Whiteley on Trial Page 7

  Stein began to see that unlike Whiteley works of known authenticity, Orange Lavender Bay lacked fluidity and movement in the brushstrokes and mark making. It had none of the vigour, spontaneity, texture and artful accidents of known Whiteley works. The composition of Orange Lavender Bay—its placement of Whiteley-style iconography such as palm trees, birds, boats and piers—was controlled, contrived and pastiche-like. Not everything Whiteley did was a masterpiece, though, ‘far from it’, he said.

  ‘Look, Whiteley had bad days in the office, really bad days. Wendy will tell you that. Some days he was smacked right out of his head and so desperate for a hit that he would just paint a painting and sell it. But there’s a difference between a “bad” painting and one in which the hand of the artist is so obviously missing,’ Stein said.

  As for the man accused of painting the allegedly fake Whiteleys, Stein first encountered him after Siddique’s arrival in Australia from England in the early 1980s. Siddique’s credentials were impressive—he had studied at London’s Chelsea School of Art and The Courtauld Institute of Art, and had moved to Australia to take up the position of painting conservator at the Regional Galleries Association of Victoria Conservation Centre in Ballarat, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive north-west of Melbourne.

  ‘All those years ago, when he first came out from England I felt that he was one of the brightest, he certainly had a lot of energy, he was amazingly resourceful and he was damned good at what he did. The outcome on pictures was really, really good,’ Stein said.

  Back then, Siddique was exemplary in other ways too—he shared his knowledge with fellow conservators, as is expected in the profession.

  Siddique published papers, gave talks and lectures, and held workshops. He gave one particular talk that Stein vividly recalled. It centred on the creation of a vacuum hot table, a highly specialised and hugely expensive machine used in restoration for the lining of paintings.

  ‘In the dissemination of information, he gave us a talk on how he made this hot table. I think that was at Ballarat, in fact, I’m sure it was at Ballarat. It was a hundred per cent Aman gig. It was a lot of bravado, it was a bit of chest beating. He is clever, he wanted everybody to know how clever he was,’ he explained, still sounding stunned by Siddique’s ingenuity.

  ‘He did things that other people wouldn’t dream of doing. He became famous for doing something that most conservators don’t want to do, but also don’t know how to do: splitting paintings.’

  This is done in the case of artists painting on both sides of a board, such as masonite.

  ‘And I asked him, so how do you do it? And he said, “Oh, it’s easy.” And this is the ingenuity or the resourcefulness of the man. He said he’s fashioned an electric knife, like the ones we used to cut bread with. He said he’s made an electric knife with an industrial motor with which he can split masonite. He also purportedly said that he could split canvas. There are paintings that have been painted on both sides. He said to me, he has no problems in splitting a canvas. And I thought, how do you do that?’

  Siddique was known for having split some double-sided works by Charles Blackman. But just how far was he prepared to go with his resourcefulness? While Stein might have watched Siddique’s ingenuity with fascination, and perhaps envy, he didn’t question the man’s basic honesty, not even when the rumours started.

  ‘Even now when we talk about him, I find it difficult. I like people, I’m not suspicious of people. I take people at face value, so even now I struggle.’

  He noted, though, that Siddique displayed some strange behaviour.

  ‘He has a massive chip on his shoulder. Years ago, he used to always say to me, “Can’t you feel it?” I said, “Feel what?” He said, “Can’t you see that they’re against us?” I said, “Who’s against us? What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, you know, we’re black.” I said, “Aman, I’m not black, you might be, I’m not,”’ Stein said, laughing, but without malice.

  The laughter quickly ended: ‘In all seriousness, he had an absolute paranoia about his ethnicity.’

  Stein acknowledged that Siddique’s mistrust about people’s motives was understandable. Born in Uganda, Siddique’s family origins were Indian, and he would have experienced the rise of Indophobia which culminated in dictator Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asian Ugandans in 1972. Siddique left Uganda with his brothers two years earlier. In England, too, he was made aware of his racial difference—I had heard stories about him being told that he would not succeed in that society because of the colour of his skin.

  Stein mentioned another trait that I kept hearing about Siddique: his constant complaining about business and that he wasn’t making enough money.

