Whiteley on Trial Read online

  ‘This is one out of the box for me,’ he said, wishing he had more time to focus on it. Other cases were demanding his attention. He mentioned an article in the weekend papers about Gant and Siddique which referred to an ‘art fraud task force’.

  ‘I laughed because I thought, “The task force is me!”’

  I knew the article he was referring to. I too had read it and noted the error—easily made. Why wouldn’t you assume that Australia had an art fraud squad? I remembered my own surprise when I discovered that there was none. But then, Australia’s secondary art market (for existing art that has already been sold before) is tiny in comparison to the global market, and small relative to the size of our economy. How often would an art fraud squad be needed to jump into action? The deceptions uncovered by art fraudsters had, until that point, been relatively minor in comparison to the many millions lost in insurance or bank frauds. It was a question of resources that were already stretched. But the case of the three suspect Whiteleys had broken the million-dollar barrier—it was always going to be hard to ignore.

  ‘This is my introduction to the Australian art industry, so my view is very tainted,’ Stefanec said. ‘My first experience is not a good one. Before this I would have been quite naïve, very impressed by it. But when you speak to some of the people involved, reality kicks in a bit.’

  He appreciated why people got immersed in the arts and in collecting, but he also saw it as a world inaccessible to ordinary people.

  ‘In the high end, you need to have the funds to be involved. It’s not for your Joe Blow. It’s not for people like myself. I might be able to buy a limited edition print,’ he said, sounding like someone who had been doing his homework.

  Did he know much about Brett Whiteley before this case?

  ‘I knew of Brett Whiteley previously, but I didn’t know anything about his work.’

  I asked again about who had laid the complaint that led to Gant and Siddique’s arrest, but Stefanec wouldn’t budge. He did, however, tell me there was a third victim, and a fourth. I knew about a third, but a fourth?

  The main victim, Andrew Pridham, would not be at the committal, he said.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ Stefanec said. ‘He doesn’t want anything to do with the whole thing. He has been quite hurt by it and every time I speak to him it brings it all back. I think he is quite affected by it. The time, it’s been dragging on. He has written it off as such. He has accepted it as being a forgery. He has been battered around a bit.’

  I was surprised that a tough businessman like Pridham would be ‘battered’ by anything.

  ‘It’s easy for someone to say it’s a drop in the ocean for him,’ Stefanec said. ‘You have to work hard to make that sort of money. It takes time and effort.’

  It was hard to believe that Stefanec had been in the force for almost twenty years. He didn’t seem hard-bitten enough. We came from different worlds, but in some ways our worlds overlapped. He too was the child of migrants—his background, though, was Slovenian, mine Italian. I mentioned the town of Bled, and his eyes lit up. He had also visited that blissful lake town at the foot of the Alps. At the end of our meeting, he showed me his police badge and pointed to his surname. ‘For the book, make sure you spell my name right,’ he said, with a big smile.

  ‘I’d hang this on my wall!’ a court reporter remarked enthusiastically as we stood before one of the exhibits that we had waited all morning to see. It was Thursday 12 March 2015, the third day of the committal hearing. Police lumbered under the painting’s size and weight, hauling it up the steps of the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on William Street. The media photographers dallying on the footpath snapped into action. It was unprecedented, a painting of this size being carried into an Australian court. Whoever had created it was not kidding. But the painting, which went by various names—Big Blue Lavender Bay among them—was of questionable origins. Peter Gant and Aman Siddique’s lawyers were claiming it was an original Whiteley, created in 1988.

  A photographer who had missed the action asked whether the painting’s arrival could be replayed. ‘I want it outside, it’s a great photo outside,’ he said. Upon hearing this, Siddique, who was sitting in court by his son, trembled with anger. His life had been turned into media fodder. His son tried to calm him as Siddique muttered furiously. ‘Dad, Dad, Dad!’ the son said. ‘Dad, stop it!’ Watching father and son I reminded myself that this was more than a ‘story’—that the accused were people with families who were now entangled in this affair.

  ‘With your trained eye would you be able to pick it?’ the same court reporter asked.

  He was holding me in higher regard than I deserved.

  ‘It seems a little stiff,’ I said.

