a future. Our conversations were always about the present. My one useful discovery was that she was passionately musical and went to concerts every week. I am tone deaf, but I was even prepared to face opera in order to spend an evening with her.

  Oddly, I thought, in the light of his reticence about her, she had a close interest in Victor. She reported to me almost daily on what he had told her about his family life: it was a living soap opera, an unending human interest story. He lived, it appeared, in an all-female household. His partner, his woman Julian called her, was white. His daughter shared their house, living there with her little girl. The daughter and the woman did not get on. They gave Victor hell, Julian reported.

  Since she told me nothing about herself, I was forced to look elsewhere for information. I could find no one we knew in common, apart from my mother and Victor. Since my mother was not available for questioning, I was forced once again to try Victor. This was no more of a success than my previous efforts. I am not the sort of person who chats to taxi drivers and porters and receives confidences about their lives, as Julian was. Before I met her, I had never exchanged more than a few words with Victor, on the weather or cricket results. I had difficulty, too, in framing my questions. What does she do? I wanted to ask. Where did she come from? Who does she sleep with? Who is she?

  I took my opportunity to speak to him when I returned late one evening. There was no one about and he was reading his paperback with his usual absorption. His response to my questions, which obliquely paraphrased what I really wanted to know, was strange. He fidgeted, riffling the top edge of the pages.

  ‘Mr Ochterlonie,’ he said, his eyes cast down, not meeting mine. ‘It’s better not to ask, do you see what I mean?’ He glanced up and, seeing my surprise, continued, ‘I don’t mean anything against her. She’s a very nice lady, very friendly and considerate. It’s not that. But people here like their privacy. That’s why they live here.’

  ‘OK, Victor.’ I picked up my umbrella, which I had leaned against his desk. ‘I just wondered. It’s, er, nice to know something about one’s neighbours.’

  ‘No, you didn’t mean that, sir.’ I looked even more surprised. ‘I know what you mean. But some people pay us extra, a tip, know what I mean, not to talk to no one. No journalists, no fans, no one.’

  ‘I quite understand, Victor. I shouldn’t have asked you. Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, sir.’ I had started across the hall towards the lift when he added unexpectedly, ‘Watch how you go.’

  I tried making enquiries about her among my friends, but the world of interior design was not one I had ever had much to do with. No one I knew who employed interior decorators had heard of her, and none of their pet decorators knew her either. What I learned at this stage came from Julian herself, as the result of a comment about her unusual name.

  ‘I invented it.’

  ‘But why Julian?’

  ‘I had, well, I suppose you could call it a religious upbringing, so I knew about Julian of Norwich. And it seemed to fit. It was optimistic, determined, or it could be made so in a
secular sense.’

  ‘All will be well. All manner of things will be well,’ I quoted.

  ‘Yes, that sort of thing. I was determined that all would be well, for me at least. And it was close to the original.’

  ‘And what was that?’

  ‘Can’t you guess? Impossible to live with. Julie Anne, I’m afraid.’

  I felt that I was failing in my technique of seduction, or rather attraction, for women are not seduced nowadays. From the start we fell into a pattern of companionableness and I realised that it was going to be hard for me to develop this along the lines I had in mind. I was out of practice. It was twelve years since I had married Emily and since then I had been a faithful husband. Winning Emily had been easy. She had been young and impressionable. I was much older than her, experienced, rich. None of these advantages worked with Julian. She was admittedly much younger than me, about Emily’s age, but she was not easily impressed and was evidently very well off herself. No friendship between a man and a woman is without its sexual element, I suppose, and most social arrangements go to diffusing such attraction. The problem now was how to concentrate it. Julian seemed glad of friendship of an easy, conversational kind and made no signals, apart from ones that were implicit in her beauty, of requiring more.

  We might have gone on for some time like this. I became more and more reluctant to make a pass, for fear that it would put an end to something that still looked promising, if distantly so, and that I valued for itself. She filled the period in the evening that had been taken up by Emily and the children, and I looked forward to the time spent with her with an eagerness that Sholto’s homework and Cordelia’s chatter never aroused, however devoted to them I was.

  About six weeks after our original violent meeting the situation changed. I went, as usual, at about seven thirty for a drink in her flat. We talked for about an hour and just when I was on the point of leaving, she said, ‘I’m starving. Shall we go and find something to eat?’