Whiteley on Trial Read online

  The man before me appeared guarded, understandably so. He alternated between fingering his wine glass and crossing his arms. His eyes constantly flitted to the side, as though he was anticipating something, or evading it. And yet he didn’t hesitate in letting me record our conversation.

  ‘I’ve got a few questions for you, too,’ he said, before we launched in. Ask away, I said, attempting to hide my discomfort—and I got in first.

  I asked him to tell me about his interest in art. When did it begin?

  In childhood, he said. He was always interested in art; he liked painting and drawing, and was good at it, but then at the age of fourteen or fifteen realised he was ‘terrible at it’.

  ‘But I always liked visual things,’ he said.

  The visual thing was not a family trait. Gant’s people were dentists—‘people that like inflicting pain on others’, he chuckled. His father, great-grandfather and father’s uncle were all dentists. Gant had no interest in following the family tradition. This dental dynasty must have been a ticket to a privileged upbringing, the kind that Gant professed to loathe. Gant corrected me, telling me his father was ‘hopeless with money’.

  ‘We grew up in Kyneton where he was the local dentist … but Dad was never any good at sending out bills. Basically, he was a socialist dentist,’ he said, laughing heartily, eyes narrowing. He described the family as ‘comfortable’, rather than well off. His father’s sentiments, he said, were ‘very working class’. The young Peter grew up mixing with ‘jockeys, trainers and working-class riffraff’.

  The second of four siblings, Gant was the ‘black sheep’, the ‘odd man out’ and the only one who ‘loves pictures’. He was born in 1955, in Queenstown, Tasmania, where his father was indentured after his studies at the University of Melbourne. Gant was still a baby when the family moved back to Victoria, to the regional town of Kyneton. He, too, had four children—an older daughter from his first marriage, and two daughters and a son from his second marriage.

  ‘They’re gorgeous kids, much better behaved than their father,’ he said, and I didn’t doubt it. Gant’s eldest daughter, Chrissy, an attractive, slim, long-haired blonde with her father’s distinct nose, accompanied him to court several times during the committal hearing, often appearing more worried than her father. I asked Gant whether he told his children about the details of the case.

  ‘Not too much because they know I won’t tell them. I don’t … I’ve never talked about my business.’

  An older country couple I serendipitously met at a wine-tasting out Kyneton way a few months before my meeting with Gant remembered the Gants as having an impressive home on a huge block in central Kyneton. They also remembered Gant’s father, the late Dr Austin Gilbert Gant, as a dentist who enjoyed a drink. I didn’t ask Gant about his father’s drinking habits, but he readily told me about another of Austin’s passions—horseracing—a passion that Peter had inherited. He had trained, ridden, owned and bred horses, mixing with the best in the business. He had owned horses with champion trainer Darren Weir, the man behind the 2015 Melbourne Cup winner Prince of Penzance. He and Weir both had a hand in producing the winner of the 2004 Ballarat Cup, Just the Part—Gant bred the horse, Weir trained it.

  Of all his siblings, it was primarily Gant who shared in his parents’ love of horses—a passion that had been put on hold after their recent deaths.

  ‘My father died a year ago almost today, and my mother died three years ago, and that was sort of the end of it, because they were the passionate ones. I was passionate, the rest of my family weren’t so keen,’ Gant said. ‘I’ll wait until I get over all this shit and I’ll one day buy a horse, give it to Darren to train and hopefully win a good race.’

  For now, Gant was facing a more crucial contest—the impending trial. As a betting man, he liked his odds.

  ‘I think we’ll win, but it doesn’t matter if we win or not. We’ll lose because financially it’s crippling and I don’t know … when we win there’ll still be aspersions on the paintings in question, so it’s not going to be enough, really. It’s going to cost the taxpayer a fortune, it’s probably already cost them a million dollars.’

  An interesting remark from a man who went bankrupt owing the Australian Taxation Office $1.9 million.

