Whiteley on Trial Page 9

  ‘It’s the power of orchestration on the one hand, and on the other it’s a mysterious X-factor that makes the work seamless. I find it very musical, it’s like a great symphony,’ Pearce said.

  Like all great symphonies, the painting worked as a whole as well as in the delicacy of its smaller passages and movements. Pearce zoomed in on the details, pointing out rain-like trickles of paint in the foliage of a tree, the thick daubs of paint on a small land mass, ghostly palm trees rendered in loose, sketchy brushstrokes, the neatly painted pelican trailing a thin white line, the bends and curves of the bay, the watery mass at times translucent, at others dark and dense. Whiteley had painted a rough white edge, like an impromptu frame, around the periphery of the canvas, and bits of white paint had hardened into lumps. It was these little accidents—lumps and trickles—and Whiteley’s free, calligraphic style, a fluidity honed over years of practice, that gave the best of his paintings their sense of movement and energy.

  ‘See, like this, here,’ Pearce said, indicating a translucent patch of blue. ‘The solvent gets very thin, you can see the texture of the canvas, and it’s just running down. A faker, how can they get that? It’s just part of the habit of the original artist. If you try to copy that, it starts to tell.

  ‘And when you step back and it gels together, those little details don’t matter, but they are still part of the magic gelling of the whole thing. A fake doesn’t give you that hit, that buzz.

  ‘The trouble is, if you get up in a court and start saying this, these vicious barristers will say, “What’s this crap you’re talking about?” They’ll say it’s some esoteric language. I would refuse to go into court because it is so traumatic when you get attacked by the barristers.’

  In 1986, Pearce was asked to give evidence at a court case involving a painting titled Kilindini, supposedly painted by the Australian impressionist Emanuel Phillips Fox in 1906. Sydney horseracing identity David Waterhouse had bought the painting from a dealer we have already met, Germaine Curvers.

  When Waterhouse became concerned about the painting’s authenticity, he brought it to Pearce for an opinion. Pearce, who had no idea who the young man was, looked at the little seascape painting and told him that he felt sure that the ‘dull little work’ was not by Phillips Fox.

  ‘I’m not an expert on Phillips Fox. I was only giving my immediate response to it when David brought it in,’ Pearce told me. ‘I said it’s too sludgy and it doesn’t look relaxed, it doesn’t have the style of Phillips Fox paintings. But we only had a few in the collection; I couldn’t proclaim myself as a specialist, which I can with Whiteley.’

  A few days later, Pearce was visited by a woman ‘huffing, puffing and bristling with indignant confidence’. She introduced herself as Germaine Curvers and said that David Waterhouse was taking her to court over the Phillips Fox painting that Pearce had viewed and condemned. Curvers had a local art critic in tow, George Berger, and the two insisted the painting was correct and that Ruth Zubans, a Melbourne art historian and expert on Phillips Fox, had confirmed its authenticity.

  After the two left, Pearce immediately contacted Zubans in Melbourne. Zubans, who had written extensively about the artist, thought it plausible that Phillips Fox had painted the work. Pearce deferred to her expertise. He asked Zubans if she could come to Sydney for the court case. Zubans said no. Pearce was left with no choice but to attend court as an expert witness—Curvers had him subpoenaed.

  The court case was Pearce’s first involving fakes, and he would not forget it. During his appearance at the Castlereagh Street Court, Pearce kept referring to Zubans’s opinion, and to that of another expert he had consulted, Stephen Scheding, who had also seen the painting and thought an attribution to Phillips Fox was not unreasonable. But the magistrate insisted that Pearce had to give his own opinion, and that was all that counted. When Pearce continued to vacillate the magistrate asked him to estimate the percentage of his certainty. At this point, Pearce made his ‘fundamental mistake’—he tried to calculate the average of his, Zubans’s and Scheding’s opinions. He told the magistrate he was ‘80 per cent’ certain the work was authentic. Far too generous, he now told me.

  ‘Germaine Curvers won. She sent me a big bunch of flowers—turned up at my door,’ Pearce said.

  ‘She said, “Oh thank you, Barry, thank you, Barry; the judge said, well, as there’s no certainty about this picture, the case is dismissed.” I still feel bad about it. And sometimes David would come in and say, “Why did you do that, Barry?” He was really hurt. That was the worst experience I ever had.’