  ‘In fact, when I would ask Aman over the years “how’s business?”, he would invariably say it was crap, “terrible, terrible”. He would say Melbourne University is destroying his business. It was a conspiracy, the conservation world was out to get him. The institutions were out to get him. Everybody was out to get him.

  ‘He used to talk to me years ago about wanting to start a McDonald’s because it made more money than conservation, which I didn’t argue with. So he was always after the buck. Aman is very money hungry.’

  Over time, Siddique seemed to become more and more reclusive. In the late 2000s, the rumours started, and finally, he was charged.

  ‘I’m in shock. I think I still am in shock,’ Stein said.

  The photographs showing Brett Whiteley–style works in progress at Siddique’s studio were a ‘smoking gun’, he said.

  ‘I don’t know how Aman’s going to get out of that one.’

  Stein was not alone in thinking so. I’d heard many others say the same thing, but we were yet to discover just how deftly the criminal courts could demolish what seemed, to the lay person at least, like indisputable evidence.

  We turned to talk about the forensic reports conducted on the alleged fakes, prepared by the very woman Siddique considered his nemesis and competitor: Robyn Sloggett. Despite Sloggett’s claim that paint samples from the alleged fakes did not behave as 20-year-old oil paint should, Stein agreed with Robert Richter’s argument that solubility tests were tricky and could not be taken as conclusive evidence, particularly when it came to contemporary paintings.

  ‘I’ve got paints that are forty years old that are still soluble, it’s not enough,’ he said.

  ‘There are paint mediums here that are fifty to sixty years old. Paints can become soluble as a result of so many different things. If you’re talking about an eighteenth-century work or a seventeenth-century work or even a nineteenth-century work and you’re looking for something specific, then you can categorically say that it’s a fake. Titanium white was not around in 1700.’ The pigment’s first known use was in 1920 and so it could be used as a marker to determine whether a painting was genuine or not, he explained.

  ‘When you’re talking about contemporary paintings, it’s much harder to find something that will be conclusive. Stylistic evidence becomes more important,’ Stein said.

  More convincing, he went on, were the alleged fakes’ ‘stiffness’ of style, or the extensive underdrawings revealed by infra-red reflectography conducted by the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. The centre’s infra-red reflectography also showed that the underdrawings matched the drawings seen in the photographs of the paintings in progress taken by the whistleblower Guy Morel. The centre’s report recommended comparing the underdrawings of the suspect works to known works by Brett Whiteley. It was another piece of the puzzle that I imagined Sloggett and her team would pursue before the beginning of the trial.

  ‘If Whiteley was applying a boat or a palm tree, he wouldn’t have done any underdrawing, he would have gone for it Caravaggio style,’ Stein suggested.

  ‘Drawing and line is his strong point, but in doing a painting like a Lavender Bay, I think he just went for it. This is where the question “would a conservator be the best forger” comes into it—a good conservator wou
ld be aware of those sorts of things. If I was going to forge something, I would be aware of not doing too much underdrawing if I was doing a Brett Whiteley. But if I was doing Conrad Martens I would probably do a lot of underdrawings. It depends on who you’re trying to forge. As a conservator you’re looking at paint layers, and the application of paint layers, very closely all the time, and it becomes like a signature. Every artist’s handling of paint becomes very idiosyncratic.’

  But how do you discuss something as intuitive as an artist’s ‘signature style’ in a court of law where method and science are favoured? At the committal hearing, Magistrate Suzanne Cameron predicted the difficulties ahead.

  As far as Stein was concerned, when it came to art fraud, the victims were not primarily those caught up in scams, losing big money on possibly worthless works. ‘The victim is Australian art, because in twenty years’ time, there will be no Aman, there’ll be no me,’ he said, alluding to the mortality of all affected by the case. The product of forgers, however, would live on, corrupting Australia’s cultural history, unless it was discovered and destroyed.

  ‘There’ll be nothing other than a whole bunch of friggin’ paintings that have a question mark over them, that can’t be taken out of the system, won’t be taken out of the system, and they’ll continue to go around and around, and cause nothing but problems for the Australian art market.

