Whiteley on Trial Page 10

  ‘He’s hard-working, trustworthy and a perfectionist,’ Melissa said with obvious admiration. The couple run an art publishing business, printing limited editions of prominent Australian artists’ work, including that of Whiteley.

  Lichtenstein was working for Whiteley when the three suspect paintings were supposedly made—1988. Whiteley’s studio assistant at the time, Christian Quintas, from whom Gant purportedly sourced the three paintings, is dead. And Wendy was estranged from her husband by then and fighting over property. As Richter kept emphasising during the committal hearing, she didn’t know everything he was producing in 1988. She wasn’t there. But Lichtenstein was.

  As a living witness to those times, Lichtenstein was the obvious person to call when Steven Nasteski and Anita Archer wanted to verify the authenticity of Orange Lavender Bay and Big Blue Lavender Bay. If Lichtenstein could identify the frames as his, it would give Nasteski and Archer cause to believe the paintings were genuine. More importantly, Lichtenstein might remember the paintings themselves. The fastidious nature of water-gilding meant that he lived with the artworks in his studio for months at a time. Frames, of course, can be changed.

  What Nasteski and Archer claim to have heard, and what Lichtenstein claims to have told them differs. Nasteski and Archer remember definitive answers—Lichtenstein insists he never gave any. Archer called Lichtenstein in November 2007 to ask about Big Blue Lavender Bay and emailed an image of the work to him. Lichtenstein told her that he couldn’t be sure without seeing the picture in the flesh.

  ‘I kept saying to Anita, it looks a vaguely familiar picture, but unless I see it I don’t know, because I can’t tell from a little picture on an email. She said, “It’s got your frame on it.” I said, “I really don’t remember it … I’d have to come and see it.” She got back to me a little bit later and said that she didn’t need me to see it, Wendy had seen it and she’d validated it. She told Wendy, though, that I’d validated it.’

  Archer’s conflicting statements would cause him trouble. The painting unexpectedly came up in conversation one day when he and Melissa were visiting Wendy at Lavender Bay. Wendy was down in the garden, pulling out bindi weeds. He and Melissa joined in to help and Wendy seemed particularly grumpy. Later that day, it became clear why.

  ‘Wendy said to me, “You validated that fucking picture.” I said, “What picture?” “The big blue one.” “No, I didn’t. I said I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen it, that I have to have a look at it.” “But Anita told me that you validated it?” And that really made it extra tense seeing Wendy for half a year,’ Lichtenstein told me, still sounding a little bruised.

  In early 2010, Steven Nasteski called Lichtenstein and asked him to his Coogee home to look at Orange Lavender Bay, a painting he claimed he was in the process of buying.

  ‘Melissa and I went over one night and looked at it for a couple of hours, and I was really disturbed about the whole thing and I should have listened to one of my dear friends who always says “if in doubt, don’t” because I didn’t remember the picture. I didn’t frame it. Seeing my style of water-gilded frame around it really threw me. It had that familiarity to it. I decided that I didn’t know. Steven really wanted to buy it and I said it’s probably okay, but I really don’t know.’

  He told Nasteski that the painting might have been from one of Whiteley’s drug-free periods, which could explain its tight style. He also told Nasteski that he didn’t see everything that Whiteley had painted around this time. What Nasteski recalls is ‘that’s definitely my frame, I framed this picture, I remember this painting’.

  These clashing versions of the truth were somewhat unsurprising. Memory is a fragile archive. In remembering we also reconstruct. And with a trial approaching, those caught up, however innocently, in the alleged fraud were trying to present themselves in the best possible light. It was one person’s word against another. No-one expected it would get to this—that things they said or did almost a decade ago would be scrutinised in a court of law. In the slippery world of forgery, the line between complacency and complicity is finely drawn—and no-one wanted to be caught on the wrong side of that line.

  Perhaps Lichtenstein’s hesitancy made it all too easy to interpret his words in the affirmative. Had Archer and Nasteski latched on to certain words and not others? People hear what they want to hear. But Lichtenstein was adamant that he had never identified his frames on any of the suspect works. And, as he pointed out, Orange Lavender Bay convinced plenty of experts: ‘All sorts of people first saw this orange picture and first went “Oh wow!”, and then went “Ooooh, I don’t know”.’

