Goodman offered the painting to Perth media mogul Kerry Stokes and finance king ‘Aussie John’ Symond. Neither, ultimately, was interested and Goodman sent the painting back to Playfoot in Melbourne. No sooner had it arrived than dealer Andrew Crawford rang Playfoot telling him he might have a buyer. The painting, like a pitiful vagabond, was sent back to Sydney. Nasteski bought it, and we know what happened next.
‘The imbecile that Andrew sold it to, Nasteski, he’s hated by everybody in the trade—do you know what his nickname is? The Pest. He got on my case …’ Playfoot said.
‘I just said, “There’s one way to solve this and that’s giving you your money,” and he said, “Oh, you would?” And I said, “Yes”, thinking that I would get the money back from Gant. I never did.’
‘I was the first person in Australia, anywhere, to even doubt that picture, and you could not doubt it from a photo,’ Andrew Crawford told me when we met, during one of his trips to Melbourne, at the reliably quiet Café Vic at the back of the Arts Centre.
Balding and in his late forties, he had a pleasant gap-tooth smile and a round, open face which he scrunched up whenever he stopped to contemplate a question. He paused and scrunched often. He was there with his wife, Nicky, an artist. Wide-eyed and fresh-faced, with long blonde hair pulled back, she sat and listened as her husband told his story.
Crawford had been in the art trade since 1985, starting as a porter at Christie’s London, aged seventeen. He hailed from a family of art lovers—his mother was a restorer and his late father, Lance, was a respected dealer who instilled an appreciation for the fine arts. Of late, Crawford’s passion for the trade had been waning—he was tiring of the deceit, the power plays, the broken deals and the fakes, which he estimated at about 10 per cent of all artworks that passed through Australian auction houses. He hated the trade, he said, and wanted out. But then he relented.
‘I love parts of it,’ he said, sounding like a man wearying of a cruel, unfaithful muse.
His involvement with Orange Lavender Bay particularly upset him.
When the painting landed at his gallery, Crawford became so concerned by what he saw that he called a trusted colleague for an opinion—Sydney dealer Denis Savill who, as we know, asked conservator David Stein along as well. Crawford told me that at first Savill wasn’t sure, and Stein initially thought it correct. But as Crawford pointed out the painting’s anomalies—among them the stiff lines and contrived composition—Savill and Stein began to share his view. This was a slightly different story to that told by Stein, who said it was Savill who urged him to keep looking. I was, by now, getting used to the sometimes small and sometimes significant variations in people’s recollections.
Crawford’s next step was to take the painting to Wendy Whiteley—and here the story varied again. As Wendy told the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court during the committal hearing, and as she repeated to me during my visit to Lavender Bay, when she saw Orange Lavender Bay in the back of the truck Crawford had organised to take the work to her, she immediately had concerns about the painting’s authenticity.
Crawford remembered her reaction differently. He said she would not commit to an opinion; he recalled her saying that she wasn’t with Brett in 1988 and that the work could have been the result of a ‘bad hair day’. Wendy wanted to see more documentation before making a judgement. Crawford sought further information from Playfoot, asking for the identity of the vendor. Playfoot would only say that the vendor was a wealthy private art collector, and that a catalogue titled A Private Affair, from 1989, illustrated the painting. Nasteski organised to have the catalogue sent up to Sydney from Playfoot in Melbourne.
By this stage, the alarm bells were pealing. On 17 December 2009, after a restless night, Crawford headed to Nasteski’s house in Coogee, urging him not to buy the painting, and asking him to sign a letter acknowledging that he had advised him ‘not to proceed with the purchase’.
‘I go round to Steve’s at seven o’clock in the morning. I say, “Steve, I’m telling you to sign this piece of paper. I’m telling you not to buy the picture. I can’t tell you it’s a fake but I cannot verify that it’s by the hand of Brett Whiteley”,’ Crawford said. ‘He then takes advice from all these other people. They say I’m mad. They say I’m totally off my trolley and he goes ahead and buys it.’
