Whiteley on Trial Page 5

  ‘That may be the case but you would then concede that …’

  ‘I wouldn’t concede anything about this catalogue!’ she stormed.

  The magistrate told Wendy to wait until Richter finished asking his questions.

  ‘Well, he’s asked me the same question fifteen times,’ Wendy protested.

  ‘I know. He’s going to ask you a different one now, I’m sure,’ the magistrate said comfortingly.

  But Richter kept circling and Wendy kept resisting. The barrister put it to her that her assertion that the paintings were fakes was based on nothing more than ‘opinion’.

  Wendy snapped back: ‘My opinion is based on fifty years of experience with the artist, his work, a great deal of knowledge spent looking at other painters’ works in art galleries—all of which you’ve never done in your life.’

  ‘No?’ Richter responded, drawing out the word in his low, smooth voice, like a fox coaxing his prey into a deep, dark hole.

  ‘Don’t put it down!’ Wendy roared at him. ‘I’ve spent my entire life looking at art.’

  Watching Wendy do battle with Richter was an unsettling thrill, the highlight—if such things can be called highlights—of the 7-day committal. The formidable Richter seemed exhausted by the end of his 2-hour tussle with Wendy, who would not be cowed.

  Robyn Sloggett had taken the stand before as an expert witness in art fraud. She helped convict Pamela and Ivan Liberto, a Toorak couple in their sixties who in 2007 were found guilty of forging and selling four works supposedly by Aboriginal artist Rover Thomas, reaping more than $300 000. It was only the second case of art fraud to be prosecuted in Victoria in thirty years.

  Having built a reputation for authenticating artworks, Sloggett, who is the director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, was the person to whom art collectors turned when they feared they had been sold a fake. And so it happened that both Steven Nasteski and Andrew Pridham ended up sending their questionable Whiteleys to Sloggett within a month of each other in 2010. Orange Lavender Bay arrived in June. Big Blue Lavender Bay in July. After examining the works, Sloggett and her colleague, paintings conservator Vanessa Kowalski, determined that neither painting ‘could be attributed to the oeuvre of Brett Whiteley’.

  A small woman with platinum blonde hair and a steely intellect, Sloggett was known for her drive and ambition. Her witness statement included a 20-page curriculum vitae with an intimidating list of awards, publications and memberships of ‘committees, boards, judging panels and industry bodies’. On Friday 13 March 2015, she took the stand on the fourth day of the committal. Richter seemed neither impressed nor intimidated. He zeroed in on her shortcomings, noting that Sloggett lacked academic qualifications in ‘hard science’. She had studied art history, philosophy and applied science, but held no science qualification of any kind. The implication was clear: her expertise was questionable, her field was pseudoscience and her findings were dubious. Richter demanded ‘hard scientific’ evidence, such as ‘this painting contains a pigment that was never used by Brett Whiteley’ or ‘this painting was painted with pigments that did not come into existence until 2000’. Sloggett was not in the business of absolutes.

  No tests had been taken to confirm the pigments used in Orange Lavender Bay, and only one pigment—ultramarine blue—was tested in Big Blue Lavender Bay. Wouldn’t you want to know, Richter asked, whether the paint was consistent with paints Whiteley was known to have used in certain periods?

  ‘No, not necessarily,’ Sloggett answered, in what seemed a strange response.

  ‘Why not?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Because that may not be the most effective way to answer the question about whether you attribute these works to Whiteley.’

  She explained that her team searched for ‘points of identification’, comparing Orange Lavender Bay and Big Blue Lavender Bay to artworks that were known to have been created by Whiteley. ‘Points of identification’ included the way the paint was applied on the canvas, the painting’s style, and paint solubility, and none of these were found to be consistent with known Whiteley works.