  He eventually worked out that the frame on the suspect Big Blue Lavender Bay was made by his protégé and friend Melbourne framer Antonio Rincon, who appeared as a witness in the committal hearing. Lichtenstein had taught Rincon how to water-gild frames. As Rincon noted in his witness statement, Aman Siddique had ordered three 23-carat-gold, water-gilded frames from him. Somewhat unusually, Siddique only gave Rincon the dimensions of the frames and never showed him the paintings the frames would be used on. Rincon had made frames in other styles for Siddique over the years—but as far as he could remember, he had only ever produced three frames in the Whiteley style for the Collingwood conservator.

  ‘Antonio is an honourable person,’ Lichtenstein told me. ‘He worked for me for seven years, but what he needed to do, which I always do, I won’t do the framing unless I see the artwork, and that applies to every artwork I water-gild, not just Brett Whiteley’s.’

  Rincon had told him about the three water-gilded frames Siddique had asked him to make.

  ‘I never thought anything of it, and I innocently told Wendy one day, and when I went back to Antonio he said he wasn’t going to get any more work from Aman because he talked and he wasn’t supposed to talk.’

  Lichtenstein did eventually see Big Blue Lavender Bay in the flesh—in 2011, at the University of Melbourne where it was being examined for the second time. The first time the painting was inspected, in 2010, Sloggett’s team had somehow missed the signature. Painted in white on a white pier, at the very bottom edge of the canvas, the signature is not immediately apparent, but a failure to spot it did not look good coming from the country’s forgery-busting centre.

  Andrew Pridham had re-sent the painting to Sloggett in June 2011 in preparation for his court case against Anita Archer. Lichtenstein had been called in to help Sloggett’s team assess the work’s authenticity. When conservator Vanessa Kowalski showed Lichtenstein the painting he had only previously seen by email, his reaction was visceral.

  ‘When Vanessa opened the door for me to look at the thing I gasped because it looked terrible and it looked so different to the little email I’d seen and the colour was wrong. It was so violety, purpley—it was not a colour that was really in Brett’s palette. It was shifted a few shades off.

  ‘It was shocking. Firstly, because Anita Archer tried to say that I validated it—I have a good reputation—and it was the worst of all those three pictures by miles, by miles. It doesn’t look like he had any hand in it at all. They got emboldened, whoever it was.’

  Lichtenstein told Sloggett and Kowalski that the frame was not his. He also noted that the door on which the artwork was painted was not from the company he would always source doors from for Whiteley’s paintings—Corinthian Doors. Lichtenstein only used one supplier and the doors usually had an identification label or a number burnt into the surface. The door Big Blue Lavender Bay was painted on did not have any identification label associated with Corinthian Doors—either on visible surfaces or beneath the paint layer. There were, however, some numbers written on tape on the bottom of the door—A 349.5. Sloggett and Kowalski’s report could not explain what those numbers meant.

  After suspicions were raised about Orange Lavender Bay and Big Blue Lavender Bay, Lichtenstein chanced across another dubious artwork. During his visits to Melbourne for work, Lichtenstein would occasionally drop in to Café Sweethearts in Sou
th Melbourne. He would chat with the owner Guy Angwin, a personable man, who told him he was an art collector.

  ‘He knew that I worked for Brett Whiteley for years,’ Lichtenstein said.

  On his last visit to the café, in June 2010, Angwin told him that he’d been buying and selling a few Whiteleys of late, and that he had a Whiteley for sale at that very moment. Lichtenstein’s ears pricked up.

  ‘When he said that I went “oh wow”, and inside I’m going “oh, this is weird”.’

  Later that day, he called Nasteski in Sydney to tell him about the conversation. Nasteski urged him to go and see the painting. Lichtenstein returned to Café Sweethearts and told Angwin that he had a friend interested in buying a Whiteley. Angwin invited him to his Elsternwick home to see the work. He showed Lichtenstein into a small front room where the painting was leaning against a wall. While Lichtenstein was looking at the work, Angwin’s landline rang and as he momentarily left the room Lichtenstein quickly took a photo of the painting on his mobile phone.