Crawford pulled out three photographs from a well-worn manila folder that he had brought along with him. I had seen these photos before: one was of the suspect Orange Lavender Bay, another was of the authentic Big Orange (Sunset) and the third was of the authentic View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay.
Crawford showed me how the suspect Orange Lavender Bay was an amalgam of elements from the two authentic Whiteley works: it was an exercise I’d been through before, one that suggested Orange Lavender Bay was a cynical cut-and-paste effort. Its foreground trees and headland, and central pier, appeared plucked from Big Orange (Sunset). A yacht trailing white foam was the replica of a yacht that appeared in View from the Sitting Room Window—except in reverse. Its top right-hand corner sliver of land with high-rise buildings drew on the same sliver of land and buildings in the top right-hand corner of View from the Sitting Room Window. The more one looked the more one saw the imprint of genuine Whiteleys on the suspect painting—the pilfering of lines, curves and motifs.
‘Here’s the funny thing,’ Crawford said. ‘I was in the auction room in Sydney when that picture there,’ he indicated View from the Sitting Room Window, ‘was bought by Peter Gant standing at the back of the room and it was bought and paid for by Robert Le Tet.’ (As we know, the painting cost $1.65 million.)
We’ll get back to Le Tet. Suffice to say that he is a powerful Melbourne financier and film industry figure who has acquired artworks through Gant since the 1980s. His venture capital company, Questco, has bankrolled Gant’s own art purchases, as well as real estate investments, for years.
Nicknamed the ‘brown’ painting for its predominant colour, View from the Sitting Room Window appeared in Morel’s photos of Siddique’s locked storeroom, seemingly being used as a template to create the suspect Whiteleys. In May 2008, it was shown unframed. A frame was back on in October 2008, and off again in December 2008. In several photographs, it was shown both framed and unframed, propped up alongside the suspect Orange Lavender Bay in progress in the storeroom. In another photograph, the ‘brown’ painting was propped up, unframed, alongside the suspect Whiteley painting that Gant eventually gave to Guy Angwin as security.
Curiously, View from the Sitting Room Window had been the subject of a fierce civil action brought by Robert Le Tet against auctioneer Rod Menzies. In September 2009, Rod Menzies’s company Menzies Art Brands bought the painting from Peter Gant in a private treaty sale for the vastly reduced price of $825 000, plus a $25 000 commission for Gant. Le Tet launched proceedings against Menzies in the County Court of Victoria claiming he owned View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay by virtue of a loan to Gant. Le Tet claimed that Questco–and not Gant–was the vendor of the Whiteley and that the work was intended to be sold to Menzies for the net price of $1.25 million, not $825 000. According to Rod Menzies’s statement of claim, however, the painting was in the sole possession and control of Gant from March 2007 to September 2009. Certainly, the painting wasn’t hanging in Le Tet’s office or home, nor at Gant’s—as Morel’s photos show, the ‘brown’ painting was in Siddique’s studio from at least early 2008 to July 2009. (The case was settled before it got to trial.)
In May 2010, five months after Andrew Crawford had warned Steven Nasteski not to buy Orange Lavender Bay, he got a call from Nasteski, who had tried to place the painting for sale with auction house Deutscher and Hackett. The firm, headed by Chris Deutscher and Damian Hackett, had declined the painting. The auctioneers could not substantiate the painting’s provenance—they had the catalogue A Private Affair forensically tested and found that it could not have been produced before 2003.
Crawford and Nasteski swun
g into action, conducting further research into Orange Lavender Bay, and organised for the picture to be delivered to Sloggett for forensic analysis.
On 30 June 2010, Crawford made a statement to the New South Wales Police.
Despite his willingness to be a witness, Crawford had not at this stage been contacted by Victoria Police in relation to the trial, which was due to start in a month. The omission exasperated him.
‘I just hope they get it right. I was the first one to make a complaint back in 2010 and you know the police haven’t even asked to speak to me? And I knew so much about that whole bloody thing.’