  Richter homed in on the solubility tests. Sloggett had determined that the oil paint from both artworks did not behave as one might expect 20-year-old paint to behave. Over time, oil paint ages first by evaporation, and then by cross-linking. More recent paint is likely to be softer—and that’s what Sloggett found, soft paint. The paint from Orange Lavender Bay was soluble in ‘white spirits’, a mild solvent, and not one in which oil paint polymer that had cross-linked for at least two decades would be soluble. The paint from the blue artwork similarly was found to be more soluble than one might expect of aged paint. In other words, these two paintings were unlikely to be from 1988. Furthermore, there were some blue paint marks on the frame of Big Blue Lavender Bay, suggesting the work had been framed while the paint was still soft.

  Richter tore into Sloggett’s methodology and results. A 200-year-old painting by George Stubbs had responded to a solvency test—the paint had dissolved, he said. Sloggett knew the example and acknowledged that the cross-linking of paint depended on many variables, including exposure to light, heat and, to a lesser extent, moisture.

  Were Sloggett’s tests reproducible? Had the cotton buds used to take the paint samples been kept by Sloggett’s team? No, they had not. Did she realise there was a varnish on the blue painting that might interfere with the results of a solvency test? Painting samples were taken from the outer edges of the painting which were less likely to be affected by varnish, Sloggett said. The solubility tests, she argued, were just one part of the body of evidence about the paintings, and no more or less important than any other element.

  The two sparred for the better part of the day, descending into such technical detail that I marvelled at how much art knowledge Richter had absorbed in preparation for the committal—and how adept Sloggett was at fending off his questions. They rallied over acronyms and chemicals, from the familiar to the obscure—acetone, toluene, xylene, Paraloid B-72, SCN, FTIR, SEM.

  In the end, though, Sloggett accepted that the best that she could say was that on the balance of probabilities the two paintings could not be attributed to Whiteley at this time.

  ‘That’s as far as you can go, correct?’ Richter asked.

  ‘Yes. Well, that’s as far as we’re prepared to go,’ Sloggett said.

  In the lift on the way out, Siddique’s son, a doctor, who was by his father’s side throughout the committal, compared Richter’s dissection of Sloggett to an appendectomy.

  ‘But at least your patients are anaesthetised,’ Richter replied, to chuckles all round.

  The Siddiques seemed very pleased with their silk indeed.

  Elmyr de Hory emailed at the end of the committal’s first week.

  From: elmyr de hory 14/03/2015

  To: Gabriella Coslovich

  The good guys seem to be on the back foot … Gant seems to think that you are warming to him …

  ‘Gant is an interesting character … let him think what he likes …’ I wrote back, feigning nonchalance.

  But the remark played on my mind. Why did Gant think so? I had not engaged with him beyond listening to what he had to say about the paintings in court. I had smiled at his amusing stories, asked a few benign questions. I had not offered my opinions in return.

  They had been crowing about him all week: Jeremy James. The last witness at the committal hearing and the defence’s ace in the pack. On Tuesday 17 March 2015, he strode into the courtroom, took the stand and swore that he had photographed Orange Lavender Bay in 1989 for the exhibition catalogue A Private Affair. He was a self-assured, shortish man of slight build and neatly cut greying hair, in a lemony-beige jacket, crisp blue-and-white checked shirt, dark jeans and shiny black shoes. His father, Kenneth James, had owned and operated a printing business and had printed art catalogues for Gant.

  In re-examination, Gyorffy, who was like the canny bloodhound to Richte
r’s wily fox, chipped away at James’s story. He established that after Kenneth James printing ceased trading in 2004, there were no records kept from 1988–89. The company was only required to keep records of work done in the previous seven years, James said. ‘After that it would have been pulped.’

  ‘Even the catalogues?’ Gyorffy asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t these catalogues have general importance in the art world?’

  ‘They may have but we didn’t take that into regard when we were pulping them.’

  ‘So if Mr Stefanec went searching for these documents they just don’t exist, is that … ?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ James replied.

  ‘Why do you remember that particular catalogue?’ Gyorffy asked, referring to A Private Affair.