  ‘I just went snap and put it away—I’ve never done any subterfuge like that,’ Lichtenstein said, sounding a little surprised at his own boldness.

  Angwin told him that the painting appeared to have one of his frames on it, but Lichtenstein said that the frame wasn’t his and that he’d never seen the painting before.

  ‘And I never saw Guy again, and I felt bad in a way, because I’d known him on and off, just in the café, for about ten years, and he seemed like a nice guy and he had young daughters and it was a lovely house, and you know, he was very urbane.’

  Lichtenstein looks for the best in people. He laughed telling me about the time Whiteley introduced him to the author Patrick White and his partner Manoly Lascaris as his ‘Jewish Gipsy Gilder’. Others might have bristled at such a label. Not Lichtenstein, and the moniker stuck. Whiteley could be difficult and mean at times, but that’s not what Lichtenstein dwelt on. He continued to be protective of Whiteley’s image and said that it was ‘total rubbish’ that the artist would churn out paintings for drug money.

  ‘He painted all the time to do a really good painting and, like any artist, sometimes he did great works and sometimes he did not so great ones,’ Lichtenstein told me.

  But the lesser works had nothing to do with getting cash for drugs—Whiteley had plenty of money to draw on, he said.

  Lichtenstein was listening to ABC Radio when he heard the news that his beloved artist had died. He could not work for the rest of the day.

  ‘He didn’t do it deliberately,’ he said. ‘Not the person I knew. I believe his heart gave up.’

  After my meeting with Lichtenstein, I checked the consignment note listing the three suspect paintings and discovered something that would keep niggling at me.

  During the committal hearing, Rincon had identified the frame on Big Blue Lavender Bay as his. He also inspected the frame on Orange Lavender Bay and said it did not appear to be his. So whose frame was it? Lichtenstein vowed that he hadn’t made it. Rincon could not comment on the frame on Lavender Bay through the Window, as that painting, once held by Angwin, had disappeared.

  In court, Richter had accounted for Rincon’s three water-gilded frames: one was on Big Blue Lavender Bay, the barrister said; another had been used to reframe the Whiteley painting Baudelaire’s Drive, from 1975; and the third had ended up on View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay, the so-called ‘brown’ painting that Gant had bought at auction in March 2007. But what had happened to View from the Sitting Room Window’s original frame?

  After inspecting the consignment note, I saw that Lavender Bay through the Window and View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay had extremely similar dimensions: respectively 121 by 198 centimetres (according to the consignment note) and 122 by 198 centimetres (as recorded in the 2007 auction catalogue). Could the original frame from View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay have been used on the suspect Lavender Bay through the Window? In other words, could the frames have been deliberately swapped to give the suspect work the imprimatur of authenticity, and a Rincon frame then placed on the genuine Whiteley work? With Lavender Bay through the Window missing, there was no way of testing this theory. Although when Lichtenstein had seen the painting at Angwin’s house he did not recognise the frame as his. So where did that leave my speculations? Perhaps more evidence would come to light during the trial.

  He picked me up in a gleaming, black, late model Bentley Mulsanne, a car designed to turn heads, and they did as I dashed out of a Coogee café and jumped into a colossus fit for kings and kingpins. I could just imagine what the café crowd and fluoro-wearing joggers out on this sparkling Sunday morning were thinking as they witnessed the scene. Steven Nasteski was at the wheel, a bright-eyed, good-looking 40-year-old dressed for the Sydney spring: shorts, t-shirt and thongs. He had an easy confidence that some in the art world described as ‘cocky’; I found his manner more disarming than cocky, but then, I’d never had to do business with Nasteski. It was October 2015, and I was back in Sydney. Unlike Andrew Pridham, Nasteski was happy to speak with me.

  The son of Macedonian migrants, he was a working-class boy made good—really good. The Bentley was not his: it was a car he was trying to ‘shift’, to sell on behalf of another luxury car dealer who’d had no luck. If anyone could ‘shift’ it, Nasteski could.

