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Portrait of a Killing
A true story of power, art and crime in France

Chapter 4 : The High Standards Christie's Employed

On the first of July, an urgent telex concerning the Murillo arrived at Gregory Martin's office in King Street. The director of Christie's bureau in Geneva, Hans Nadelhoffer, was warning Martin: "[I] had a telephone call from a Mr. Celotti in Vevey [Switzerland]. [He] apparently showed you the Murillo in September 84. He claims that the picture rightfully belongs to a Mme. Suzanne de Canson." Nadelhoffer added: "I did not mention that the picture is withdrawn

Nadelhoffer, whose discretion was legendary, had behaved carefully and well. Martin knew plenty of reasons not to give Celotti any information about the Murillo. First of all, Celotti had indeed offered the picture to Martin in the fall of 1984, on behalf of an unnamed owner. But a few months later, Joelle Pesnel had shown up in Geneva with the picture, and Martin had subsequently dealt directly with her. Perhaps she was the owner Celotti had represented, and he was angry over losing his commission on the deal.

But Celotti's message contained a worrisome detail: the name de Canson. That name had indeed appeared in the Murillo's provenance. Whether or not this de Canson still had a claim to the picture was another question.

Martin telexed the news to Duminy, who disgustedly wrote back: "Of course I can't judge whether or not [what Celotti says] is true." Then Duminy dutifully, wearily telephoned Madame Pesnel at her hotel on the Mediterranean coast, and told her about it.

"I am indignant," she roared. "Everything Celotti says is a lie."

So you say, thought Duminy. He regarded Pesnel as full of surprises, none of them good.

On July 2, a matter of vital importance to Christie's came up in the Superior Court of New York. At stake was nothing less than the company's right to fail to meet its own optimistic promises to a client.

The affair dated from the night of Tuesday, May 19, 1981, when David Bathurst, the handsome, slender, easy-speaking son of the second Viscount Bledisloe and chairman of Christie's New York bureau, stepped down from the spotlit podium of the Park Avenue saleroom in defeated anxiety. His third major Impressionist auction in a year had inexplicably veered into disaster. All the right buyers were there, the same people who had shouted out a world record $18.3 million in bids for Henry Ford's Impressionist collection in May 1980. But tonight, only one picture out of the eight confided to Christie's for auction by a Swiss art investment consortium called Cristallina Limited, had found a buyer. A fine Gauguin, two excellent Van Goghs, a Monet, a Renoir, a Cézanne and a Berthe Morisot had been stiffed. Bathurst had fallen catastrophically short of the $12 million total he had predicted to Cristallina's president, Dimitrio Jodidio.

To his horror, a reporter on the scene challenged him to explain why the art market had "collapsed." Bathurst panicked, perhaps because the market was collapsing. Christie's pretax profits had dropped a third (to about $7.5 million) in the past year, a worse slump than the auction crash that followed the world oil crisis of 1973-74.

Swiftly he and his sales director, Christopher Burge, came up with a lie: The sale total wasn't one out of eight sold, Bathurst announced, but three out of eight. Which, he added, "isn't bad." And that was how it was reported in the media.

At first, Dimitrio Jodidio acquiesced in Bathurst's lie. It wasn't in his interest to announce that no one wanted his Impressionists. Stiffed pictures could lie dead, so far as the market was concerned, for years before anyone bid for them again. But then Jodidio asked Bathurst to make up some of his loss in the sale. And when Bathurst refused, Jodidio filed suit against Christie's for fraud, negligence, and breach of contract, asking $5.5 million in compensation, plus triple punitive damages. He was claiming far more than Christie's profits in most recent years.

Bathurst had since been named chairman of Christie's flagship London bureau, a prelude to assuming the direction of the entire company. On this July 2, 1985, he filed an affidavit in which he admitted lying about the Cristallina sale results. But Bathurst argued that he had thereby managed "to maintain stability in the art market[,] which might have become depressed if the public immediately discovered that only one painting was sold." In short, he defended his lie as something of a public service.

It had apparently not occurred to him that Christie's, a company which sold stock to the public, had an obligation to report its sales honestly to investors. Bathurst's lie was exactly the art-world equivalent of General Motors faking its quarterly sales. It could fairly be called a serious fraud, and in any other business it would be. Moreover, if Bathurst's lie were indeed as effective as he claimed, taxpayers had been bilked of millions of dollars, because artworks had been sold to public museums at inflated prices over the past few years.