  ‘I owe a lot of money,’ Gant admitted. ‘I haven’t actually paid a lot because I haven’t had a lot, but I’ve had an incredible couple of legal people who have stuck by me, whether they can continue to stick by me I don’t know …’

  One of the people Gant was referring to, no doubt, was his steadfast solicitor Terence Grundy, a chatty, friendly type I had met with months earlier to discuss the possibility of speaking to Gant.

  ‘Terry’s an amazing bloke,’ Gant said. ‘One of the best guys I’ve ever met.’

  The admiration was mutual. Grundy told me at the time we met, ‘He says he has done nothing wrong.’ He didn’t mention his client’s persistent rotten luck in being so often associated with suspect artworks. He did, however, enthuse about Gant’s sophisticated knowledge of art and his insights into the questionable practices of the art world.

  I couldn’t help notice, as I sat opposite Gant now, that the two had similar heads of hair: short, straight, spiky. They also shared the persuasive style of the practised salesman. Raconteurs both. By Grundy’s assessment, if Gant were a writer, his tell-all book about art-world transgressions would be an explosive bestseller. Early on, Grundy had been keen to push the idea that I collaborate with Gant on the writing of a book.

  I mentioned Grundy’s depiction of him as ‘fearless’.

  ‘Well, it’s probably true,’ Gant said. ‘But not to my ultimate benefit.’

  I was interested in Gant’s politics and wanted to know the origins of his dislike for the wealthy—an incongruous antipathy given those willing to pay good money for art are the very people on whom his businesses have relied.

  ‘I wouldn’t put a label on me except to say that I’ve never voted for the Liberal Party and I doubt whether I ever could or would. I haven’t voted for the Labor Party in the last few elections because they’ve been a joke,’ he said, disdain written on his face. ‘I’ve had to vote for the Greens knowing that they can’t get in, but I’ll at least make a protest of some sort.’

  He told me about a formative childhood incident, the source of his left-leaning sentiments. It was, he said, ‘the first really good glimpse at the way society works in Australia’. He was in third form at the time, at Kyneton High.

  ‘A mate and I got into a lot of shit, for lots of misdemeanours.’

  Serious stuff?

  ‘No, not serious. Minor things, like breaking into the local picture theatre and stealing all their cigarettes, stuff like that.’

  His mate’s name was John, and John came from a single-parent family.

  ‘He only had a mother and his family were poor, whereas my dad was the local dentist and we were comfortable,’ Gant said.

  As punishment for their misdeeds, the boys were kicked out of Kyneton High—but the dentist’s son received favourable treatment.

  ‘We copped it pretty hard, but John got sent to a youth training centre and I got sent to a plush school, Geelong College. That was my first glimpse of how if you’ve got no money you go to a prison farm,’ he said. ‘That made me realise how unfair the whole fucking system was.’

  But not ‘fucked’ enough for Gant to avoid the private school system for his own kids—after our interview I went home to check my lengthy file of documents on Gant, collected during years of reporting on him while I was working at The Age. When he declared himself bankrupt for the second time, in 2011, among his creditors, owed $5000, was Geelong College. Terence Grundy was also owed an unspecified amount.

  Gant’s friends and enemies agreed on one thing—he knew his art, much of his knowledge gained during 40-odd years of dealing, and through self-guided research and reading. Gant dropped out of his teaching degree, at Rusden State College, and returned to stud
y later in life. In 2006, aged fifty-one, he was conferred an honours degree in art history from the University of Melbourne.

  The University of Melbourne is, of course, the workplace of Robyn Sloggett. It’s also where art dealer Anita Archer, who sold the suspect Big Blue Lavender Bay to Andrew Pridham, now works, tutoring in art history while completing a PhD researching the auction market for contemporary Chinese art.

  Gant didn’t know Sloggett personally when he was completing his art history studies, but the two were by then well on each other’s radar.

  ‘She’d already shitcanned stuff,’ Gant said. ‘I already knew she was the enemy when I was there. I had nothing to do with her. I kept well away from that. I did do one of the units on art conservation, which I got very high marks for. I knew it all. I was reading books on art conservation when I was twenty years old. I knew all that stuff.’