  It was a short drive to Nasteski’s Coogee home—a double-storey, renovated Art Deco mansion, worth around $6 million. Perched on a hill, the home’s sweeping bay windows overlooked Gordons Bay, a small, secluded scoop of rocky coastline popular with divers and snorkellers. It was the ‘Amalfi Coast’ of Sydney, he said, repeating real estate agents’ favourite spiel. The spot was beautiful enough without needing comparisons to Italy.

  We arrived at his house and I was astonished that he parked the Bentley on the street—‘Where else would I park it?’ he said, with a boyish grin.

  A high wall reaching up from the original stone fence shielded Nasteski’s house at street level. He opened the wooden gate and we walked up a sloping, stepped garden, paved in sandstone, dotted with carefully tended lavender bushes, and topped by a long, limpid pool. Inside the house’s front entrance hung one of Nasteski’s prize paintings—After the Swim Tangier, 1986–87, a classic Whiteley beach scene, featuring the artist’s long-time muse and soon to be ex-wife, Wendy, drying off in the sun. She was reading a book, lying prone and topless, a tendril of hair curling down towards a canyon-esque cleavage, large, pale breasts digging into sand, her famously curved haunches dominating the canvas, tiny footsteps tracing her path back from the shore. The painting had kudos—it was shown in the 1995 Whiteley retrospective Art & Life at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

  Nasteski bought the painting from Wendy herself. He lauded the work’s ‘sophistication’ and ‘flair’, but didn’t consider it the ‘best’ work in his collection—he gave that honour to the large John Currin nude that took centre stage in the lounge. Featuring a passive temptress lying naked and Olympia-like on a sheet, it was a tame work by Currin’s standards, a contemporary New York artist known for applying Old Master style to images plucked from porn magazines. By ‘best’ Nasteski meant ‘in terms of quality’, although he was obviously impressed by its potential monetary value—Nasteski predicted the painting could be worth $20 million one day. He compared the work to Currin’s painting The Collaborator, which sold at Christie’s in New York in May 2015 for US$3.5 million. His own work, Venus with Wrist Watch, 2012, at 1.4 metres by 1.8 metres was substantially larger, and, Nasteski said, ‘a lot prettier in the face and in the hair’. A heavy art book on Currin lay on a coffee table. Nasteski picked it up and flipped through it, showing me the artist’s ‘porno paintings’ with wide-eyed glee.

  ‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ he murmured, perusing a rather mild one titled Mademoiselle, of an aristocratic-looking woman, eyes averted, dressed in a black, see-through feather-trimmed negligee. Contemplating a rather more explicit work, he said: ‘Look at
this, can you imagine me putting something like that in the house?’

  As a father of three, Nasteski had more than his own impulses to consider. Birthday balloons of silver, blue and white hovered in the house, leftovers from his youngest son’s first birthday, held the day before. His two sons from a previous marriage—a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old—were also with him that weekend.

  ‘The reason why I didn’t buy a porno picture is because in Australia if the parents of a 12-year-old came home and saw a painting of two people having a threesome with a woman they’re going to ring the police. I might be arrested!’ he said, only half-jokingly. This was, after all, the city where police had threatened to charge photographer Bill Henson with child pornography seven years earlier. Somehow, the possibility of arrest didn’t extend to the tome on Currin that sat uncensored on the coffee table.

  Nasteski’s art collection included some of the hottest names on the international contemporary circuit: there was a Damien Hirst ‘butterfly painting’ on one wall, a vast, kaleidoscopic work featuring dead butterflies stuck onto the surface of wet paint (works from the series have sold for more than two million pounds at auction); a ‘skull painting’ by Japanese superstar Takashi Murakami in another room; a couple of small abstracts by the Turner Prize–winning Martin Creed; and a Jeff Koons gold balloon ‘Venus’ was on its way from New York. Despite their international status and associated price tags, these were not necessarily his favourite works. He told me, ‘If you said to me which pictures do you love the most, I’d say the Whiteleys, to be honest.’