Judge Eugene Wolin, however, was not asked to rule on such matters, and he threw out Jodidio's case. With the market for Impressionists exploding, it seemed doubtful to claim, as Jodidio did, that no one would ever again buy his property at its proper value. Bathurst had lied to his clients, the press, and the stock market, and apparently got away with it.

Nonetheless, the whole story was now in the public record, waiting for some enterprising reporter to look it up. Christie's was sitting on an armed bomb.

What concerned Gregory Martin on July 4 was a telex from Joelle Pesnel: "Sale of the Murillo painting Sevillian Gentleman maintained at London on 5 July 1985 at 14 hours. Ministerial accord." Duminy knew nothing of the matter when Martin called him. Lombard, Pesnel's lawyer, had blandly confirmed to Martin on July 2, by telex, that he "took note of [Christie's] decision [to pull the Murillo from the sale]." Now it looked suspiciously as if Lombard were negotiating directly with his friend Jack Lang, the Minister of Culture, behind the backs of Christie's and the Louvre.

Duminy was obliged to phone Lombard and ask point blank what Pesnel was talking about. Nothing, Lombard insisted. "Of course we can't sell the picture until the situation with the Louvre is cleared up," he told Duminy.

But later that day, Pesnel telexed Martin: "Refusal to bring painting out of England. Leave painting on exhibit. Will telephone tomorrow morning. To keep informed of talks Louvre." Either the woman was entirely out of control... or Lombard was indeed trying to cut a separate deal and leave Christie's in the cold.

At this exact moment an inspector from Her Majesty's Customs and Excise contacted King Street, and asked to speak with whoever was responsible for the sale of a Murillo on July 5. Her Majesty's official explained that a formal request for action had been received from the French Customs administration in Paris. According to the French, the Murillo had been illegally exported from France, and it was urgent that its sale be cancelled. Was Landais breaking his promise not to unleash Customs against Christie's?

The company's secretary general and top legal official, David Allison, told the inspector that the picture came to Christie's from Switzerland, and he had no information regarding its exportation from France. (Such information was indeed known to top executives of Christie's, if not to Allison, but in any case, this was not the time to discuss it.) However, Allison added, "We've withdrawn the picture from the sale, and our lawyer in Paris is discussing the matter with the Museums of France." Her Majesty's Customs and Excise went away and did not call back.

Madame Pesnel went silent, too. The July 5 sale went off without her Murillo.

Then Bathurst's bomb exploded.

On July 7, the Associated Press put the news of Bathurst's affidavit on the wire. It took another three days for the London papers to confirm (or believe) the news that an auctioneer and gentleman had lied like a rug merchant. Suddenly, Bathurst became front-page news in New York and London, as the reporters he and Christie's had treated like obedient heralds turned on him in a pack. On July 11 Christie's share price in the London stock exchange tumbled a whopping 17 percent, "as the market began to wonder," reported the London Times, "if fudging the figures has happened since 1981." In New York, the Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) weighed the suspension of all auction licenses for Christie's personnel in the city - a step which would deprive the company of access to the world's biggest art market. For the second time in a month, Christie's stood on the brink of disaster.

Quickly, coldly, Bathurst was sacrificed to save the company. On July 13, Christie's chairman of the board John "Jo" Floyd declared that he and his colleagues took "the gravest view of this isolated lapse from the high standards of conduct that Christie's employs," calling the fraud an "error by Mr. Bathurst." (In fact, according to the memoirs of a top Chrstie's executive, Floyd had personally condoned Bathurst's "lapse" at the time it occurred.) Bathurst accepted his fate like a gentleman, in discreet humility. On July 18, he resigned from the board of Christie's International, and left the company.

The next day, the DCA fined Christie's $80,000, but let it stay open in New York. Instead, Bathurst's license was suspended for two years, while his partner-in-fantasy Christopher Burge's license got off with a suspension of four months. DCA commissioner Angelo Aponte boasted on the front page of the New York Times that he had just sent "a very clear signal to the art world that they are going to have to clean up their act." That remained to be seen.

Christie's could console themselves that Sotheby's looked no better. That same week, Sotheby's agreed to pay out a total of $2.2 million in settlement of civil claims in New York, charging the firm  with "persistent fraud and illegality" in the sale of 21 rare Hebrew books on June 21, 1984. The books were widely known, before the sale, to have belonged to the Jewish Cultural Institute of Berlin, which was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. How they had suddenly appeared in America was unknown.