  Gant’s art education began, to some extent, at Geelong College, where he had access to a good art teacher who introduced his students to the pleasures of Raphael and other Renaissance masters.

  ‘I just got a buzz out of the images, but I never absorbed any information,’ Gant said. ‘So I didn’t know anything, and then, when I was about eighteen and I was courting my first wife, I saw an ad in the paper for a little gallery in Geelong, saying how they do Devonshire teas on a Sunday, and I love scones and cream, and she was very arty.

  ‘So I took her down there, had a Devonshire tea, met the guy who ran the place, John Heard, who was probably the best salesman I’ve ever met in my life, and he sold me a painting. I lay-byed it for twelve months; it was about $300.’

  The painting was a traditional Australian landscape, the sort of stuff that ‘people cut their teeth on’.

  ‘We got into the habit of going there on a regular basis,’ he said.

  These regular visits piqued Gant’s interest—it wasn’t so much the art but John Heard’s salesmanship that fascinated him. Gant watched and learnt. Soon, Gant was working with Heard, and proving an equally capable salesman: ‘I was selling more than him at one stage.’

  At Heard’s Balmoral Art Galleries, Gant would sell traditional landscapes by the likes of Ambrose Griffin, Harold Septimus Power and Harold Herbert.

  ‘They were just boring landscape artists, but good quality,’ Gant said.

  Around that time, Gant discovered Robert Hughes’s The Art of Australia, and the writings of Marxist art historian Bernard Smith, two highly influential Australian critics who inspired him to take a more politically incisive approach to art.

  In 1978, aged twenty-three, he was ready to make his own mark. That year, Gant set up Niagara Galleries with his old Kyneton High schoolmate William Nuttall. The gallery was named for its location at 27 Niagara Lane in Melbourne’s central business district. Melbourne’s laneways were not yet the fashionable locations they would become. Gant recalled that his neighbours in Niagara Lane were a group of young architects who would go on to leave a big impression on the city—Denton Corker Marshall. At Niagara, Gant moved from traditional landscapes to modern art, exhibiting artists including Herbert McClintock, Noel Counihan and Vic O’Connor, specialising, as Gant told it, in ‘the old left-wing artists of the 1940s period’. To supplement the gallery’s modest takings, he and Nuttall ran a framing business in the basement and did shiftwork at a nearby car park.

  Running a gallery was an exciting business. If an important critic, such as an Alan McCulloch or a Robert Rooney, had been in to see a new show, he and Nuttall would rush out in the early hours to the former Age building in Spencer Street, or the old Herald and Weekly Times building in Flinders Street, waiting for newspapers to roll off the presses, impatient to read the reviews.

  ‘I think the most striking thing, and if you spoke to anybody about the seventies and the early eighties, most of them would tell you the same, was that if you were running a gallery or dealing art you had no comprehension at all or no expectation that you were ever going to make a lot of money out of it. It was not even in your head. You did it because you loved handling it. We were always so delighted if we could pay our bills, if we could pay our rent, and be there for another show.’

  Gant had just been espousing the salesmanship of Heard, but now he seemed to be favouring another approach. So he wasn’t in it for the money?

  ‘No way. Not in a million years. And it all changed when different types of people got into the art world and started spruiking it for different reasons, for different causes.’

  The art world, he said, began to be infiltrated by people driven primarily by the profit motive, and not a genuine love of art and artists.

  ‘I see people who have come into the industry and pushed prices on artists. I’ve seen them work in league with auctioneers, and you can quote me on this, the greatest example is Menzies.’

  He was referring to Menzies Art Brands, the company run by successful Melbourne auctioneer Rod Menzies, known for driving a hard bargain. Next in Gant’s firing line was Metro Gallery, which opened on the prestigious High Street in Armadale in 2001, originally as Metro 5 Gallery, a slick operation then run by five businessmen with a knack for marketing and publicity. High Street was also Gant’s turf at the time.

