Whiteley on Trial Page 13

  With his second wine, Gant was becoming increasingly animated; he began to replay the defence’s arguments and started knocking his so-called victims.

  ‘Nasteski’s an absolute creep,’ he said. ‘The one time I spoke to him, the first thing he wanted to tell me was how he’d made a million dollars by the time he was twenty-one, so therefore he must be a really smart guy. And, that just lost me.’

  Why?

  ‘Because there are a lot of people who made a million dollars by the time they’re twenty-one who aren’t that smart,’ he said, roaring with laughter. ‘Nasteski is a joke. He’s a joke.’

  He was also going to be a witness in the trial.

  ‘Good. He’ll be a great witness for us. Good. They’re Johnny-come-latelies … they don’t know anything, even now they don’t know anything. He could tell you information about three artists, the three artists that he knows certain people want to buy, that he wants to try and buy to sell to them … He wouldn’t have a clue.’

  What about Andrew Pridham? I asked.

  ‘I don’t know Pridham. All I know about Pridham is that he was one of the CEOs of, what was it called? Centra? Or Centro property investment company that went belly up and left all of the mum and dad shareholders losing every cent they had, and he and his fellow directors walked away with millions.’

  Gant cared enough to mention it, although he didn’t have the facts. Pridham was not a chief executive of the Centro Property Group—as executive chairman of JP Morgan investment banking, Pridham was advising Centro on its financial affairs. His role in the group’s economic health was significant, and he would have been paid handsomely for his advice. As journalist Michael Evans put it in The Sydney Morning Herald in January 2008: ‘If [chief executive] Andrew Scott was the architect of Centro’s failed dreams, then his banker of choice, Andrew Pridham, was the builder.’

  Pridham’s reputation was dented, but not for long. In 2009, he set up the Australian arm of New York–based investment bank Moelis. One of the companies he restructured in his new role was none other than Centro. For Pridham, as they say in business, it was a win-win.

  Gant turned his vitriol to Wendy Whiteley. His contempt was acrid. He ranted about Wendy’s controlling and manipulative behaviour, and the ruthless battle over Brett Whiteley’s estate. After the artist’s death, Arkie Whiteley contested her father’s will, as did his last girlfriend, Janice Spencer, represented by lawyer Malcolm Turnbull, assisted by his wife, Lucy. Brett Whiteley had left a series of wills, and the final one was supposedly witnessed in secret by Arkie’s then boyfriend Christopher Kuhn. This last will was missing and could not be produced in court, but supposedly left the bulk of Whiteley’s estimated $13 million estate to Arkie. The judge ruled in favour of Arkie. Spencer received one painting: Sunday Afternoon, Surry Hills, a work in which she starred in onanistic pose, prompting its nickname The Masturbation in art circles. Gant put his own spin on the story, casting Wendy and Arkie as scheming women who used their influence to steal Spencer’s rightful inheritance. Spencer was ‘absolutely destroyed’, he told me. Despite this, Wendy ‘parades herself as this fuckin’ goddess’, he said.

  ‘The other thing that I’d like to ask is why is it that if you fuck somebody it makes you an expert on their work? How does that work? You tell me.’

  She was living with Brett for a very long time, overseeing his work, assisting in the studio, I said, hiding my distaste.

  ‘But she wasn’t living with him when these pictures were painted,’ he countered.

  ‘In fact, she was in a divorce court with him accusing him of hiding things from her and hiding assets and all sorts of shit,’ he said, paraphrasing one of the arguments that was made by the defence during the committal hearing. Discrediting Wendy was one of the defence’s main tactics. Maligning Sloggett was another.

  On the one hand, Gant professed indifference to the upcoming trial; on the other he raged against those who would testify against him. Was this the fury of an innocent man? His anger was quelled by a call from one of his daughters—the one who liked drinking wine with him, he said. Phone call over, we returned to the subject of Wendy. He’d give her this: she could be compelling in the witness stand.

  ‘All they have to do is put me on the stand, I can sort her out. The joke here is that most of the witnesses for the police aren’t particularly good witnesses for them,’ he said, cracking up at the thought.

  But some of the police evidence, surely, must have worried him, such as Guy Morel’s photos of the allegedly forged artworks in the process of being painted?