  ‘We’re not talking about a blue painting and an orange painting. We’re talking about a stack of paintings that are out there, that have been for the past fifteen years at least, that are in people’s homes, I believe on some museum walls, and they’re there, they’re out there.’

  Stein would not be the last to suggest that these three dubious Whiteleys were the tip of the iceberg.

  The next day, I headed to Lavender Bay, to see the view that stirred the most lyrical of Brett Whiteley’s paintings, to visit the house where so much happened. Where Wendy and Brett lived, fought, loved, created, partied, raised a child, lost themselves in the hell of addiction and where Wendy continues to live, the sole inhabitant, the sole survivor.

  I was surprised to be going. A week before I was due to travel to Sydney—hotel booked, flights booked—I rang Wendy as I had promised to confirm my arrival. She attempted to cancel, sounded flustered, cranky, said she didn’t have time, that she was busy with the soon-to-be-published book about her ‘secret garden’, that she had nothing more to say about the art fraud case. I scrambled for a response, somehow convinced her to stick to our plans, told her that I didn’t need all that much of her time, that all I wanted was to see that view, for myself.

  As I headed to Lavender Bay on my allotted Friday afternoon, I feared that she may have forgotten, that I might appear at her door and she would refuse entry. Anything was possible with Wendy. The prospect of interviewing her was always unnerving.

  I was staying in Potts Point and walked along Darlinghurst Road to Kings Cross Station. Vacant-eyed women slouched idly in doorways, weasel-faced men sauntered nearby, beggars slumped on the footpath. It was two stops to Town Hall, a change of trains, and another two stops to Milsons Point, to another world, crossing the bridge to the North Shore, quite the event for one accustomed to Melbourne’s unspectacular city grid. I got off, left the station, walked down Alfred Street, and turned into the relative quiet of Lavender Street. Some 50 metres or so along, the bay—Brett Whiteley’s bay—came into view, as intoxicatingly beautiful as his paintings suggest, a small, curved inlet, one of the many coves that make up the geographical marvel of Sydney Harbour. Attached to the city and yet secluded, spared, to some extent, from overdevelopment, Lavender Bay is an urban hideaway. From here, one can look back towards the city, across the water bobbing with yachts, to the bridge and the onion-bulb domes of Luna Park with its Ferris wheel and vertiginously swinging pirate ship. The scene seems an apparition as much as an actuality, a mirage indelibly entwined with Whiteley’s dreamy, sinuous visions of it; it exists in the imagination perhaps even more vividly than in real life. The eye cannot help but view it from Whiteley’s perspective. Perhaps for this reason I was moved, overcome as I took in that glorious view, loaded with associations and memories, including my own—past lives, travels, loves. The bay, Whiteley’s bay, seemed to exist in a continuum of time. He famously described it as ‘optical ecstasy’ but it was Whiteley himself who turned us on to its hallucinatory power.

  From Lavender Street I turned into Walker Street and headed left down the steep, shadowy steps leading to Wendy’s house. She lives at the very bottom of the street, at number one, in the house she, Brett and their 5-year-old daughter Arkie moved into in 1969 on their return to Australia, after they had fled the chaos of New York for the tranquillity of Fiji. The family lived on the island for five months: Brett exhibited his work for the local people in a friend’s barn, and, in a less salutary turn, was fined fifty Fijian pounds for possessing half an ounce of opium. Such have been the vagaries of the Whiteleys’s well-documented lives.

  I spotted her before I spotted the house. She was standing at the top of an external stair, conspicuous in her flamboyantly wrapped headscarf, dressed in a long black top and black pants, a minimal Japanese aesthetic, comfortable, flowing, dramatic. ‘Her art was her appearance,’ Brett Whiteley’s sister Frannie Hopkirk wrote of her in the 1996 book Brett, and the words retain their truth. She was barefoot, a striking figure, hovering at her doorstep, overseeing her domain. As a young woman her rebelliousness earnt her the nickname ‘Mad Wendy’. She refused to conform, still does.