Despite public pleas from Jewish groups and New York State Attorney General Robert Abrams, Sotheby's refused to reveal the owner's name, or to justify his title to the books. That was smart marketing, because the scandal clearly contributed to making the sale a smashing success. However, thanks to Abrams' post-sale lawsuit, the owner was revealed to be a retired Jewish seminarian. He claimed that he'd been promised the books in exchange for smuggling them away from the Nazis. Of course there were no witnesses or records to back his claims, because the Nazis destroyed them all. By the same token, Sotheby's argued, no one could prove their client wrong. True enough, but that put the house in the position of seeming to exploit the Holocaust for profit.

Faced with defending that stance in open court, Sotheby's agreed to recall the books from their buyers--an extremely rare event in the auction trade. But as a Sotheby's spokesman crowed to the New York Times on July 16: "We haven't had to change any of our policies." The house's right to sell objects to which no written title existed had been preserved in the settlement with Abrams.

Even more important, so had the unique privilege of client confidentiality, the right of an auctioneer's client to appear simply as "a lady" or "a gentleman." No other market of comparable magnitude offers its clients such freedom from disclosure. In a single night at auction, tens of millions of dollars can change hands, in deals where neither sellers nor buyers are obliged to reveal their names. Incredibly, that fabulous asset was rooted only in bygone genteel traditions, which dictated anonymity for noble bankrupts forced to sell off their family heirlooms. Sotheby's had been wise not to expose this singular privilege to further public and judicial scrutiny.

The auction houses weren't out of danger yet. From her podium in the London Times, saleroom correspondent Geraldine Norman called on Parliament to wipe out the auctioneers' privileges. "By hiding their activities behind a cloak of 'client confidentiality'," she warned, "they can get away with practices that would not be tolerated in other markets." In Manhattan, the DCA planned hearings on reforming the auction business, as the New York Times sneered: "Some auction houses do business rather like houses of another kind, with large mirrors and loose morals."

It was against this background of outrage, in a house shocked by the loss of its heir apparent, on July 19, that Gregory Martin received another letter about the Murillo - one he could hardly interpret as anything but a grave menace. It was written by a Swiss lawyer named Francois Pidoux, who evidently knew the embittered Mr. Celotti.

Pidoux repeated, in awful detail, the charge that the Murillo sale "pose[s] some problems concerning the identity of [its] owner.... In effect, it was held by a lady, Suzanne de Canson, until the month of December 1984. I personally saw it in a bank of Vevey, and other people, including your expert, Gregory Martin of Christie's, also saw it."

Then it got much, much worse: "Right now Madame de Canson, who is an aged person, has arrived at the home of one of my acquaintances without any money, and saying that she doesn't know what someone has done with her paintings. I therefore can't understand how this Murillo could end up [in Christie's sale with another owner] when it seems to still be owned by Madame de Canson...."

Now came the threat, barely veiled: "To avoid all litigation, I believe that it is urgent to determine in what manner, and subsequent to what events, the said painting could find itself in your catalogue."

The Swiss lawyer attached another dreadful document - a letter Martin had written in October 1984, shortly after he accepted Celotti's invitation to look at the Murillo in Vevey. Its deliberately allusive, vague language did not conceal, for any informed reader, Martin's clear understanding that the picture he'd been presented was smuggled goods. Referring to the fact that Angulo Iñiguez's Catologo Critico named a Frenchman as the Murillo's most recent owner, he had told Celotti, "Christie's cannot be of any help to you or your client. I strongly recommend that the matter is regularised. [Then] Christie's will be... of every assistance." He had since been of every assistance, though not to Celotti. And the matter was still anything but "regularised."

Martin worriedly telexed Duminy in Paris, demanding that Pesnel's lawyers "provide us with proof that there is no reason to doubt [her] title for sale." Despite all his research into the Murillo's provenance, Martin had neglected to confirm that his client actually owned the thing. If what this Swiss lawyer said were true, Christie's had advanced Pesnel $80,000 for a picture that really belonged to some destitute old lady. They'd also promised the picture to the Louvre, a promise that it might now be impossible to keep.

Suppose this de Canson woman filed a lawsuit, and these letters were revealed, and Hubert Landais learned that Martin and Duminy had indeed known the picture was smuggled?

And suppose the press got hold of the story again... and the stock market realized that Christie's was in serious trouble in two out of its principal markets?

And what if Geraldine Norman's warnings about the evils of client confidentiality were taken up by a pack of reformers, armed with yet another scandal?

Would anyone consider this just one more isolated lapse from the high standards of conduct Christie's employed?

Click here to read Chapter 5.

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