Whiteley on Trial Read online

  With one notable exception. He was never a great fan of the supposed Whiteley work that he paid $1.1 million to get his hands on, the suspect Orange Lavender Bay. The colour just wasn’t to his taste.

  ‘That’s not a painting I was ever going to keep,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t me, you know. I never understood why Brett loved orange in a harbour picture.’

  Nasteski’s house had a minimal, beachside aesthetic, a pared, monochrome palette: dark wood fittings offset with white couches and Philippe Starck ghost chairs. Uncluttered and clean, despite his wife Alisa’s apologies about the post-birthday party mess, it had the transitory feeling of a house recently moved into, even though Nasteski had lived there for twelve years. The colour orange might well have clashed in this muted environment—especially the stark, unmitigated orange of the disputed Orange Lavender Bay. When the painting was presented in court during the committal hearing, a barrister who had come in to watch the drama turned to me and asked: ‘Do you like it? It’s a very angry colour.’ A telling observation, I thought. Compared to Whiteley’s Big Orange (Sunset), with its tempered, golden-orange, the suspect Whiteley had a high-vis stridency.

  But there was something other than aesthetics driving Nasteski’s desire to buy it, despite being warned against it. Nasteski had been dealing in art since the early 2000s and he was on the hunt for a bargain.

  We moved outside to Nasteski’s high-walled, wood-decked back garden, to sit on sleek white 1960s lounge chairs by American designer Richard Schultz, arranged around a generous white table. The back wall featured a central sheer drop of Corten steel, like a minimal Richard Serra sculpture, along which flowed a soothing vertical stream of water. As he laid out the treats bought from Sydney’s star patissier Adriano Zumbo, Nasteski began, once again, to tell the story he leaked to the media five years ago. He made sure he got his $1.1 million back first—by threatening to go to the police. He made a complaint to the police, withdrew it on receiving his money back—and then ‘told the whole world’ anyway. Nasteski was not reacting as one might expect of Sydney’s supposed ‘wood ducks’.

  Not only do those caught with an alleged fake often feel so mortified that they tend to keep mum, they also don’t want to be left holding a possibly worthless piece of art. Speaking out will only further taint their purchase—and jeopardise their chances of selling it on. The art world is equally reticent about airing its dirty laundry and potentially damaging consumer confidence. Those who deal in fakes count on this code of silence—and the notorious difficulty of prosecuting art fraud—to keep their crimes underground and undetected.

  Nasteski was not so easily hushed. He even went to the extent of spending $10 000 to have the suspected creator of Orange Lavender Bay, Aman Siddique, followed by a private investigator for six weeks.

  But back in late 2009, when he was first told that a painting called Orange Lavender Bay was for sale, his appetite for a profit took over. Sydney art dealer Andrew Crawford told Nasteski the painting was available and being ‘handled’ by Melbourne dealer John Playfoot. As far as Nasteski was concerned, Playfoot was a well-regarded dealer trading in quality works. What Nasteski didn’t know at the time was that Playfoot had sourced Orange Lavender Bay from Gant, a man whose reputation is such that cautious art dealers and auctioneers tread carefully when handling an artwork associated with him—some simply refuse to deal with Gant full stop. Gant’s name was kept from Nasteski’s notice. He thought he was doing business with Crawford and Playfoot.

  ‘Playfoot was a big player in the Australian art market, five, six, seven years ago. He was placing a lot of expensive pictures,’ Nasteski said.

  ‘The deal was I had to buy it direct from Playfoot and give Crawford a commission. So I transferred a $100 000 deposit [to Playfoot] in, probably, very, very early December, and then the picture was sent up for me to look at, to give the final approval.

  ‘I looked at it in the flesh,’ he said. Unlike Pridham, who paid $2.5 million for an artwork he had only seen in a photo. ‘It came to Crawford’s gallery … I ended up saying to Andrew, that’s sweet, I’ll pay a million one.’

  As Nasteski told it, Crawford suggested that the painting be brought to Wendy Whiteley to gauge her opinion on the work. When I asked Nasteski what prompted Crawford to bring the work to Wendy, he laughed, and said, ‘Everybody wants to show Wendy fucking everything!’