  ‘Yeah, well. Wait till we’re in court. We’ll see what happens,’ Gant said.

  Did Gant know Morel well?

  ‘Know him really well. It shows what a bad judge of person I am. I thought he was a lovely guy. Turns out he’s been working for the cops for years against Aman who’s been so generous to him. I can’t believe what he’s done to Aman. There’s things I’d love to say to you which obviously I can’t, but um, those photos are so staged. Now, whether that will ever be picked up by a jury I don’t have a clue, but they are so staged it’s a joke. Book here, paint there,’ he said, laughing. ‘They are so staged it’s a joke.’

  So he believed Aman was set up?

  ‘Yeah, big time. Look, anyway, we’ll see what happens. It’s just another court case. That’s all I seem to have, court cases.’

  His recurring brushes with the law seemed more of a nuisance than anything else. Annoying asides, a drain on time and money, keeping him from the things he loved best. Such as travelling overseas, or horseracing.

  ‘The things that are important to me are always there,’ he said. A good book to read. A glass of wine with his kids. The only thing that really upset him was the constraint on his travel.

  ‘That really shits me,’ he said. ‘Plus, I don’t like the idea that I have to tell people where I’m going. It’s bullshit. I’ve found that very hard.’

  Had it crossed his mind not to come back?

  ‘If I didn’t have kids I’d have pissed off years ago, but it wouldn’t have been pissing off from the court case, it would have been getting out of Australia. Nah, I can’t do that.’

  Our second glasses of wine were also now empty and Gant offered to buy me another. I made my excuses, saying I’d taken enough of his time, and that I was not a very good drinker.

  ‘Oh, I’m a great drinker,’ he said.

  We got up to leave, Gant in a spirited mood. Like an eager boy, he encouraged me to head to Readings book store a few doors down so he could show me the work of one of his favourite authors—British crime writer Philip Kerr, creator of the fictional character Bernie Gunther, a private investigator from Berlin. The night was still warm when we stepped out onto Lygon Street.

  As usual, Readings was packed. We made our way through the crowd and Gant headed straight for the shelf where Kerr’s books were stacked. He picked up his all-time favourite, A Quiet Flame, telling me I must read it. He bade me goodbye and kissed me on the cheek, leaving me holding Kerr’s book. The popular Bernie Gunther, I discovered, was an antihero: he drank too much, smoked excessively and had a roving eye for women. He was ‘sardonic, tough-talking, and cynical, but he does have a rough sense of humor and a rougher sense of right and wrong’.

  A fortnight later I had the curious pleasure of assessing Gant’s culinary skills. In an odd coincidence, Gant was on duty for his niece’s catering business, The Paella Pan, at a small end-of-year outdoor gathering of University of Melbourne research students, of whom I was one. His art dealing days ostensibly behind him, he was earning a living doing casual work. It was a drizzly old December day. We huddled under trees, sheltering from the wind and intermittent rain. Gant hovered over two huge pans, ministering the simmering rice and ladling out steaming bowls of vegetarian or seafood paella. He had a bottle of Corona on the go as he worked. The vegetarian option was fast disappearing: I chose seafood.

  ‘You can’t give me a bad review,’ he
quipped, handing me a bowl of saffron-tinged rice scattered with mussels, clams and prawns. I had seconds.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not interested in Peter Gant at all. We had a very acrimonious split many years ago and I think there is far too much wonderful art-world energy wasted on him and Aman Siddique.’

  More than three decades had passed since William Nuttall severed ties with Gant, his former friend and co-founder of Niagara Galleries, but whatever happened between them still stung. He wouldn’t explain what went wrong. The two parted ways after five years at Niagara, and Nuttall, a respected dealer, moved the gallery to its current site in Punt Road, Richmond.

  ‘I have no interest in the man at all,’ he said, when I tried to press him for details. The phone call went nowhere.

  Other art-world figures spoke to me on condition of anonymity. They painted the picture of a chameleon—a cunning charmer. Pig-headed. Humorous. Cagey. Intelligent but dodgy. Badmouthed everyone in the industry. Loved a drink. Made great hunks of money at the races and then lost heaps and was desperate.