He wouldn’t be the last art-industry figure I spoke to who was surprised that the police hadn’t come calling. Nor was he alone in mentioning that these three suspect Whiteley paintings were not the only dubious works in circulation. Suspect Tuckers, Arkleys, Blackmans, Nolans and Williamses were all out there in the market, he said. Crawford was particularly concerned about another major Whiteley currently in a private collection about which there were similar questions as the three supposed Whiteleys at the centre of this case.
‘Catalogue raisonné is a rather grand-sounding name for what is in fact a somewhat pedestrian object—a list,’ writes antiquarian book dealer Peter Kraus in The Art Expert Versus the Object. He goes on to explain that when that list is an inventory of every known work created by an artist, it could be a very contentious list indeed. The authors of such lists could be subject to pressures from art collectors and their agents—some have even faced death threats, as happened to Marc Restellini, who was compiling a catalogue raisonné of drawings by Amedeo Modigliani, perhaps the most faked artist of the twentieth century. The threats against Restellini, the director of the Musée du Luxembourg, were considered serious enough that in 2001 the planned publication of his catalogue raisonné was cancelled.
Art equals money, and an artwork’s inclusion or exclusion from a catalogue raisonné can have serious repercussions—exclusion can render works worthless, or suspect at the very least. Kraus describes the catalogue raisonné as ‘the bedrock on which the confidence of the marketplace is based’. It follows that the author of a catalogue raisonné bears a huge responsibility for what is essentially commercially unrewarding and painstaking work. It is also important work—at its best, a catalogue raisonné is a credible, objective, usually chronological list of all known works by an artist, and, as such, a vital reference tool that can guard against the selling of fakes. Artworks offered for sale in the secondary marketplace can be checked against an artist’s catalogue raisonné—if a reputable one exists.
Since 2013, Kathie Sutherland, a Melbourne art historian and former paintings specialist at Sotheby’s and Christie’s Australia, has been compiling the complete catalogue raisonné for Brett Whiteley. She has been documenting every known work by Whiteley, checking its date, title, dimension, medium, exhibition history and provenance. It’s a laborious task that I imagined could only be willingly performed by someone who loved Whiteley’s work. I was surprised to find that I was wrong.
‘I wouldn’t say love, it just needs to be done,’ Sutherland said, in her scholarly, no-nonsense way.
She is not being paid. It’s a self-directed and, for now, self-funded obsession.
‘I always like to keep independent, I don’t want to feel beholden,’ she said.
We spoke by phone and Sutherland’s refined voice suggested a woman of quiet determination. She had compiled 3000 works thus far—paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints—and could not be sure when the catalogue would be finished. One thing was certain: the three ‘Whiteley’ paintings at the centre of the upcoming trial would not be included in the catalogue raisonné.
‘No, not in a fit,’ she said.
With a trial pending, Sutherland was reticent to explain why. She was, however, willing to talk about her process, telling me that she kept a ‘fake file’—for her eyes only—where she placed works she was unsure about. In a reversal of the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, these works had to prove their innocence—that is, their authenticity. Until that time, they were presumed guilty.
‘Everything has to be checked out and it stays in the uncertain file until all the boxes get ticked,’ she said.
Sutherland’s first book, Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line, 1957–67, published in 2010, featured part one of the catalogue raisonné—listing, in spite of the title, the artist’s work from 1955 to 1967. The list included some intriguing entries—some early paintings with Peter Gant in their provenance or chain of ownership. Two paintings were from Whiteley’s so-called bathroom series, Nude Beside the Basin, 1963, and Woman, Basin and Heater, 1963, and there was a portrait of Arkie Whiteley as a baby, in the bath, simply titled Arkie,1967. All of these works were of unquestioned authenticity; they ticked all the boxes, and were evidence of Gant’s discerning taste.
‘That’s his great strength—in the trade one calls it a “good eye”,’ Sutherland said.
She had sought Gant’s help in sourcing images of artworks for her first book. This was before Gant was publicly named in connection to the three suspect Whiteleys, although Sutherland was already aware of his dappled reputation.
‘Of all the people I dealt with, he was the one who stood out as being extremely helpful,’ she said.
