The Fly Trap

by Fredrik Sjoberg

  Now, on the other hand, that art was the last in a series of riddles in the Malaise case. I really needed that catalogue. Moreover, I was following a new lead. There had been a break-in at his villa on Lidingö on 17 July 1978, the day before Malaise’s funeral, and the thieves had known exactly what they wanted. The university had not yet collected the paintings, and now five works of art, presumably the most valuable, were gone without a trace. From police archives and people who specialize in stolen art, I had not succeeded in learning much more than that three of the canvases were attributed to Paulus Potter, Jan Polack and Rembrandt van Rijn, and that the investigation had been closed on 15 February 1979. No suspects, no leads, nothing.

  But if I could get my hands on photos of the stolen paintings, I thought, I could do some snooping of my own.

  The facts in the case are these. Malaise began to take an interest in art as early as the late 1940s. It was a golden age, which art dealers even today have a hard time describing without tears in their eyes. Fabulous quantities of art and antiques circulated during the war, and afterwards, for more or less tragic reasons, a good deal of it found its way to Sweden. Whole boatloads of paintings were shipped here from the east and the south. Absolutely anything might appear on the market.

  Over the course of a couple of decades, Malaise bought older European paintings at auctions, flea markets and antiques stores, both in Stockholm and in London—that much I knew. I also knew that he bought low and valued high, so high that experts seldom if ever took him seriously. Everyone I spoke to who’d been close to him knew about the art collection, but no one really knew more. Rembrandt was named. Smiles were smiled. The only written testimony I found was a short passage by the American entomologist Robert Leslie Usinger, a world authority on bedbugs and other heteroptera, who, in his memoirs, tells about the International Congress of Entomology in Stockholm City Hall in 1948. He had stayed in the country for several weeks after the meeting in order to study the collections from the frigate Eugénie’s trip around the world in the 1850s, which were housed in the Museum of Natural History, and there he had met all the great Swedish experts—Lundblad, Brundin, Bryk, Malaise. And it was clearly the last of these who made the deepest impression. Usinger, who obviously continued his acquaintance with Malaise, concludes his paragraph about the Swedes as follows:

  But the most fascinating thing about Dr. Malaise was his hobby of collecting oil paintings of the old masters. His home was filled with the most magnificent paintings, and he showed us his latest collections recently on our last trip to Stockholm. Dr. Malaise claims that if you know enough and are lucky enough you can find such paintings in old junk shops and auction shops, buy them for a modest price, and take them home and clean them up into such treasures. They are certainly beautiful, and his home looks like a small and nicely arranged museum.

  So anyway, there I was, resigned and unhappy. It was Friday. I happened to be in Stockholm and was heading home to the island that evening. The art historian answered, but he was in a hurry. Asked me to get back to him later that afternoon. I assumed he just needed a little time to figure out how to keep me at a distance and protect his unpublished bunker find. On the other hand, it was highly probable that the bonanza in the air-raid shelter was only a collection of forgeries and clumsy copies, which the easily duped Malaise had foisted off on the newly opened university in Umeå.

  A couple of hours later, I called him back.

  Chapter 18

  Portrait of Old Man

  After that, everything happened very quickly. I suddenly found myself in a kind of mystery play. So let me make use of an unimaginative protocol that builds on dates, names and other details. I need something strict and unimpeachable to reinforce this improbable stew of coincidence.

  Three days with my heart in my throat.

  When the curtain goes up, I’m on the telephone. It’s the afternoon of 23 January 2004. The place is a flat in the Södermalm section of Stockholm, and the art historian I’m talking to is named Hans Dackenberg.

  He remembered clearly our conversation of several months earlier. In fact, my unexpected interest in Malaise had energized him so much that he had immediately resumed work on his catalogue, which was now complete and had been sent to the printer. If I was interested, he could send me a text file at once, all in all about eighty pages, of which one—in reply to my insistent questions—contained a brief list entitled “Catalogue of works missing from the gift.” The five stolen paintings were indeed by Polack, Potter and Rembrandt—two Rembrandts, not one—plus a painting by Sebastián de Llanos y Valdés, the authenticity of which had once been attested by a certain Sanchez Canton at the Prado Museum in Madrid. Moreover, Dackenberg added, the list included a painting attributed to Michelangelo, which, according to Malaise’s own notes, was one of only four known easel paintings by that artist. It was not reported as stolen but was nevertheless missing.