  A man was leaving, I wondered who it might be. They saw me; I had no alternative but to walk up to greet them, even though I was half an hour early. It was Ashleigh Wilson, arts editor of The Australian, who was writing a new biography on Brett Whiteley. An unauthorised biography exists, published four years after Whiteley’s death, by Margot Hilton and actor–writer Graeme Blundell. Whiteley: An Unauthorised Life is a sensational portrayal of the volatile relationship between Brett and Wendy, an unwavering account of their peccadilloes, infidelities, addictions and arguments, the bitter divorce proceedings, Brett’s sad, solitary death in a motel room in Thirroul, New South Wales, and the subsequent battle over his will. I was told the book had infuriated the ‘Whiteley women’.

  Wilson bade us goodbye and I nervously mumbled an apology to Wendy, explaining that I didn’t realise the train ride would be so swift. I offered to explore the garden for half an hour and return, but she beckoned me in. I entered into one of the most serene and beautiful interiors I have seen—I recognised the aesthetic as that which pervades Whiteley’s paintings of Lavender Bay interiors. The palette was restrained: whitewashed floors and walls, black and white sofas with contrasting black and white cushions, African and Asian artefacts, Brett’s paintings exclusively on the walls, everything placed just so, and yet seemingly organic, as though it had grown in the room just like the trees in the garden beyond. The feeling was that of space, air, peace—no residue of any of the difficulties that arose during Brett and Wendy’s tumultuous twenty-seven years of marriage. The only strange touch was a couple of long, undulating wall mirrors that distorted reality, transforming it into a curved, Whiteley-like parallel world.

  So much had happened in this 4-storey house, with its landmark tower that watches over Lavender Bay and overlooks the luxuriant garden that Wendy began to nurture after Brett’s death, in her grief and despair attacking the overgrown weeds and dumped rubbish, transforming a neglected, derelict patch of public land into a terraced oasis.

  Guarded and curious, Wendy invited me to sit at the kitchen table, afternoon sun filtering through venetian blinds. Her face, unforgivingly marked by time and a life of extremes, has remained compelling. It is no longer the ‘miracle of nature’ that a friend once pronounced it, but the Prussian blue eyes that caught Brett’s attention when he was just seventeen, and she fifteen, have retained their defiant spark. Like the bay, Wendy exists in the reality and the imagination—she is the woman before you and the
languorous muse that inspired so many of Brett’s paintings: Wendy Sleeping, Wendy on Cushions, Portrait of Wendy, Wendy Drunk 11pm. And simply, Wendy. The woman who, according to Hopkirk, was the only person that came close to getting a handle on her precocious, prodigious brother. I remarked on how beautiful this space and setting was and Wendy agreed, telling me she was ‘addicted’ to it, which was why she rarely travelled these days.

  Wendy made coffee and cut generous slices from a small, round carrot cake, while quizzing me about the book, wanting to know how I would approach the upcoming court case. I told her about my nascent themes: art-world greed, self-interest and money. She questioned the idea of ‘greed’ as the motivating factor for those who fake art, telling me about an interview she had listened to a few days earlier, between broadcaster Michael Cathcart, from the Radio National program Books and Arts, and American art historian Noah Charney, author of The Art of Forgery, published in 2015.

  ‘He said quite defensively to Cathcart that very often it wasn’t about money and greed, it was about ego and them trying to convince people that they were as good as, if not better than, the original artist,’ she said.

  Wendy’s visual flair was evident in every corner of her perfectly curated Lavender Bay home: alternating blue and white towels draped over a steel rack in her attic bathroom, tribal bouquets of large seed pods dangling over her bed, her collection of bangles placed just so in glass cabinets, her famous hats perched all in a row on black velvet mannequin heads. Wendy’s former lover, the singer, songwriter and poet Michael Driscoll once remarked that the house was ‘her work of art, her pièce de résistance, the centre of her life’.

  Numerous renovations have changed the house dramatically since the Whiteleys first moved there in 1969, renting the first floor, their friend the architect Rollin Schlicht and his family living on the ground floor. What was now a spacious, open-plan area was once, as Wendy put it, ‘a series of small, quite pokey, very dark rooms’. But the house even back then held its appeal, in this quiet, rundown, unknown part of Sydney. ‘Arkie was quite anxious to stay in Australia and we just kind of looked out there …’ Wendy said, nodding towards the bay.