  I was the wrong person to ask. My mind was unfairly made up. I had first written about the suspect Whiteleys five years earlier, long before the case reached the criminal justice system. Even after I left The Age in 2012, I maintained an unhealthy interest in the case. On the day that Gant and Siddique were charged, in August 2014, I read the newspaper reports with envy, feeling a warped sense of proprietorship. And here I was, back in court, despite the difficulties of writing about the alleged art fraud in July 2010, under the constant threat of litigation. Now I was a freelance writer, here of my own volition, without the backing of a media organisation, no-one paying me to see where the story led. I could not let it go. What stubborn impulse was driving me? To watch a mystery unfold? A narrative resolved? To be proved right? Why did it matter? Ego, I suspected, was the reason many of us had ended up here.

  While the blue painting did nothing for me—I found the composition anodyne—the audacity of the undertaking astonished me. If it was a forgery, as the Crown claimed—and as I believed, after years of inquiry and listening to stories told to me in confidence—its scale and sale price made the work of previous Australian forgers seem lily-livered. This was the painting sold to Andrew Pridham for $2.5 million. If it was a forgery, it was the most brazen in Australian art history.

  Pridham had not even bothered insuring Big Blue Lavender Bay for its trip from Sydney to the Melbourne Magistrates’. That’s how little he rated it now. How could a painting go from being worth $2.5 million to zero in a beholder’s eyes? The image hadn’t changed. But Pridham had thought he was buying into the prestige of a genuine Whiteley—joining a club accessible only to Australia’s richest. The rest of us had to content ourselves with admiring the artist’s work in museums.

  In my twenties, when I fantasised about becoming an artist, I had been besotted with Whiteley’s romantic visions, his balletic sweeps of paint on canvas, his wild pronouncements about art, his extreme, quixotic life. I remember standing before one of his Fiji paintings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and sighing with pleasure at the rain-like trickles that he had allowed to run down a green mountain. I wanted to abandon myself to art, just like him. I didn’t want to be a doctor, as my parents desired, I wanted to paint myself drunk after three bottles of wine as he had. I had watched the 1989 documentary Difficult Pleasure and thought everything was worth sacrificing for art. But I grew out of Whiteley. The next time I watched Difficult Pleasure, in my fifties, I guffawed at Whiteley’s pretentiousness. Had he always been so ridiculously self-absorbed, or had I just grown cynical? And now I was reassessing him, looking again at his work, really looking, and rediscovering his extravagant gift for both the glorious and the gaudy.

  Not everyone admired Whiteley. Critics’ assessments ranged from the superlative to the withering. To James Gleeson he shone ‘as no other Australian artist has ever shone’. Christopher Allen called him ‘hopelessly superficial’. John McDonald dubbed his later work ‘slick and wristy, his colours blandly decorative’. Patrick McCaughey pronounced his career a ‘story of squandered genius’. Robert Hughes, who held Whiteley responsible for introducing his first wife, Danne, to heroin, refused to write an obituary for the artist, saying he had ‘wasted his talent’. Sasha Grishin fairly summed it up: ‘A huge
and uneven oeuvre.’

  But the market had an enduring love affair with Whiteley. In 2007, when Pridham invested in Big Blue Lavender Bay, agreeing to its purchase before seeing the painting in real life, Australia’s art market was burning like an out-of-control bushfire and Whiteley was the artist pouring fuel on the blaze—105 of Whiteley’s works sold at auction that year, for a total $19 452 126. Records were being broken, and six-figure sums regularly paid. Multimillionaire Morry Fraid, co-founder of the Spotlight fabric-and-crafts chain, set the record that year, paying $3.4 million at auction for the 1985 painting The Olgas for Ernest Giles. The market was in a frenzy—and the market wanted Whiteley. Conditions were perfect for would-be forgers: the mood was feverish, dealers were hungry and collectors wanted to believe. Gant himself bid for a Whiteley work at auction that year, paying $1.65 million for a painting called View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay—Whiteley’s last Lavender Bay painting, created in 1991, the year before he died. That painting was delivered from the Sydney auction house straight to Siddique’s Collingwood studio. This was the ‘brown’ painting that Jud Wimhurst had seen at Easey Street, the painting that was always getting in the way.