  And so the big orange painting was placed into the back of a van and transported to Lavender Bay for Wendy to scrutinise. Wendy didn’t like what she saw.

  ‘So I said, “Well, we gotta get a second opinion from someone, who can we get a second opinion from?” And I spoke to a few people and they said, “Why don’t you contact whoever was framing them at the time?” So I got Lichtenstein over here. He looked at it and said, “I remember this painting, yes that’s definitely my frame, I framed this picture.”

  ‘So you think to yourself, right, here’s a guy that says he framed this picture and he remembers the painting. What are you supposed to do, you know? You’re gonna believe him, aren’t you? He’s the guy that’s framing the pictures!’ Nasteski said, laughing heartily at the memory.

  Nasteski emphasised that he didn’t complete the transaction until he received the painting’s provenance by post—or ‘providence’ as he called it, a common misnomer, and an apt one in a case in which the destinies of so many people were on the line, and intertwined. The two pieces of provenance Playfoot sent Nasteski would themselves become exhibits in the criminal trial: the catalogue titled A Private Affair, purportedly from 1989, and the hand-written consignment note listing the three ‘Whiteley’ paintings at the centre of the alleged scam.

  Sitting back in his Coogee oasis, leg cocked on knee, Nasteski didn’t mind admitting that it was the lure of the bargain and the chance to reap a healthy profit that disposed him towards Lichtenstein’s view of Orange Lavender Bay over Wendy’s. In a world that prefers to camouflage its commercial tendencies with effusive descriptions of artistic meaning, Nasteski’s frankness was perversely amusing.

  ‘At the end of the day, I thought I was buying a picture at the right money, I thought I was going to make $400 000 or $500 000 out of it, so the capitalist function in my brain came out. I was leading myself, thinking, here’s someone who thinks it’s genuine who tells me he’s framed it. I have my capitalist functioning brain on.’

  Capitalist functioning brain. I relished the candour of the phrase.

  ‘The money wasn’t the issue,’ Nasteski said. ‘The picture was worth a million one every day of the week. I thought it was a million five, a million eight picture. It just turned out that the whole story was a complete fuck up!’

  While Pridham continued to decline my requests for an interview and even had me chided by one of his close friends for leaving messages on his office answering machine, Nasteski was more than willing to recount—with gusto—how he became entangled in this regrettable tale. Life seemed one big circus for Nasteski—and he the consummate ringmaster, manipulating all with his flashing smile and streetwise style.

  Nasteski was born in St Peters, at the time a tough working-class area in Sydney’s inner west. The family moved to Hurstville in southern Sydney when Nasteski was fourteen. His father worked in a steel factory, his mother at St George Hospital as a cleaner. Nasteski grew up in the optimistic, progressive years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and said he remained an unwavering Labor voter, attached to the party’s ‘social conscience’. He believed in philanthropy and had donated to various organisations including the Sydney Children’s Hospital.

  He told me he was dux at Hurstville Boys High—‘not the greatest of schools’, he admitted—and claimed to have been accepted into the London School of Economics. He said that his family didn’t have the money to send him to London, and since he hadn’t been offered a scholarship he settled for something closer to home. Soon after finishing a finance and economics degree at the University of Technology Sydney, he did the sums and calculated he’d be better o
ff selling cars than working in finance.

  ‘I worked in a car yard selling prestige cars on the weekend, just earning 10 per cent commission, and that’s where it came from. I got a job first week out of uni being a junior financial analyst, earning $700 a week, and I didn’t think that was going to get me anywhere, so I went home that weekend and sold a car and got two and a half grand, so thought to myself, if I’m ever going to get anywhere, I actually have to have money on the table. You can’t work for anybody to make money.’

  The compulsion to buy and sell art was triggered in 2001 through the canny purchase of a Sidney Nolan work from one of his prestige car enthusiast friends, entrepreneur Jim Woodward, brother of concert pianist Roger Woodward.

  ‘I would sell him prestige cars on a monthly basis, and I would go to his home and he had a wonderful art collection, and he sold me my first painting. He sold me a Nolan called Ghost Kelly, a proper oil that he had bought from [art dealer Rex] Irwin back in the early 1990s, and I bought that from him particularly cheaply, as he keeps saying to me. And the return on that picture was phenomenal, and that’s what got me hooked.