  “Are there photographs?”

  “No, not of the stolen items.”

  I was on the hunt now, for my own sake, and was hoping desperately that the scent would not go cold again. Fortunately, Dackenberg now corrected himself and said that in one case there actually was a photo—the painting by Jan Polack, tempera on a wooden panel, late fifteenth century, depicting Christ with a crystal ball in his hand, had appeared as an illustration for an article by Malaise, published in 1966 in the journal Samlarnytt (Collectors’ News), published by the Collectors Association North Star. The title was “Yea- or Nay-Sayer.” Dackenberg had included a quotation from it in his catalogue, and he now read it to me over the phone.

  It is always easier for an art expert to say No instead of Yes and so avoid responsibility for his verdict, especially if no explanation is given. It’s the easiest way to hide your own ignorance, although, as the great art expert Max Friedlander says, “Nay-sayers arouse no credibility unless they occasionally say yes.” Frauds do a lot of damage, of course, but ignorant “experts” can be just as dangerous for anyone interested in art, though in a different way.

  Collectors’ News? I had never heard of this publication. Nor had I ever heard of the Collectors Association North Star. The phone call came to an end. It was three o’clock. I went out, took the subway to Hötorget and jogged down to Alfa Used Books on Olof Palme Street, where, in a labyrinthine cellar, they store an unfathomable quantity of periodica, carefully sorted in brown paper cartons arranged in alphabetical order. Ominously, the clerk had never heard of Collectors’ News either, but added that if the magazine actually existed anywhere in the world, then the probability was high that it existed here. He gestured in towards the labyrinth and said that I needed only to search alphabetically. I moved into the cellar like a cave diver and went to work.

  It did not take me long to find a number of cartons labelled Collectors’ News. Publication began in 1941, then under the name Käpphästen (Hobby Horse), and strangely enough it was still being published with an undiminished breadth of subject matter. The magazine dealt with every possible thing that anyone had ever thought of collecting. I now found myself in the wonderful world of the amateur, populated by quirky individuals who collected uniform buttons, corkscrews, cigarette packs, postcards, eggcups, weapons, matchbox labels, dress bayonets, barbed wire, lemon presses, tin soldiers, thimbles, flatirons, player organs, Czechoslovakian razor-blade packages, canes, medals, coins and needles—the works. In one article, a woman wrote proudly about her enormous collection of plastic bags; in another, an elderly gentleman went on about how cool it can be to collect old bandy clubs. Someone else congratulated himself on owning the pope’s autograph.

  After looking for a while, I found the year I wanted and the issue containing the article about the stolen wood panel. “By René Malaise, Ph.D.” I glanced through it quickly. Truly a singular story.

  Malaise had bought the painting at Bukowski’s in 1954. According to the auction catalogue, it was the work of Martin Theophilus Polak, died 1639, which of course our enthusiastic collector doubt
ed. A number of details—among them the gold background, the wood in the panel, and “the entire type of Christ figure”—indicated instead an earlier artist, probably German. To clear the matter up, he sent a photograph of the painting to the director of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, Professor Ernst Buchner, who immediately recognized it as an early work of Jan Polack, died 1519. Buchner, who was just then in the process of writing a monograph about Polack, also knew that until the First World War the painting was owned by a certain Frau Barbara Witu in Munich, but from that point on he had, sadly, lost track of it. Malaise, however, could report that it had later appeared in Sweden, first in the collection of one Jaen Jansson, jeweller to the court, and later owned by a wholesaler named Jacobsson, now deceased. His estate had presumably informed the auction house that the painting was by Polack, and the two artists had simply been confused.