  It was the first time I had seen the blue painting in the flesh. I had only known the work in reproduction, through photographs leaked to me when I was working at The Age. Propped up against a wall to the right of the magistrate’s podium, the painting was a shock of blue against the office-like decor, an alien presence amid the white walls, dusky low-pile carpet and blonde wood veneer. The painting had been collected from Sydney that weekend, retrieved by Justin Stefanec from the Mosman home of Andrew Pridham for its court appearance.

  Gold framed and measuring 1.51 metres high and 2.42 metres wide, the painting was a scene of Sydney Harbour. The background was bathed in ultramarine blue, the colour prized by Renaissance painters, who would reserve the expensive pigment—then made from lapis lazuli—for the robes of angels and Madonnas. Winsor & Newton’s deep ultramarine was Brett Whiteley’s oil colour of choice; he reserved it for his beloved harbour, and as a conscious reference to the masters who had come before him.

  To me, the painting seemed bereft of the ‘life force’ that Whiteley had sought to capture in his works; it lacked the artist’s feeling for space, his sweeping curves and fluid lines. The blue was not quite right—it lacked intensity and texture. But this day in court would not be the last time that someone would remark on the painting’s beauty. It was innocuous, easy on the eye. A long, white central pier jutted into the bay. A shaggy trio of orange palm trees rose in the foreground. There was a hint of the Harbour Bridge in the upper left-hand corner. Yachts were moored near the pier, boats skimmed across the water, birds flew above. Common Whiteley traits.

  As I stood inspecting the big blue painting in court, marvelling at its gall, Gant sidled up to me and said: ‘It’s a trophy painting for rich people.’ Did I laugh? I must have. A mini art-appreciation lesson ensued. Gant pointed out a paper fragment stuck onto a yacht. ‘Whiteley used to do collages,’ he said. He helped me locate the ‘Brett Whiteley’ signature that Robyn Sloggett and her team had embarrassingly missed in their first report on the painting. It was barely visible, a minute white signature at the bottom of the central white pier. White on white—it seemed a deliberate joke, a trap set for an unsuspecting forensic art expert.

  ‘It’s tiny,’ I said.

  ‘But they shouldn’t have missed it if they were examining it,’ Gant scoffed.

  He had a point. Of course he did.

  Leaning against another wall in the courtroom, to the left of the magistrate’s bench, was the second suspect Whiteley, Orange Lavender Bay, sold for $1.1 million to Sydney luxury car dealer Steven Nasteski in December 2009, when the market was cooling. It was smaller than its blue companion—1.21 metres high and 2.15 metres wide, but still impudently big. Orange was a less marketable colour. Gant told me that he preferred the ‘orange’ painting to the ‘trophy’ blue. I had to agree it was the better of the two, bolder in its use of space, less crowded, more curvaceous. It too had the hallmarks of Whiteley’s harbour paintings—boats, birds and palm trees, and the use of plaster and collage to create texture. But was the orange slightly off key? It felt too strong to me—tangerine bright, rather than the honey-orange of Whiteley’s harbour sunsets. There was none of Whiteley’s subtle variations in colour and translucency, and the composition’s stillness was unnerving. It seemed too flat. Too considered. What Gant thought of the third suspect painting—known as either Through the Window Lavender Bay or Lavender Bay through the Window—which he had used as collateral on a $950 000 debt, I would not know. The painting was missing—and whoever knew where it was hidden wasn’t telling.

  During the 7-day committal hearing, names that had been whispered to me over the years materialised as witnesses. Steven Drake. Antonio Rincon. Guy Angwin. Jeremy James. Scrawled in one of my old notebooks from the days when I was investigating the suspected fraud for The Age were the words: Ro Milburn? Still alive? She most certainly was and I would hear her testimony on Gant’s behalf. I was surprised at how accurate my sources had been, particularly the enigmatic ‘Elmyr de Hory’, who had begun emailing me in 2010, a month after my first stories about the suspect paintings appeared in the paper. ‘Elmyr de Hory’ was a pseudonym plucked from the pages of art history. The real Elmyr was an infamous Hungarian-born forger who had fooled the establishment with works in the style of Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse before committing suicide in 1976. He was the subject of Orson Welles’s 1974 documentary F for Fake. And now I had an anonymous informer using his name. His first email came with the subject heading ‘Whiteley’s’—this ‘de Hory’ was prone to errors of spelling and grammar, but when it came to Gant he seemed well informed and precariously close to the dealer and his friends:

  From: elmyr de hory 12/08/2010

  To: Gabriella Coslovich

  Keep asking … questions … Your making progress.