She paused and added, ‘Maybe for all the wrong reasons.’
There was one more significant detail about the provenance of these early, authentic Whiteley works. All three were exhibited by Gant at his South Melbourne gallery in the ‘Autumn Exhibition’ of 1988. They were all bought from Gant by Robert Le Tet. In 2009, Sutherland spoke to Le Tet, seeking permission to include his name on the paintings’ chain of ownership for her first book. Le Tet granted permission.
‘I was concerned about using his name without his permission and Peter Gant kept saying, “it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine”,’ she said.
During the committal hearing, Le Tet’s name also came up in connection to the suspect Whiteleys, a connection that defence barrister Robert Richter was keen to downplay. That was a connection that Le Tet was possibly not so ‘fine’ about.
From: elmyr de hory 10/03/2011
To: Gabriella Coslovich
Hello and happy new year.
Anita Archer is having all sorts of problems with her client who bought a “Lavender Bay”.Gant has always told her that he would take care of it and if need be would pay her client out for the return of the painting.Obviously he is in no position to do so and has left Anita to deal with the problem as best she can.
Cheers,
Elmyr.
‘No-one was expecting a forgery as brazen as this—a painting on a door measuring 2.5 metres by 2 metres and weighing a colloquial tonne,’ Anita Archer said when we met to talk about her involvement in the $2.5 million sale of Big Blue Lavender Bay to Andrew Pridham.
‘If it was a work on paper I would have been much less surprised to have found that it wasn’t right. But it’s a great big massive door. It takes two people to lift it,’ she said in her clipped English accent, still marvelling at the audacity.
The aftermath of that sale left her reputation and mental health in tatters. It was damaging for an art consultant and auctioneer with twenty years’ experience to have been caught out selling an enormous artwork that so many people were now questioning. Especially when that work was sourced from Peter Gant, a man whose name was ‘poison’ in the art market, as Louise McBride’s Senior Counsel Francis Douglas, QC, had so tartly put it during the civil court case about suspect Tuckers in 2014. Archer made $300 000 in commission from the sale of that huge blue painting, but in the end was deeply out of pocket. Pridham sued her. She paid the price financially, emotionally and professionally. Auction firm Deutscher and Hackett, for whom she had been chief auctioneer, showed her the door when the dispute erupted.
‘It was the worst couple of years of my life. I would not have wished it on my worst enemy,’ she said.
Archer
was a high-spirited woman with a newly blonde bob and a raucous laugh that was startling coming from her slender frame. She had booked a library room at the University of Melbourne for our meeting; a small, private space. I had tried to speak to Archer several times after the story of the suspect Whiteleys broke in mid-2010—without success. She didn’t return my calls. With a civil case pending, her lawyers had been advising her to keep mum. She was now ready to talk. A witness in the upcoming trial, she had mixed feelings about her return to court over the painting that had plagued her life for eight years. Taking the witness stand was not pleasant, but she was determined to expose the men who had acted with such cool disregard for other people’s lives.
‘I’ve only got one story,’ she said. ‘I’ll give them the truth, and that’s all I can do. I don’t come out covered in glory, but that disappeared a long, long time ago.’
Archer’s descent into the lowest point of her career began with another story. I could understand the lure of that tale—a pot of gold lay at the end of it. But surely, she knew who she was playing with?
‘Yes, of course I knew Gant was dodgy,’ she said.
Anything that came from Gant had to be scrutinised, but he had also been the source of many good works. She thought Big Blue Lavender Bay was one of them. She reminded me that the market was ‘burning up’ in 2007. Competition among dealers was furious, she said. It got to the point where professionals were not talking to each other. Gant took advantage of this overheated climate. She was ‘set up’, she said. ‘Well and truly groomed.’
Provenance is a form of story-telling—the story one tells about the life of an artwork, from its birth in an artist’s studio to its journey beyond, the exhibitions it goes to, the people it associates with, those who buy it and sell it on. Gant told an elaborate story about the life of Big Blue Lavender Bay. Anita Archer now drily described that story as a work of art in its own right.
Whiteley on Trial Page 14