  ‘Probably because it was the first catalogue I’d photographed for Peter Gant Fine Art.’

  ‘What is it about the painting that strikes you, that makes you remember it?’

  ‘It was the—it was the intensity of the colour of the work and the size of the work.’

  ‘When was the first time you were asked to look at that photograph again after 1989?’

  ‘Probably back in—probably four or five years ago.’

  ‘There were a number of orange Whiteley paintings, weren’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you know about Mr Whiteley’s work?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘But you don’t profess to be an expert in it or anything of that nature?’

  ‘I’m not an expert.’

  ‘So as far as the statement on the photograph that you took, that it was Brett Whiteley, Orange Lavender Bay and the size, that all came from Mr Gant, didn’t it?’

  ‘No, I don’t understand your statement.’

  Gyorffy tried a different approach.

  ‘Have you ever seen this painting again?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So all you can say is you took a photograph of a painting that looked like that in 1989?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Other than Mr Gant saying it was a Brett Whiteley, you can’t say it was, can you?’

  ‘No, not with any—any authority.’

  Gyorffy wanted to know what kind of camera James had used. Was it a Kodak camera?

  ‘No, it wouldn’t have been a Kodak camera. It would have been either a Leica, a Nikon or a Hasselblad.’

  He had not kept the negatives of the photographs.

  ‘You say you don’t have a specific recollection of seeing the completed catalogue after it was printed, is that the position?’ Gyorffy asked.

  ‘We were printing and delivering fifty to eighty jobs a week. I only saw things when they weren’t correct after delivery.’

  ‘Do you know whether this catalogue was printed by your company at all?’

  ‘We were certainly commissioned to print it. It looks like the sort of thing we would have printed at the time.’

  James told the court that the film and plates used to print the catalogue ‘would have been destroyed within six months’, and he wasn’t sure whether he still had the transparencies of the photographs of Orange Lavender Bay.

  ‘Would you be prepared to make a search for them when you get back home to see if you can find them?’ Gyorffy asked.

  ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘And if the informant, Mr Stefanec, were to ring you, you’d be happy to talk to him whether you found them or not?’ ‘Absolutely, yeah.’

  ‘If you find them, produce them to him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  On 10 April 2015, more than three weeks after the committal hearing, Magistrate Suzanne Cameron handed down her finding in a concise, 15-minute hit. A businesslike woman of middle age, with short, greying hair, the magistrate had presided over the committal with sharp humour and an incisive mind, keeping the wrangling barristers in check. I had watched her carefully but could never tell which way she was leaning. My palms grew clammy as I listened to her summarise the defence and prosecution cases. Which story had she found more compelling? And how had she managed to digest all the evidence in so short a time, becoming art expert, hardware specialist and sleuth? I had been following the case for years, and still found it complicated.

  Five minutes in, the magistrate said the words Siddique and Gant did not want to hear.

  ‘The evidence is of sufficient weight for committal to trial and are matters to be properly considered by a jury.’

  Siddique’s son placed his hand on his father’s leg. Siddique bowed his head and cradled it in his hands. Gant barely flinched. He scratched his leg. Did they hear the rest of the magistrate’s spiel?

  The evidentiary threads listed in the magistrate’s finding were many and varied. Morel’s photographs ‘clearly’ showing paintings in progress. The completed paintings appeared to be ‘identical’ to the works ultimately sold to Pridham and Nasteski and produced as exhibits to the court. The timing of the photographs coincided closely with each work being offered for sale.

  Richard Simon’s doors, which exactly matched the dimensions of the paintings that were ultimately sold.

  Siddique’s purchase of frames from Antonio Rincon, who had learnt how to make Whiteley’s preferred water-gilded frames under Brett Lichtenstein, the artist’s main framer. Rincon’s identification of the frame on Big Blue Lavender Bay as one of his.

  Wendy Whiteley’s adamant and consistent argument that the two paintings she viewed were not original works by Brett Whiteley.