  Pearce had not been asked as an expert witness in the upcoming Whiteley art fraud trial. But he was ‘100 per cent sure’ that the two suspect paintings he had seen—Orange Lavender Bay and Big Blue Lavender Bay—were fake.

  ‘No doubt whatsoever,’ he said. ‘It was so obvious. I was sent a very good, high-resolution image of them. I could fill out my whole Macintosh computer with them, and I saw them in detail. I just knew straight away they were fakes. I don’t usually give an opinion based on photographs, but they were so bad on the screen I was just happy to say they’re not by him, I don’t even have to go and see them.’

  The paintings were ‘clunky’, he said, they lacked the subtle shifts of texture and transparency of genuine Whiteleys, the colour key was not quite right, the shapes and composition were laboured and the ‘pace’ was all wrong.

  ‘Pace is one of the keys to authenticity and Whiteley painted with such speed,’ Pearce said. ‘A faker is trying to get that to look right at a slower pace, and you can tell. I could tell when I saw it on the computer and the pace was just real labour.’

  During the committal hearing, the defence argued that the suspect paintings were examples of Whiteley having a ‘bad hair day’. Pearce dismissed the idea. The ‘bad hair day’ line was an excuse used by those who wanted to peddle fakes, he said. All artists had ‘bad hair days’, he said: ‘I’ve seen terrible Bretts, I wouldn’t spit on them, and if he was back living today he would probably burn them.’

  But even Whiteley’s mediocre works bore the mark of the artist, he said. The composition might not have been resolved—it might have been too crowded or too claustrophobic—but the signature handling of paint was there. Pearce acknowledged that Whiteley works had many elements that would give confidence to a forger—the repeated motifs, such as shaggy palm trees, little white boats and jacaranda trees, and the use of paint thinned down with mediums such as Liquin or poppy seed oil to create a transparent effect.

  ‘If you do the research you probably think, well, I can have a go at that. But it’s the accidents and the non-conscious style of the artist that’s very difficult to replicate,’ Pearce said.

  ‘I haven’t yet seen a fake Whiteley that’s good enough for me to be 50 per cent or 60 per cent. The ones that I’ve seen I have no doubt and I’ll stand up until the day I die saying “this is not a Brett Whiteley”.’

  Soon after Gant and Siddique were charged, Pearce received an abrupt phone call from a lawyer representing the defendants. He couldn’t remember the caller’s name, but he remembered the request—Pearce was asked whether he would testify that the suspect paintings were genuine.

  ‘As soon as I said, “Look, I have 100 per cent certainty they’re fakes,” they just hung up on me. I told Wendy about it. Wendy was furious. I was never consulted from that point, at any level, on that case. I was more than happy to declare my opinion.’

  Our next stop was Surry Hills, an inner-city suburb known for its fashionable cafés, boutiques and design stores, and as the home of the Brett Whiteley Studio. Located down a narrow side street, the building was a former t-shirt factory that Whiteley bought in 1985 and converted into a studio and exhibition space. He lived and worked there for the last four years of his life.

  ‘It was less hipster in his time,’ Pearce said when we arrived in Surry Hills. ‘I used to bump into him in a Japanese restaurant in Crown Street, but he wasn’t a happy man then
. There was a divorce going through.’

  I asked him about Janice Spencer, Brett Whiteley’s girlfriend after his separation from Wendy, who he had met at Narcotics Anonymous. What was she like?

  ‘Sweet, very sweet person,’ Pearce said.

  Spencer came to the opening of the Art & Life retrospective, and the ‘Whiteley women’ froze her out.

  ‘No-one would talk to her, so I talked to her, just because I felt so sorry for her. Weeks later, I bumped into her, she said, “I’m so thankful that you spoke to me, that’s the kindest thing anyone has ever done.”’

