The Rescue Artist

18

Money Is Honey

If the Russborough House thefts have a moral, it is that the lure of big money is only one of the reasons that thieves steal big-time art. But none of the other reasons—the notoriety, the thrill, the thieves’ urge to flaunt their contempt for the patrons and collectors of art—would ever come into play if great paintings did not command stunning prices.

The giant numbers skew everything. “The first thing you have to understand about the art world,” Charley Hill likes to say, “is that, with a very few exceptions, including me, everyone’s a crook.” This is, in part, a joke. In small part.

Hill lives in a black-and-white universe, and he contemptuously dismisses the commonplace view that the world is composed largely of honest, hardworking folk. Whether in politics or history or society at large, he sees a swarm of crooks and con men and cheaters and backstabbers and hypocrites, with, here and there, a hero.

For a man with Hill’s preconceptions, art is the perfect field. Revolving around hugely desirable, one-of-a-kind objects whose value is in large measure a matter of opinion, the art world’s upper tiers are a natural home for vanity, envy, and greed. Moreover, the art market is a virtually unregulated, anything-goes bazaar. In short, it is a stage for the human comedy in its most rambunctious and delectable form. “I live in a world of bollocks and bullshit,” Hill says. His lament would carry more weight if he did not so plainly revel in what he professes to regret.

In Hill’s jaundiced view, Ulving and Johnsen were merely the latest unsavory characters he’d run across in a field beset by scoundrels and renegades. Many of the top-end players all but acknowledge that no one is quite as high-minded as he seems. They are more likely to quote than to fret about the old joke that the art trade is made up of “shady people peddling bright colors.” To protest in indignation would be to proclaim oneself a novice and a rube, close cousin to the playgoer who rushed onstage to wrest a knife from the villain.

“One knows perfectly well that it has been rubbish all the time,” remarked Peter Wilson, for more than twenty years the chairman of Sotheby’s. “When I go and advise someone to sell their picture because now is the moment to sell it, and they’re going to make more money than they’d ever dreamt of, and there’s never going to be another moment like this, I know that I’m giving them the wrong advice. I should be telling them to keep their picture, because isn’t that what we are telling our buyers—that now is the ideal moment to invest, and that they should all be buying?”

The rich have always collected art, but the money frenzy that now surrounds great paintings is something new. Even the highest prices from past centuries, when translated into today’s dollars, fall far short of modern records. One key reason, the critic and art historian Robert Hughes points out, is that the idea of art as an investment scarcely existed before the twentieth century. “One bought paintings for pleasure, for status, for commemoration, or to cover a hole in the ancestral ceiling,” Hughes remarks. “But one did not buy them in the expectation that they would make one richer.”

Today that expectation—or, at any rate, that hope—is central. But if art is also business, it is a singularly strange business. Fashion and chance play central roles. A year before his death, van Gogh wrote a letter to his brother thanking him for his latest loan and boldly claiming, “I dare swear to you that my sunflowers are worth 500 francs,” which would be perhaps $500 in today’s dollars. No buyer agreed. In 1987, in a frantic auction at Christie’s, a bidder acting on behalf of Japan’s Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance purchased van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $39.9 million.

Everything can hinge on a name. Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents sold in 2002 for $76.7 million, at this writing the fourth highest price ever paid for a painting. For over two centuries, the Massacre was thought to be the work not of Rubens but of one of his followers. The family that inherited it in 1923 disliked it so—it depicts infants torn from their weeping mothers and slammed against the ground—that they tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it. Finally they lent it to an Austrian monastery, where it hung for decades in a dim corridor, ignored. Only in 2002, when the eighty-nine-year-old owner tried once again to find a buyer, was the painting properly identified. In the monastery, the painting hung in such darkness that the Sotheby’s specialist who attributed it to Rubens had to wield a flashlight.

When the simple equations of supply and demand run head-on into the complexities wrought by human psychology, they emerge from the collision bent and twisted. High prices in the art world, for instance, may serve not as a deterrent but a lure. Record-setting prices, one New York dealer explained, work “like a magnet.” For buyers, high prices confirm the value of the objects they are chasing. For sellers, high prices draw new objects to market. In the apt words of the late art dealer Harold Sack, “Money is honey.”

The result is topsy-turvy bragging, where people boast not about unearthing a bargain but about spending a fortune. One New York art dealer claimed not long ago to know people who wanted to spend $1 million on a painting and weren’t particular about which one. The discovery of this quirk was perhaps the key to the success of the most famous art dealer of all, Joseph Duveen, whose glory days were the early years of the twentieth century. “Duveen’s clients preferred to pay huge sums,” his biographer observed, “and Duveen made them happy.”

Such tackiness is not reserved for rubes. In 1967, when the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., purchased Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra Benci for $12 million, the museum’s director, John Walker, pointed out that “the cost per square inch of paint… is the greatest in the history of collecting.”

For similar reasons, stolen-and-recovered paintings tend to command higher prices after their return than before. What endorsement could be more sincere, after all, than someone’s decision that a painting deserved stealing?

The great boom in art crime came with the skyrocketing art prices of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1961, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $2.3 million for Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, the price set a record that more than doubled the previous high. Time magazine put the painting on its cover, and the story of the “million-dollar Rembrandt” dominated the front page of the next day’s New York Times.

Thirty years later, at the peak of the most recent art frenzy, $1 million would seem like small change. On the evening of May 15, 1990, in an overflowing room buzzing with chatter in half a dozen languages, Christie’s auctioneer opened the bidding for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet at $20 million! From there, bids increased at $1 million increments. Five minutes later, the portrait sold for $82.5 million. Two days after that, Sotheby’s auctioned off $300 million worth of paintings in an hour.

Even the pros seemed awed by the new world that had emerged. “We have moved into a whole new set of prices,” Christopher Burge, the president of Christie’s in the United States, told the Washington Post. “A $1 million sale once was thought scandalous and shocking—then it was $2 million, then $5 million, then $40 million. The $2 million Renoir has become a $6 million picture. The $6 million Renoir is now worth $20 million, and the most important of his paintings would go for a lot more.” (In 1868 Renoir traded a portrait for a pair of shoes.)^*

An economics writer for the New York Times could only shake his head and marvel. “Great Impressionist canvases, worth as much as Rolls-Royces in the 1970s,” he wrote in February 1990, “now trade at parity with Boeing 757s.”

Through the rest of the 1990s, prices dropped from those record highs. Then, in the spring of 2004, another symbolic barrier fell. In an auction at Sotheby’s in New York City, in front of a large and buzzing crowd, an anonymous bidder purchased Picasso’s Boy with a Pipe (The Young Apprentice) for more than $100 million. The painting depicts a young boy dressed in blue, wearing a garland of red roses. Picasso painted it at age 24, in 1905. His world-renowned paintings would come later. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon dates from 1907, for example, Girl Before a Mirror from 1932; Guernica from 1937. Boy with a Pipe—”a pleasant, minor painting,” in the words of one Picasso scholar—is not of that rank.

But unlike Picasso’s masterpieces, which belong to museums, Boy with a Pipe was available to anyone who could meet the price. The bidding opened at $55 million and rose, for eight minutes, in $1 million increments. It passed $60 million, then $70 million, then $75 million. At $80 million, a new bidder joined in. In the end, the anonymous winner paid $104.1 million.

News like that draws crowds, and the crowds are not composed entirely of solid citizens.