The Fly Trap
Page 16
…
Finding stolen art is difficult, but thanks to the Internet it has become a tiny bit easier. The great auction houses put their catalogues on the Internet—with pictures and other relevant information—and since I had now seen both the Polack and the Michelangelo in Collectors’ News, I went into both Bukowski’s and Auktionsverket’s archives to examine the fine-art auction catalogues of recent years. There was, of course, no Polack, not one, and entering Michelangelo in my search engine seemed merely ridiculous. But once you’ve started wandering through digital art exhibits, it’s hard to stop, so I started poking through the catalogues, one after another, and when I got to the last of them several hours later I’d forgotten what I was looking for. So my surprise was all the greater.
I recognized it immediately. In the Little Bukowski auction catalogue number 157 I saw the same picture I’d seen two days earlier in Collectors’ News. Item number 225, “Rembrandt, school of. Oil painting. Old man. Relined canvas, 30 × 25 cm.”
I sat perfectly still for a long time and just stared at the screen, while a short list of stupid questions (What is going on? Is this possible? Why now?) took turns running through my head. The fact was, Little Bukowski’s auction number 157 had not yet taken place. It was to be held on Monday, 26 January 2004. The next day.
The article in Collectors’ News, number 3, 1968, lay open on the table beside my computer. It was titled “Tales from a Painting’s Fate.” I don’t know how many times I read it before I finally fell asleep in the wee hours.
The painting shows a man supporting himself on a cane. Malaise caught sight of it in Auktionverket’s showrooms on Torsgatan (they moved from those premises in 1961) and thought he knew enough to identify it at once as Dutch, painted in the seventeenth century. But that wasn’t all he saw. “At that period, the brushwork could only be the work of Frans Hals or his pupil Judith Leyster, plus to some extent also the ageing Rembrandt and a few of his students.” Excited by this unexpected find, he went home to study up. The hands and the nose were definitive, he writes. The painter was Frans Hals, without a doubt. “I was in great suspense when the painting came up for auction the following Monday. It caused no great stir and I was able to acquire it a good deal cheaper than I had anticipated.” So begins the article.
The writer then goes on to develop his theories about the painting. Malaise the entomologist dives enthusiastically into an ocean of esoteric art literature and comes up quickly with the proof he’s looking for. True, the painting is not reproduced anywhere, but he finds it nevertheless, in an old German book that refers to an auction in The Hague on 7 October 1771, when a work of Frans Hals’s went under the hammer—A Man Leaning on a Cane—whose dimensions are given as 29.7 × 24.3 centimetres, which, when checked against actual measurement of the mounted canvas, matches to the millimetre. “That seemed to settle the question, but then I happened to see the same painting in the National Gallery in London. The man in this painting was depicted actual size (format 134 × 104 cm) and, although unsigned, it was confidently identified as painted by Rembrandt about 1660.”
So his smaller version is a copy.
But no. At this moment, anyone else would have understood that the curtain had gone down, but not Malaise. He goes on autopilot instead and rolls out a charming little story.
The painting Malaise has purchased is once and for all so masterfully realized that it cannot possibly be a copy. An expert can see this at once. In all probability, he reasons, the National Gallery has got its hands on a copy of his original. And the beauty of it is that their copy may very well have been painted by Rembrandt van Rijn. In broad strokes, the idea is that Frans Hals painted the old man at home in Haarlem, gave the painting to Judith Leyster, who moved to Amsterdam, where she installed herself as Rembrandt’s mistress (or so Malaise has heard) before later marrying the painter Jan Molenaer. So it is by way of her that the painting made its way to Rembrandt—who found its artistry so exceptionally interesting that he copied it in order to learn a new technique, and because he was an honourable man, he did not sign it. Congrats, London, a genuine Rembrandt! “Judith Leyster’s connection to my painting is based on pure guesswork, of course, but that Rembrandt owned, or at least saw and copied, the painting must be considered quite certain.”
Behold the imagination needed to invent a better fly trap!
What remained was the question of why the painting was for sale at just this very moment.