  Cheers,

  Elmyr.

  It was the start of a long correspondence. But who was this latter-day ‘Elmyr’ and what was his motivation? Why was he emailing me? He did not say and I did not ask, heedful of his anonymity. I asked about Gant—and ‘Elmyr’ happily filled me in, tipping me off when moves were afoot, telling me more than I could safely publish. He seemed at the forefront of the action, watching the story of the three suspect paintings unravel. Sometimes his stories seemed too outlandish to be true. But I would later discover that he had been right. On 11 March 2014, five months before the news of Gant and Siddique’s arrest hit the media, ‘Elmyr’ emailed me to say that Gant had been ‘taken into police custody’ and ‘questioned extensively’ the previous Thursday. I now knew that he had been spot on. In moments of paranoia it would cross my mind that ‘Elmyr’ might be Gant himself—that I was being set up. Gant was a maverick—he liked to play people. Was he messing with me? But the thought would pass. I wondered whether ‘Elmyr’ was here among those who had gathered to watch round one.

  Guy Morel was the reason we were all here. The whistleblower. This was the person Stefanec had been alluding to. Without Morel there would be no case. None of the ‘victims’ had pressed for charges to be laid. Not Nasteski, who dropped his police complaint after getting his money back. Not Pridham, who had pursued the matter in the civil courts against art consultant Anita Archer, who had sold him the painting after sourcing it from Gant. Not Guy Angwin, to whom Gant had given the suspect Lavender Bay through the Window as collateral for his $950 000 debt. And certainly not Steven Drake, an engineer from the affluent Melbourne suburb of Toorak who had bought Orange Lavender Bay in August 2013 for $122 000, three years after Nasteski had returned it and the painting had been disparaged in the media as a ‘fake’. Drake claimed that he had believed the painting was genuine, and that it would eventually be proved so, turning his purchase into a bonanza. Was the man for real? He, supposedly, was the fourth ‘victim’. His wife, Ola, a slender, long-
haired woman who wore a succession of body-skimming outfits, was in court most days taking notes. She told me that she wanted to know whether the painting that had been seized from her home by police was a fake. In the bathroom one day she asked my opinion. I muttered something about not being sure.

  Siddique had hired a prize legal pugilist—Robert Richter, QC—said to cost $20 000 a day, although I had been told that Siddique was getting him at half price because the case interested him. Whatever the cost, Siddique would have figured it a blue-chip investment. If Richter could convince the magistrate that there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed to trial, Siddique’s torment would end. Richter was a boxer of the intellectual kind: he cut an impressive figure, like a lean and hungry Ernest Hemingway, with thick white hair and beard, and owl-like glasses, of the sort preferred by men of a certain age and sophistication. Gant had hired the younger and perhaps less costly Dermot Connors as his defence lawyer. Clean shaven and quietly spoken, he looked a little like a benign version of the American actor Ray Liotta. But it was Richter who stole this show. He sparred mercilessly with the witnesses. Gant and Siddique were counting on a knockout.

  Richter wasted no time demolishing the credibility of prosecution witnesses. James Macdonald was made to look like the hapless cop out of his depth in the tricky world of art. A man who wouldn’t know oil paint from acrylic, pencil from charcoal. Who had never heard of Brett Whiteley until this case came up. ‘Some of us knew before,’ Richter snarled. Macdonald acknowledged that he wasn’t an art expert and persevered against Richter’s blows. A tall, white-haired man with a matching white moustache, and a warm Canadian accent, he maintained his dignity in the witness stand.

  Morel was rather more shambolic. Grey haired, dark eyed and olive skinned, he must have been a looker in his prime. Time had carved bags under his eyes and grooves on his face, given him a Serge Gainsbourg–like appeal. He sauntered into the courtroom, attempting to look nonchalant. Unlike Macdonald before him, who had stood during cross-examination, Morel sat in the witness stand, hands folded before him. He was a reluctant witness; he had wanted to remain anonymous. But now he was in court testifying against Aman Siddique, as his former colleague glared at him from across the room. What had changed his mind? Richter asked.