  Malaise’s article now shifted to an attack on ignorant art experts. For example, the curator of the Malmö museum, mercifully not named, turned out to be, freely translated, a feeble-minded, full-blooded fool, who in the early ’60s had the bad taste to condemn some of Malaise’s Renaissance paintings as forgeries,

  …including not only the Jan Polack reproduced above and several other works, but also the painting by Moretto da Brescia which, at the International Congress in Venice in 1955, I showed to be the original of Moretto’s most distinguished work of art. The proofs were published in the official deliberations of the Congress, with illustrations. Following my lecture, I received two oral assurances that my proofs were unassailable. I will return to that painting in a later issue.

  Aha! A later issue! I hung up my coat and asked the clerk if I could borrow a worktable. It was after four o’clock. I started going through the bundles, issue by issue, like going through the harvest in a Malaise trap in summer. An hour later, I rushed from the shop to catch the bus to the evening boat to the island. In my briefcase I had eleven issues of Collectors’ News dated from 1961 to 1971, containing an equal number of contributions from Malaise, all of them about art except the first, which was titled “Collecting Ethnographica in Burma.” I read all of them, one right after the other, on the road east.

  The first one I read was about an oak panel with a painting of Adam and Eve in Paradise, purchased in London in 1952, and “in all probability painted by Jan Gossart of Maubeuge, called Mabuse (1478?–1533).” Theory in this case was supported with a lively description of a detailed examination, together with patient study in private and at museums in Germany, Spain and England. Next was a portrait executed by the French court painter Corneille de Lyon, died 1575. Then a large canvas by Alessandro Varotari, called Padovanino (1588–1649), plus, several issues later, the promised exposé of the way Malaise managed to prove to everyone willing to listen that he and he alone owned the preliminary sketch for the six-metre-wide, three-metre-high depiction of Christ in the house of Simon the Pharisee, painted by Moretto da Brescia in the year 1544, which has hung in Chiesa della Pietà in Venice since the middle of the eighteenth century.

  I have already mentioned that Malaise went about studying art roughly in the style of an entomologist, some might say a buttonologist. First the hunt in the field, titillating, unpredictable, where plenty of time and sharp senses are the hunter’s most powerful tools. Then species identification of the prey, at home at the microscope, in the library, and through comparative studies in museums and private collections. He set to work on his paintings as if they’d been sawflies (or hoverflies), scrutinized the painted figures’ knees and the tiniest folds of their bodies, fingers, noses, ears and every other anatomical detail, the smaller the better.

  But Malaise discovered that, unfortunately, the other people involved were not entomologists, and in a 1968 article—obviously about the painting ascribed to Michelangelo that subsequently disappeared—he returns to the problem of recalcitrant art experts who insist on saying no. It is money that’s taken the fun out of things. The experts simply don’t dare to say yes. If they sometimes do so anyway, he snorts, then you can be sure that the expert in question has made certain that he will get a share of the profits. He continues:

  Collectors of natural objects are almost always supported by their scientific colleagues, but in the art world, this solidarity seems to be lacking. An incorrect identification of a plant or an insect matters little, but in the art world it can have huge economic consequences and liabilities. A private collector has a hard time getting his acquisition acknowledged, and often this recognition does not come until after his death, when his collection has passed into public ownership. At that point, some art historian comes along and “discovers” the masterpiece. But the collector can get much pleasure and learn a great deal by doing his own detective work.

  Say what you like, he never grew bitter. His good humour seems to have worked like a vaccine against the kind of distress that so often leads men like Malaise to a breakdown. Moreover, he unquestionably had hopes for the future. Sooner or later, some expert would rediscover his Watteau, for, as I read on the bus, Ragnar Hoppe at the National Museum had said that it came from the right period and had the right coloration, figures, style and conception but was nevertheless not a Watteau, unclear why not. And his two fifteenth-century works by Andrea Mantegna, one of them a sketch for a fresco in the Eremitani Chapel in Padua, what would be their fate? Or the little portrait of an old man that he ascribed to Frans Hals or possibly Judith Leyster, which Rembrandt himself had later copied? Maybe the future was his very best friend.