  Vanessa Kowalski and Robyn Sloggett’s unwillingness to attribute the works to the oeuvre of Brett Whiteley. The infra-red images of the orange and blue paintings they produced showing underdrawings that matched the underdrawings on the works produced in Siddique’s Easey Street studio. These images established ‘an important evidentiary link between the works produced at Easey Street and the works sold to Pridham and Nasteski’.

  Inconsistencies in the provenance stories attached to the paintings.

  Gant’s answers in the police interview conflicted with other evidence before the court, and his vagueness about the details of transactions that should have been uppermost in his mind. His assertion to police that there were ‘more wood ducks in Sydney’—or easier targets.

  The evidence of Rosemary Milburn and Jeremy James, which was not incontrovertible. The consignment book that had a number of irregularities between the 28 June entry and other entries. The A Private Affair catalogue that was also ‘full of weaknesses’. Mr James’s evidence, which did not establish that he ever saw the catalogue once it was printed in the late 1980s, his lack of records relating to the print job, and the fact he relied on Gant for the details about the paintings.

  Magistrate Cameron summarised, ‘There is not, as I have reviewed the evidence, a single piece of evidence before this court that could be categorised as truly independent of the accused, Gant, capable of establishing the purchase of the three subject works from Whiteley in 1988.

  ‘As with the evidence of Milburn, it would be open to a jury to reject Mr James’s evidence given its inconsistency with the large body of circumstantial evidence to the contrary.’

  Furthermore, there was no evidence to support the defence’s contention that Siddique had been creating ‘copies’ in his storeroom: ‘in fact, no evidence of works being painted alongside the original as one might expect if a true copy were being produced, a copy so accurate that even underdrawings not visible on normal viewing were replicated.’ An extremely pertinent point—would one really go to the extent of copying underdrawings as part of producing a copy of an original painting?

  The magistrate identified a significant point of tension that had recurred throughout the committal—the conflicting methods of the world of connoisseurship and that of the law. Richter had insisted on ‘hard science’ and absolutes from Sloggett and Kowalski, but their field of expertise, the magistrate said, combined both ‘scientific aspects’ and ‘other less tangi
ble measures’.

  ‘A difficult concept for those of us participants in the criminal justice system whose preference is always for a determinative forensic test yielding a yes or no answer,’ Cameron said.

  But even forensic evidence was open to subjective or statistical interpretation, and was frequently challenged in court, she said. Sloggett and Kowalski’s evidence was ‘not dissimilar to fingerprint evidence where an expert looks for points of similarity and when sufficient number are identified the expert is prepared to say there is a match’.

  Her comments would prove highly prescient.

  The magistrate concluded with the following remark: ‘I think it’s worth noting that throughout the brief of evidence there are numerous references to Mr Gant’s reputation in the art world and suggestions of other dubious dealings and transactions. I have not given these matters any weight in determination of the committal.’

  Had the magistrate taken these other matters into account, the court would have heard many colourful stories about Peter Gant.

  In the late 1980s, Peter Gant had a gun pointed at his head by a henchman sent by a client wanting his money back for a dud Russell Drysdale painting. It would not be Gant’s last encounter with underworld heavies seeking amends on behalf of unhappy clients. The associates of a well-known gangland figure would also one day come calling.

  In 1990, Gant was charged with deception for selling a John Perceval painting he did not own. He was acquitted in the County Court of Victoria in 1993. That year, Gant became bankrupt for the first time.

  In 1997, Gold Coast gallery owner Win Schubert took twenty-three supposed Charles Blackman artworks to the artist for authentication. Schubert had bought the paintings from Gant. Blackman said they were fake. Schubert returned all the artworks to Gant who refunded her money.

  In 1998, Gant appeared in a London civil court case in relation to seventeen Lalique glass car mascots that had been doctored to give them a rare purple glow and sold for £60 000 (A$164 000) each to motor-racing magnate Mansour Ojjeh.