Provenance
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16 Annette worked on the catalogue raisonné up until her death in 1993. The catalogue raisonné for Giacometti’s paintings alone was ready to be published by the association in 2001 and as of 2008 still had not been released.
17 James Lord. Giacometti: A Biography. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1983.
18 The rare Geneva Bible of 1560 was known as the Breeches Bible because it described Adam and Eve’s fig leaves as “breeches.” The Vinegar Bible, published in Oxford in 1717, was so named because the parable of the vineyard was given as “the parable of the vinegar” in the heading of Luke 20. Only twelve copies were published. One of them, worth about $30,000, was stolen from a church in southwest England in the spring of 2008.
19 The account of Belman’s dealings with Stern is based on interviews with Belman. Stern declined to comment.
20 Madeleine Marsh, “COLLECTABLES/On the Roadshow to Riches,” The Independent (London). Jan. 17, 1993.
21 Richard Polsky. I Bought Andy Warhol. New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2005.
22 Konigsberg was not formally charged with any crime.
23 The judge in a subsequent confiscation proceeding confirmed that Drewe had opened Swiss bank accounts. Although Drewe authorized the banks to provide the police with details, the police were not able to obtain precise details of the accounts and their contents.
24 Drewe has chalked up statements such as these as an indication that Goudsmid is mentally unstable.
25 In 1993, the association became engaged in a battle with the French government over Annette’s will. Annette wanted the association—whose initial board members all had close ties with Giacometti—transformed into a foundation that would inherit all of Giacometti’s artworks and documents that she had owned. While this would save substantial inheritance taxes, it required a difficult process to obtain government approval.
26 Mark Jones, ed., with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker. Fake? The Art of Deception. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
27 This comic nudge at credulous American collectors has been retold often, with wildly varying figures. In 1934, Time magazine made note of the “hoary art joke . . . that the U.S. today has no less than 30,000 Corots.” In 1940, Newsweek wrote, “Of the 2,500 paintings Corot did in his lifetime, 7,800 are to be found in America.” Later, ARTnews published slightly different figures, as did the Guardian. Time revisited the joke in 1990, in a piece by critic Robert Hughes: “It used to be said that Camille Corot painted 800 pictures in his lifetime, of which 4,000 ended up in American collections.”
28 Jones et al.
29 Berenson is a controversial figure. Some scholars claim he deliberately misattributed many works to earn the substantial commissions he charged.
30 Gordon Stein, ed. The Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993; excerpt found at denisdutton.com/van_meegeren.htm.
31 Hoving and ARTnews, September 2001.
32 Hebborn was murdered by an unknown assailant in 1996 while living in Rome.
33 Alex Wade, “Cracking Down on Art Fraud,” Guardian, May 24, 2005.
34 No relation to Robert Volpe, the New York art-fraud detective.
35 The Footless Woman would resurface on the market in 2001, only to disappear again. A prominent London dealer who had been duped by Drewe in the 1990s sent a photograph of the work to Palmer for a certificate. The dealer was selling it on behalf of a U.S. collector. When Palmer told the dealer that the painting was “a Drewe fake” and asked him to hand it over to the police, he said he would return it to the collector instead. It hasn’t resurfaced since.
36 Grace Duffield and Peter Grabosky, “The Psychology of Fraud,” Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, March 2000, http://www.arc.gov.au/publications/tradi199.html.
37 Y. Yang et al., “Prefrontal White Matter in Pathological Liars,” The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2005 187, 320-325, found at bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/reprint/187/4/320.pdf.