  It was pitch black on the jetty, with an ice-cold southwest wind blowing from the bay.

  On Saturday I read the catalogue that Dackenberg had sent me on the Internet. The gift turned out to consist of thirty works of art, of which five had been stolen and one was simply missing. In addition to those I already knew about, the list included a number of interesting works that contributed to a picture of the collector’s taste. Malaise identified a small painting on slate of the Descent from the Cross by Jacopo Bassano (1510–92) as the original for a famous altarpiece (not identified), while he believed that a badly worm-eaten panel—Madonna and Child—was by Pietro Lorenzetti, died about 1348. He attributed a couple of somewhat larger canvases to the Dutchman Aert van der Neer (1603–77) and to the Spanish baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). A bit unexpectedly, the list also included a couple of nineteenth-century artists, H. C. Bryant and H. W. Hubbard, neither one of whom I’d ever heard of.

  The story of how Malaise acquired a landscape of Jan Frans van Bloemen (1662–1749) was rather bewildering. According to his report, the painting was originally purchased directly from the artist, in Rome, by the Russian Czarina Catherine II, whereupon it wound up in the palace of Tsarskoye Selo outside St. Petersburg. A long time later—in 1925, to be exact—the revolutionary government decided to weed out the paintings from the royal palaces, and the van Bloemen, in spite of having been selected by the Hermitage Museum, was for some odd reason sold to the writer Alexei Tolstoy (1882–1945), who for some other odd reason was acquainted with René Malaise from his time in the Soviet Union. What the final transaction looked like was not on record.

  What portion of all this was true? Umeå clearly lacked the resources for a closer investigation of the authenticity and provenance of the paintings. They simply had no money for material analysis and X-ray photography, and so the catalogue was based on Malaise’s own attributions, even though these were often followed by a tiny qualifying question mark. But did I not sense a certain restrained enthusiasm here and there nevertheless? “Malaise’s own list of the donated works includes several of art history’s most prominent names: Mantegna, Zurbarán, Watteau, etc. If these should prove to be correct, the collection is nothing short of sensational.”

  In one case, at least, Malaise was guilty of a mistake. It concerned Padovanino’s painting of Tarquinius and Lucretia, an imposing work that Malaise supposed to have come to Sweden from Russia after the October Revolution in 1917, but which experts h
ad traced as far back as 1856, at which time it had been hanging in the De Geer family palace in Finspång here in Sweden for many years. But of course that didn’t lessen its value.

  And Moretto! The treatment of this work in the catalogue grows into a sinuous, Bible-invoking essay on the gentle sensuality and dreamy melancholy of the North Italian Renaissance and becomes a multifaceted homage to the painting, which is of course a copy, but which so captivated Dackenberg that he finally went to Venice to see the original. I can’t imagine that Malaise believed in very much beyond himself, but of course he smiled in his heaven as I sat by my computer and read, astonished and delighted, while dusk fell across the islands.

  By Sunday morning, I had a clear picture of the situation. René Malaise was an incurable optimist, an adventurer who managed to live both well and long on a meagre diet of pure self-sufficiency and happy calculations worthy of someone in a novel by Balzac. Every time he saw one of his paintings in the Prado or the Louvre or the National Gallery in London, he drew what was for him the obvious conclusion—that the museum had managed to get its hands on a copy. The original, or at least the sketch or first effort, was in his house on Lidingö, an upscale island suburb of Stockholm, and the greatest original of them all was he himself.

  But in Malaise’s company, you can never be completely certain. He clearly knew a lot and was so audacious that in the summer of 1955 he went to the Eighteenth International Congress of the History of Art in Venice, where he gave a lecture on his Moretto to art experts from the whole world. Yes, he was often wrong, and yes, all his life he willingly let himself be duped. That was easy to see. The hard part is to figure out when he was right. Maybe the thief was the greater expert. I decided to follow a lead that was swept aside decades ago.