  ‘I have never consigned from Peter Gant,’ a leading auctioneer told me. ‘Even if it was the Mona Lisa, I just don’t want to be involved.’

  Stuart Purves, the director of Australian Galleries, who was Whiteley’s dealer and close friend, and held many of his major exhibitions, including his Lavender Bay series in 1974, was another who wouldn’t touch anything that had passed through Gant’s hands.

  ‘He’s synonymous with doubt,’ Purves said.

  And yet, many in the tight-knit art industry kept doing business with Gant. While his slipperiness was often noted, so too was his art expertise. Again and again I was told he had ‘a great eye’. He was also expert in gaining people’s trust. I was surprised by the loyalty felt towards him, particularly by younger people he had helped launch into the world of art. They could not believe, or did not want to believe, he had done anything wrong.

  ‘He’s in court more than a lot of other galleries, but, as he would tell you, he’s not the only one,’ said one of his younger friends, now a curator at a leading museum.

  He described Gant as a mentor who instilled leftist ideals in him and taught him about passion and how to appreciate food. He laughed that he also learnt the perils of gambling.

  ‘I’m still a lefty because of some of the values I heard standing around listening to him. He gave me a couple of books by Karl Marx. He gave me books by good writers; he was into existentialists. I learnt about being an angry leftist from him. I am not angry any more,’ he said.

  Another admitted that it never occurred to her that anything untoward might have been going on. Since Gant’s arrest, however, she has had to ask herself whether she was taken in by his persuasive ways. Was she stupidly naïve? She would rather not know. ‘It’s not going to achieve anything if I sit down and come to the conclusion that something deceitful was going on … then I’d have to assess my personality … and decide what, that I am a droob?’

  One of the few people who didn’t mind talking openly about Gant was 72-year-old Tasmanian artist and Vietnam veteran Peter Stephenson. We spoke by phone; he had a calm, no-nonsense, old-school Australian drawl that immediately made me warm to him. Stephenson first met ‘Pete’ in the late 1990s, when Gant was running a gallery in South Melbourne.

  ‘One of his many galleries,’ Stephenson said. ‘He’s sort of on the move all the time.’

  Gant was keen to represent the artist in Melbourne. Stephenson agreed and the arrangement was very successful. Gant was enthusiastic, knew the market and was genuinely interested in artists’ work. He was like the gallerists of old, ‘blokes like Georges Mora and Rudy Komon’, Stephenson said, paying him a big compliment. Sometimes, Gant was late to pay, but that wasn’t unusual in the field of art.

  ‘On one occasion I was having a show in Melbourne and he wasn’t forthcoming so I had to chase really hard. Pete’s not the only one I have had to chase. Art dealers, bloody nightmare,’ he said.

  Sometimes, Gant would lavish expensive dinners on Stephenson and his wife. One evening he took them to Melbourne’s most exclusive Cantonese restaurant, Flower Drum. But Gant also seemed to hate wealthy people, which Stephenson found odd, given they were his ‘bread and butter’.

  I asked Stephenson what he thought when he read about Gant’s involvement with the suspect Whiteleys. He avoided commenting on Gant but had a firm view about the paintings.

  ‘When I saw the works I thought, Jesus, they are obviously fakes, they don’t look that good to me. This case will attract a lot of attention. This will be night-time news stuff.’

  The man Gant ‘loves to death’—art dealer John Playfoot—was unimpressed by the declaration.

  ‘I just wish he would pay me the $1.3 million he owes me,’ he said, when I called him to deliver Gant’s affection.

  Of modest height and widening girth, Playfoot was a sharp dresser, in his sixties, with a voluptuous sweep of wavy hair. His Mexican grandfather was a catcher with a world-famous trapeze act. His Cuban grandmother was an equestrian acrobat. Playfoot missed out on the acrobatic genes—but he was a showman of another sort. A punter who loved to live in grand style, he was an art-world figure with a big reputation. ‘A loveable rogue’, as one dealer described him. His first speciality was the decorative arts, primarily Art Deco, but since the early 1990s he’d been dealing mainly in art. He was treated with caution by some and held in high regard by others, particularly those he had financed and backed over the years. They wouldn’t hear a bad word about him.