  ‘I’ll never forget, I thought to myself, you know, you’d spend 110 grand on a car and I’d sell it for 115, you could buy a picture for 115 and get 200, almost as easily as selling the car. It was extraordinary.’

  Nasteski had a ready-made art client list: ‘The people who buy prestige cars have the funds to buy paintings,’ he said. ‘It was really easy for me to sell a $50 000 picture to somebody who I sold a $400 000 car to … most of them were my own clients. I wasn’t selling things at auction. I wasn’t selling things to dealers. It was positioning all the works to people I already knew.’

  The art dealing, he said, started as a hobby of sorts. He’d deal in ‘insignificant things, like fifty grand’.

  I wondered how the cliquey art scene felt about a prestige car dealer homing in on its patch, a big-spending outsider, an interloper in this seemingly genteel, bourgeois world.

  ‘Well, I was making a lot of artists a lot of money at the time. I was placing a lot of works for the dealers at the time. I think everybody was very happy,’ Nasteski said.

  Small and tight-knit, Australia’s art circles are gossip prone, and Nasteski, with his fast cars and fast-talking ways, has been the subject of curiosity and conjecture, not least about how he got the money to buy art in the first place.

  ‘I essentially had a very, very strong car business for many years, from when I finished university right to, you know, 2004 and ‘05, when I was trading heavily in art. There were six or seven years’ worth of profits in cars that were continually building … it was seven-figure sums in some years,’ Nasteski said.

  So was it money that drove him?

  ‘No!’ he huffed. ‘It’s not just the money. The money is just part of the process. It’s probably the negotiation of the deal, the cementing of the deal.’

  I tried again: so it was the game that grabbed him?

  ‘It’s the game, correct.’

  But while Nasteski loved risk, he was not a gambler. Buying the suspect Orange Lavender Bay was a risk that didn’t pay off, but the experience didn’t disillusion him about the art world.

  ‘Oh no, it was the greatest experience of my life because once again, you turn negatives into positives,’ he said.

  ‘It rekindled my relationship with Wendy. I’ve bought several Whiteleys that I now own, phenomenal pictures that I bought directly.’

  Nasteski had also been helping Wendy ‘place’ works with clients, with the money raised funnelled back into her famed ‘Secret Garden’. He described Wendy as ‘Australia’s artistic treasure’. He calculated that she was also possibly the wealthiest person in the Australian arts scene.

  Nasteski’s first brush with the formidable Wendy was as a prestige car dealer. ‘I bought a car from her in 2004, I bought her old Mercedes-Benz.’ At that time, Nasteski also managed to buy a painting from Wendy—Big Orange Nude. The two fell out after Nasteski sold it soon afterwards. ‘She hated me for that,’ he said.

  A couple of years later the thaw set in. Wendy had the same housekeeper as Nasteski’s ex-wife, and, as Nasteski told it, she eventually worked out that he had been forced to sell the painting as part of his divorce settlement.

  Nasteski was a fascinating mix of earnest and shrewd. While candid about his interest in art as a commodity, he also held artists in romantic awe. His eldest son was showing artistic talent at school and Nasteski encouraged him, telling him that if he ever wanted to just paint, he’d support him.

  ‘At the end of the day, I was never born with an ability to be creative so I can’t paint, I can’t draw, but I can appreciate it when I see it, and I understand, you know, the incredible sophistication that’s gone into a canvas when somebody’s spent hours thinking of what they’re going to put on a canvas, it’s just extraordinary. The world of art is extraordinary, it’s just a pity that we don’t have the culture in this country to really grasp it, like they do internationally,’ he said.

  He described Brett Whiteley as a ‘gun artist’ and an ‘artistic genius’, but was equally excited by Whiteley’s marketing nous.

  ‘If you’re in the market for a Whiteley, you can buy a $10 000 print, you can buy a $40 000 vase, you can buy a $100 000 drawing, you can buy a $5 million painting. As well as being a great artist he was a great marketer and he actually knew what the market wanted from him, and Brett was able to satisfy it for a long time.’

  Nasteski identified with Whiteley, felt as though he knew him through his art, and understood his legendary ‘manic’ drive.