  At number two Raper Street, the studio’s entrance was marked by Whiteley’s well-known sculpture of two giant matches—one straight and unused, ready to blaze, the other blackened and spent. The work seemed a metaphor for Whiteley’s life. An austere wooden door opened to the ground-floor gallery that was used for changing exhibitions of Whiteley’s works. Here we’d come to see Big Orange (Sunset), another of the artist’s famed Lavender Bay paintings that appeared to have been used as inspiration for the suspect Orange Lavender Bay. The painting had what some might describe as ‘impeccable provenance’—it once belonged to the Australian author and Nobel laureate Patrick White, a serious collector of Whiteley’s works who eventually gave it to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Big Orange (Sunset) was a huge work, 2.4 metres high and 3 metres wide, and overwhelmingly orange, not the most soothing of colours, although Sandra McGrath, in her book on Whiteley, described it as a ‘tender and passionate commitment to his new mistress’—that is, Lavender Bay. Pearce was far less rapturous. He confessed that he didn’t really like the work. He didn’t linger over it the way he had with The Balcony 2, seemed keen to move on, but quelled the urge and spent a few moments pointing out typical Whiteley traits: reflections on the water rendered in quick, loose brushstrokes, the changing texture of the orange harbour, the big sweeps and curves of paint, the liquid movement.

  ‘If we could get that fake orange picture and hang it alongside, and do the same with the other, it would be very, very evident, even to an untrained eye. But the advantage the forger has is there’s no chance of these things being seen together,’ Pearce said.

  We indulged in the idea of Big Orange (Sunset) and The Balcony 2 being transported to the Supreme Court of Victoria and shown to the jury alongside the suspect paintings.

  ‘You almost wouldn’t have to say anything,’ Pearce said. ‘You’d say, there it is.’

  We walked upstairs, to Brett Whiteley’s studio, which had been left as though the artist might walk in at any moment, pick up a brush, and start painting. The studio floor was splattered with paint. An empty cane chair—Whiteley’s chair, immortalised in his 1976 painting My Armchair—sat facing the artist’s midden: a messy cluster of brush-filled jars, paint tins, spray cans, solvents, ink, a tangle of every imaginable art tool. The studio’s whitewashed brick walls were graffitied with inspirational quotes, written in pencil by Whiteley. ‘The moment you are no longer a child, you’re already dead’—Brancusi. ‘Don’t follow leaders an’ watch the parkin’ meters’—a lyric from the songwriter he idolised, Bob Dylan. Newspaper clippings and photos were stuck to the walls: images of Dylan, a young and glamorous Wendy, the couple’s beautiful blonde daughter Arkie, Whiteley posing with the celebrities of his day—Francis Bacon, Bob Hawke, Malcom McLaren.

  I felt as though I had entered an adolescent male sanctuary. There were no photos of Janice Spencer. She had been erased. Not so his addiction. The Heroin Clock, which Whiteley made in 1981, hung on a wall. It was actually two clocks: one reading twenty to ten, the other with numbers scrambled. All the relics of Whiteley’s bohemian, hero-worshipping, pretentious, self-mythologising and self-destructive life. Pearce didn’t much like thinking or talking about Whiteley’s personal life—he’d rather focus on the art.

  ‘It’s a bit like enjoying Mozart’s music without being distracted by the annoying shit he was in real life,’ he said. ‘I’m in love with Brett’s paintings, but I don’t give a flying fuck about all the other stuff, really. I just want to look at the paintings. I think, boy, you got it, you cracked it. I think Brett needs to be reassessed. He will be reassessed, because I think he’s a true genius.’

  The art market never doubted it—and forgers prey on what the market desires. But market recognition was not the sort that Pearce valued. He had no respect for collectors greedy for status symbols rather than quality.

  ‘I think there’s an infatuation with the name Whiteley, and that’s a deadly thing. There’d be collectors who would say, “I just want a Whiteley, I want the label.” He made some gawky, pretty vulgar paintings, but they don’t care because they want the name. They want the brand.’

  For Pearce, Whiteley at his best would always be more than just a luxury label.

  Later, I emailed Pearce to ask whether Whiteley would have been creating Lavender Bay paintings in 1988, more than a decade after the original series, and at a time when he was no longer living at Lavender Bay. Pearce replied that it would have been ‘extremely unlikely’.

  ‘It might be claimed, of course, he could respond to a demand for such works for quick commercial return, but he never indulged in that kind of cliché rehash, never as far as I know. In fact, he despised artists who did. Besides, around 1987–89 he was inspired by other motifs, landscapes of south and west New South Wales, Japan, Paris et cetera, and perhaps above all, Birds,’ he wrote, referring to the 1988 exhibition of bird paintings held in the Surry Hills studio.