  A former compositor with The Age, long before my time there, Playfoot started out small in the art-trading business. He’d place objects in Leonard Joel auctions for tiny sums, nothing worth more than three figures. He graduated to the millions, bidding at auction for high-profile clients such as retail billionaire Morry Fraid, co-founder of the Spotlight fabric chain. As Fraid’s frontman, Playfoot cast the winning bid for Whiteley’s 1976 painting My Armchair, which sold for $3.92 million (including buyer’s premium) at a Menzies auction in Melbourne in 2013. After that sale, Playfoot told The Age: ‘You pay $4 million and get a couple of hundred thousand out of it. It pays the school fees.’

  His involvement with Orange Lavender Bay was starting to look less fruitful.

  ‘I never bought the painting, I was given it on consignment by Gant,’ Playfoot told me.

  It was not the first time he had been troubled by suspect works linked to Gant. There’s the oft-cited case of the ‘purple’ Lalique that ended up in the High Court in London in December 1998—a case best not mentioned. The last time I did, when I was still at The Age, I copped an earful of Playfoot’s wrath.

  The case involved seventeen purple Lalique car mascots, sold for £60 000 (A$164 000) apiece to motor-racing magnate Mansour Ojjeh. When the mascots were found to have been irradiated to give them their deep purple colour, Ojjeh took London gallerist Mark Waller to the High Court. Waller told the court that he had sourced the mascots from Playfoot—Playfoot said he had sourced them from Gant. In their court statements, Gant and Playfoot claimed the glass mascots were already coloured purple when they got them. Gant flew to London for the civil hearing—at Waller’s expense. He told the court that he had bought the glass from another Geelong dealer, Don Lovett, who died in 1989.

  Gant claimed that Lovett had acquired the glass collection from an elderly French couple living in Melbourne. He had tried to locate the couple, without success. The story had a familiar ring: a chain of ownership that comes to a dead end. Waller was found in breach of contract and ordered to pay £610 402 (A$1.64 million) in damages and costs. Gant flew home. After that court case, Playfoot told the media that he was quitting the business.

  And now, once again, he was being drawn into a court case as a result of his connection to Gant. And this time, he himself would have to front up.

  ‘Apparently I am going to be called as a witness. I am not even sure why,’ Playfoot said, his irritation palpable down the line.
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  ‘Gant wants me as a witness and he said: “I want you to tell the truth.” I said, “Peter, you know that I bloody well don’t lie.” I reckon he’s mad. It just depends on the questions that the prosecution asks. I know that if I was Peter, I would not ask me as a witness. It’s just madness.

  ‘If I am a witness, I’ll bury them. I am going to tell the truth. It won’t bury Aman. I don’t know that Aman had anything to do with it.’

  Moments later, Playfoot seemed to change his mind, telling me: ‘If Aman faked those paintings, I hope he goes down because I have no time for bloody fakers.’

  For now, though, he still had time for Siddique. He continued to use him for restoration work. Gant, on the other hand, had been wiped.

  ‘I no longer associate with him,’ Playfoot said. ‘My wife, if she was a murderer, she would kill him. I have been set up left, right and centre by Peter Gant, and if that’s what someone does to his friends, it’s an odd way of showing your friendship.’

  Playfoot’s artist wife, Suzanne, seemed to be her husband’s moral compass. She hadn’t wanted him to sell Orange Lavender Bay because she didn’t trust Gant, he told me. She wanted the painting out of the house.

  Playfoot was interviewed by police about the ‘orange’ painting a day after Gant’s arrest. ‘When they interviewed me they asked me where the painting was. I said I know where it is, but I can’t tell you. I don’t know how they knew. I didn’t tell them,’ he said, sounding genuinely mystified about how the police had found out that the painting was at Steven Drake’s, who had bought the work after Nasteski sent it back to Melbourne.

  He wouldn’t say whether he thought Orange Lavender Bay was authentic or not, but like Gant he too had little faith in the appraisals of Robyn Sloggett. He reeled through a list of auctioneers who saw the work and thought it fine: Chris Deutscher, Damian Hackett, Geoffrey Smith and Tim Goodman.

  ‘Damian Hackett said it was a “masterpiece”, Geoff Smith pointed out three parts of the painting and why it couldn’t be fake. And if they deny it, I will say they did, because I was there and I witnessed it.’