  For now, Gant wouldn’t have to deal with the hard-nosed business types he so abhorred—unless he was facing them in court. His business, Peter Gant Fine Art/Gallery Irascible, which restlessly hopped from one address to the next, most recently in Carlton, was closed.

  ‘I just couldn’t afford to keep it going. No, I think I lost the drive,’ he said. ‘I had a sensational PA. The girl working for me, who was with me for about ten years, was absolutely amazing, so whilst I had her we could do all sorts of wonderful things because she was so bloody good.’

  Second drink on the go, we relaxed into our respective roles, and I began to see how Gant might cast a spell. He was good company and the political views he espoused were common among artists and others attracted to working in the arts. People had described him to me as intelligent and well read, and I found him so. The man was also habitually implicated in court cases. He admitted that he was not terribly concerned about the upcoming trial, although he knew he probably should be.

  ‘I don’t even get blood pressure. I don’t know, I might have a gene missing,’ he said. ‘No, what worries me most about this case is how it’s affected Aman. It’s really had such a massive impact on him. Not just financially but emotionally. He comes from a different cultural background and different values and he’s always had to fight a certain level of underground or undercover discrimination anyway.’

  Gant has known Siddique since the 1980s when he was fresh to Australia from London. He described Siddique as a ‘remarkable man’. In Gant’s retelling of his friend’s escape from Uganda, Siddique and his brothers ‘marched’ out of the country, ‘ended up in Russia or somewhere’ and badgered the British government for citizenship, eventually ending up in London. Siddique, he said, was one of the most highly qualified conservators in the world, ‘an intellectual of the first order’, ‘well versed in foreign affairs’, and a man of ‘great social ideals’.

  Gant’s world was divided into friends that he rapturously praised and enemies he loathed with equal passion. There was little in between. A man he was particularly fond of was Melbourne art dealer John Playfoot, a fellow horseracing enthusiast with whom he had been doing business for decades. Police interviewed Playfoot in relation to the Whiteley art fraud. He had been shopping around the suspect Orange Lavender Bay, inviting auctioneers to his St Kilda mansion to inspect it, leaving Gant’s involvement out of the equation.

  ‘Oh yeah, they interviewed him, old John,’ Gant said, dissolving yet again into laughter. ‘He’s larger than life. He’s actually one person I can say I love him to death. I really do. I’m not saying he’s a good man or anything like that, but he knows more about art objects and Art Deco than any person I’ve ever met anywhere in the world ever in my life. He’s got an amazing knowledge, an amazing eye.’<
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  The conversation moved to the artist at the heart of the impending trial—Brett Whiteley, a man who seemed to provoke as much controversy in death as he did in life.

  ‘He’s an incredibly beautiful draftsman,’ Gant said. ‘I love his drawings. Some of his paintings from the late sixties and early seventies are fantastic. The stuff that we’re talking about, it’s mediocre, made for the market. The blue one’s really average … the orange one’s really nice, I like it, but it’s like fifteen years too late,’ he said, referring to the suspect Orange Lavender Bay’s supposed date of creation in 1988. Gant maintained the three paintings at the centre of the upcoming trial were authentic.

  ‘The great Lavender Bays were probably 1974 or something like that. So, it’s fourteen years, so he’s just regurgitating, and they are formulaic, and this is what the idiot …’ Gant didn’t finish the sentence, but it was clear that he had Sloggett in his sights. Her reports on Big Blue Lavender Bay and Orange Lavender Bay emphasised the paintings’ pastiche-like quality, the calculated harvesting of motifs from known Whiteley paintings to create new works to be passed off as the real thing. Gant was not the first to point out that Whiteley himself resorted to formula, especially in his later years. Certain art critics have also disparaged Whiteley’s gimmicks and mannerisms, his repetitive imagery and lines, plucked from his bag of tricks, paintings created to flatter the viewer and pander to the market. Sloggett’s highlighting of the ‘formulaic’ nature of the paintings as proof that they are fake was ridiculous, said Gant.

  ‘Well, of course they’re formulaic, it’s what Brett was doing. I can show you a hundred pictures that fit that category, so … so what?’