Now it was my turn to theorize. And first of all I turned to the National Gallery, whose most famous works are on the Internet for public viewing, including the portrait we’re talking about of the old man with the cane. They really were very similar, aside from the size, of course. Of greater importance for my theorizing, however, were two things that had happened since Malaise was in London in the 1960s. In the first place, according to the museum’s home page, they had found a signature under the varnish—Rembrandt—and, second, with the help of various sophisticated analyses, they had determined that the painting was a forgery, possibly painted as late as the early eighteenth century.
Did Malaise know that, or suspect it, when he put together his gift to Umeå University? But if that was the case, we can be absolutely certain that he would have forgotten both Hals and Leyster and crafted a completely different and more straightforward history and attribution. Which isn’t hard to guess at. Intriguingly, one of the two Rembrandt paintings in Dackenberg’s catalogue of the stolen works bore the title Portrait of Old Man. No picture, no measurements. Was that the one to be sold the next day?
And in that case, why? For a good twenty-five years, no one had lifted a finger to shed light on the theft of Malaise’s paintings, no one had even bothered about them until I began poking into the whole thing this winter. It couldn’t simply be a coincidence. Off the top of my head I could count a number of people who, in light of my researches, had good reason not to have a stolen painting on the wall, if that was what they had. There was no lack of motive.
I decided to go to the auction, more as a spy than a speculator, even though there wasn’t much I could possibly learn—I already knew the auction house would refuse to identify the seller. Moreover, I couldn’t afford to bid. The minimum bid was listed as 15,000 crowns. But at least I could finally lay eyes on the actual canvas in the flesh, and I could see who bought it.
…
I often go to art auctions. It’s true that I seldom can afford to buy, but there’s something about the atmosphere that makes me prefer them to galleries and museums. I suppose it’s the excitement that attracts me.
In any event, when I walked into Bukowski’s, down at Nybroplan, this grey, gloomy January Monday, the usual clientele was already assembled, a mixture of dealers and pensioners. It was going to fill up. I was nervous. In order to get a full view of the room and see who bought the portrait, I took a seat farthest back in one corner. It was icy cold. People came and went the entire time, and consequently the door out to Arsenalsgatan was rarely closed. There was a draught. I’m going to catch cold, I thought, but I stayed where I was for the sake of the view.
Nothing sensational happened. Item number 161, a painting of the Holy Family by an unknown Flemish artist, went for 195,000 crowns, well above the 25,000-crown minimum, but on the whole it was a rather uneventful affair. And draughty, as I mentioned. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and moved farther forward in the hall, not far from the table with a green cloth and lots of vases full of tulips, where five people were dealing with the telephone bidders. A video camera behind the auctioneer registered the tiniest gesture by any of the numbered paddles. My pulse rose.
Typically, the bidding started at the back. I turned around and tried to see who was bidding, but I was now so poorly located that I couldn’t possibly see anything in the crowd of people. Anyway, things were happening. The minimum was quickly surpassed. The bidding continued, now between a person way in the rear and someone on the telephone. The man holding that particular phone was sp
eaking Italian. I watched tensely. Soon only the Italian on the phone was left. Going once. Going twice. Now wait just a minute, I thought, and waved my paddle. And then there was no going back. It was him or me. I mean, was I really going to let René’s Rembrandt leave the country? I just couldn’t let that happen. The Italian bid 20,000. I waved my paddle until he gave up. The hammer fell. The painting was mine!
…
I was now the owner of a copy of a Rembrandt forgery. A small one. Probably stolen. My pulse slowed rapidly, my mouth was dry, I felt a bit dizzy. I stayed in my seat, apathetic in a way, completely empty. The auctioneer’s monotone voice on the loudspeaker faded and disappeared. The items being sold did not interest me, nothing interested me anymore. I wasn’t even cold. I was feeling both nausea and the fear of an oncoming financial problem. Exhausted, I looked out through the tulle curtains in the window, sat there and listened to my own breathing while my gaze wandered over the grey mist and snow in Berzelii Park and on towards the buses and trams at the red lights on Nybroplan and, beyond it, the Royal Dramatic Theatre with its gold filigree, and Sibyllegatan, where the Malaise family lived when René was a child, a little way up the slope at number 21.
A memory popped up from somewhere, slowly, like a distant migratory bird in the sudden emptiness. A vague feeling drew closer, a repudiated question and doubt that was somehow associated with this very place and maybe with a play whose title I couldn’t remember but that told a story about the curse of poverty, and flight.
There was dialogue. And a singular fragrance.