  ‘Yes, he did revisit a mode of abstraction near the end for a brief while, but of a quite different syntax to the 1960s, and the theme of rivers and flora and fauna was a constant from the early 1970s, but never a rehash in the sense that may be being claimed for those Lavender Bay fakes. For that reason, even if they were much more convincingly painted, I’d still have trouble accepting them as authentic.’

  Nonetheless, Whiteley apparently did return to the Lavender Bay theme in 1991, a year before he died, with View from the Sitting Room Window, Lavender Bay, the painting Peter Gant bought at auction and that was pictured in Guy Morel’s photos of Aman Siddique’s locked storeroom, seemingly being used as a guide for the suspect paintings. I mentioned it to Pearce.

  ‘Perhaps Brett was indeed desperate enough in 1991 to make what seems a rare rehash that goes against my view of his integrity of vision, which explains the clunky, self-conscious quality of the painting; and gives it an uncanny kinship with the two fakes in question. Brett’s heart, at his wit’s end, and ill with his addiction, was clearly not in it.’

  ‘I’ve seen them all now, I’m the only one who’s actually seen all of them, I believe,’ Brett Lichtenstein told me the next morning. All three suspect Whiteley paintings in the flesh—including Lavender Bay through the Window, or as it was otherwise referred to Through the Window Lavender Bay, before it vanished.

  It was a drizzly Sunday; my last appointment of this Sydney trip. The harbour was a misty, melancholy grey, just like the paintings I had seen at Wendy’s. Lichtenstein and his partner Melissa Lock picked me up from my Potts Point hotel and drove me to a breezy café in nearby Rushcutters Bay for breakfast. Ginger-haired and balding, with a warm, melodic voice, Lichtenstein was instantly likeable—affable and a talker. His stories took the long, scenic route and constantly slid off on tangents: his mixed heritage, his travels, his showbiz dad, his glamorous mum who shared a birthday with Brett Whiteley. Both Aries, he told me, born on 7 April.

  ‘On her birthday we always toast Brett,’ he said. ‘I think that’s one of the reasons I could work with him. If you believe in any sort of astrological thing, there would have been a bit of synergy.’

  His parents had a tempestuous relationship and Lichtenstein, an only child, was the calming influence in the family—a role that seemed to have extended into other adult relationships. He was eager to please, a ‘softie’, Melissa said. He was also clearly devoted to Whiteley for whom he worked for sixteen years from 1976 until t
he artist’s death. He had framed somewhere between 400 to 500 of Whiteley’s paintings.

  ‘It was my addiction,’ Lichtenstein said. ‘His was heroin, mine was working with him. I loved his paintings, I loved his artwork, I really did,’ he told me.

  Lichtenstein was sixteen years old and living in London with his parents when he first fleetingly met Whiteley. It was 1973 and his father, Peter Lichtenstein, who went by the nom de plume Lance Peters, was about to launch a play in the West End. A shy adolescent, Lichtenstein greeted the artist, who was by then in his thirties, and that was the extent of their exchange. He couldn’t have predicted the significant role Whiteley would play in his life. His father, who sounded quite the character, did most of the talking. An actor, writer, radio broadcaster, political speech writer and producer, Lance had been president of the Australian Writers’ Guild and part of the ‘TV: Make It Australian’ push of the early 1970s. His many writing credits included one of the last of the British ‘Carry On’ films—Carry On Emmanuelle—and his final film was 1993’s Gross Misconduct, starring Jimmy Smits and a very young Naomi Watts.

  Lichtenstein did not follow in his father’s footsteps: he would become known for another craft, his meticulous, 23-carat-gold, agate-burnished, water-gilded frames—Whiteley’s frames of choice. Water-gilding is a traditional, labour-intensive technique: many preparatory layers of gesso and a clay called ‘bole’ are applied to a timber frame before the final application of loose gold leaf squares that are laid down wet, left to dry for several hours, and then finely polished to create a surface that glistens like solid gold.

  In late 1975, after four months of travelling through Africa and the Middle East, unsure what to do with his life, Lichtenstein returned to Australia and had to decide. In 1976, he began working with Sydney master framer Charles Hewitt, who introduced water-gilded frames to Australia and counted Brett Whiteley and Russell Drysdale among his clients. Lichtenstein learnt the craft and in 1978 started his own business, inheriting Whiteley as a client. The artist was exacting—and Lichtenstein was happy to oblige.