  ‘I’ve always been manic, if I want something I don’t stop till I get it,’ Nasteski said. Whiteley, too, ‘was a hundred miles an hour’.

  ‘He was always on the go, and the way I see Brett, he was probably twenty years ahead of his time as an Australian artist. It’s really sad that he didn’t live in London, or he didn’t live in New York for the duration of his career, because I think if he had, he probably would have been the only Australian artist to maintain an international reputation.’

  I asked him what gave him the most pleasure, trading in art or cars. He stopped to think, the trickling water feature timing his drawn-out pause.

  ‘Probably still cars, to be honest,’ he answered eventually. ‘The reason why it’s cars is because I never see the car, I’m using a knowledge and a talent that you’ve worked over for years to gauge what that car is worth instinctively over the telephone.

  ‘So I could be sitting on a beach in Cuba, as long as the technology is right, not seeing something, selling something and making a good margin on the phone over a minute conversation.’

  It was not hard to imagine Nasteski, fresh from a swim, drying off under the Cuban sun, phone in hand, cementing the deal.

  PARTIII

  Melbourne—Mavericks, Middlemen and the Missing Link

  WE GO BACK A long way, Peter Gant and I. You wouldn’t exactly call it a friendly connection. For me it was work—I first wrote about him in 2008. For Gant, I was a nuisance. In 2011, he sued The Age over articles I had written. And yet when I asked to speak to him after the committal, he agreed. His eagerness to talk was one of his many contradictions.

  We were about to be reacquainted at one of Gant’s preferred haunts, Jimmy Watson’s Wine Bar, on the northern edge of Carlton’s ‘Little Italy’, the watering hole of choice for many a Melbournian of learned, literary and left-wing persuasion. The University of Melbourne is nearby, a reliable source of clientele. On this balmy November evening, Lygon Street was alive with chatter. The night was conducive to socialising: people sat at footpath tables, sipping pre-dinner drinks, the city softening into a warm, mellow spring.

  Gant was already there when I arrived, sitting quietly at a private nook by the window, a glass of white on the go. He was facing in, back to the window, and looking a lot more spruced up than I’d seen him look in court: blue-and-white striped shirt seemed freshly ironed, sil
ver hair had the spiky impudence of a new cut. He looked like a man who had made an effort.

  During the 7-day committal hearing, Gant’s sartorial ensembles made little concession to the seriousness of the charges against him—a black leather jacket commonly appeared, as did a pair of dark grey jeans. On more than one occasion, he arrived late. His co-accused, Aman Siddique, would invariably arrive on time and in a sober black suit, white shirt and tie—until the final day of the committal, that is, when there was really no point. The die had been cast: Magistrate Suzanne Cameron would deliver her decision and a suit would make no difference. That day, Siddique dressed for comfort: charcoal sports jacket, olive corduroy trousers and a white shirt with thin black stripes. Gant wore a blue shirt with white collar, grey jeans and boat shoes.

  Our meeting felt like an awkward first date: we were both a little on edge. Gant’s face was lightly tanned, glowing—a by-product, perhaps, of his mysteriously frequent trips to Thailand. He’d be off again in a few days. Were the trips art-related? I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I sort of hate Australia now,’ he said.

  Because of the upcoming trial?

  ‘No, not just that, the way things work here.’

  Politically?

  ‘Everything. I did say once—and I actually swore on the bible—if the Liberal Party ever get into power in Victoria ever again I’m going to leave. And they got into power and I never left.’

  Gant had a slightly high-pitched voice and an impishly upturned nose. He had the twitchy energy of someone younger than his sixty years. He offered to buy me a drink—I ordered a gin and tonic, hoping to stay sharp. I know he can hold his drink. I know I can’t. I was still not sure why he had agreed to meet me given our chequered history. But then, he had been known to act in seemingly ill-advised ways. In September 2014, six months before the committal hearing, Gant gave an interview to The Saturday Paper in which he railed against the art establishment and ‘inherited wealth’, telling writer Martin McKenzie-Murray, ‘Art used to be about things. It used to be important. Now it’s just a vehicle for rich people to make more fucking money.’ I read the article with a mixture of envy and disbelief. Now I too would have my time with Gant.