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| ISBN-13: | 9781927249529 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Awa Press |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 208 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Gold from Goldies
IN 2008 A RETIRED COUPLE, Bill and Phyllis Gibson, decided to sell their house in Mosgiel, south of Dunedin. Sometime between July and October that year a portrait by C.F. Goldie that had been hanging in their house disappeared. At first the Gibsons didn't notice the painting was missing. It had been on a wall behind a door in a spare bedroom and the thief had cleverly hung another painting in its place.
The missing portrait was of a Maori woman with a moko, a traditional facial tattoo; she was looking back over her shoulder, and her hair was tied back. The painting had been in the Gibson family for more than six decades, having been given to Phyllis Gibson's parents by the artist as a token of thanks for their care and teaching of Maori in south Taranaki: her father had been a teacher in the Waitotara area and her mother a nurse.
According to the couple, the only inscription on the back was a note about the gifting. It read something like: 'In appreciation of B. Whiteside's work with Maori in Waitotara Area. C.F. Goldie.' As is often the case with domestic art collections, neither the title nor the date of the painting was recorded. In fact there was no actual evidence of the painting's existence. Since it had been a gift there was no record of purchase, and as it had stayed in the same family the entire time there was no paper trail of provenance. And the work had never been photographed.
The timing of the painting's disappearance led the owners to conclude it had probably been stolen during an open home when their house was on the market and visited by potential buyers and interested onlookers. Unfortunately, the real estate agent who had organised the open homes had moved on, and the agency had not retained the list of visitors that would have been collected at the time.
Once the media were alerted to the story, a television channel hastened to interview Bill Gibson. The case had all the ingredients of a good story – a Goldie painting, a brazen theft, a real estate open home and an elderly couple. In hindsight, it is likely the attention was detrimental to the chances of solving the crime: publicity like this can dissuade a thief or handler of stolen property from trying to sell the goods, making it more difficult for the police to track them down and apprehend those responsible. The Gibsons had provided a good description of the painting, and they hoped that if it had been offered for sale to a dealer gallery or through an auction, the police would learn of it. In the event, the painting has never been seen again and its fate is unknown.
WHEN NEWS OF THE THEFT reached the public, Roger Blackley, an art historian and eminent Goldie scholar, noted that the artist's paintings regularly went on holiday, a polite way of saying they are regular targets for thieves. Charles Frederick Goldie, born in Auckland in 1870, is often considered New Zealand's greatest nineteenth-century artist. As a young man he travelled to Paris and studied art at the Académie Julian. On his return he began painting finely detailed portraits of Maori kuia and chiefs. These portraits were enormously popular and remain so today. Goldie was a master salesman, even producing carefully crafted studio photographs that romantically depicted the artist at work with his sitters.
Goldie has been referred to as New Zealand's Rembrandt – an apt comparison since deception also figures largely in that painter's story. Those who have tried to establish a complete catalogue of Rembrandt's work have found that the number of authentic paintings is somewhere between 250 and 350, half the number previously thought. The discrepancy is explained by the number of assistants Rembrandt had working for him and painting in his style. His pupils also emulated his style.
Similarly, Goldie's oeuvre has been difficult to catalogue with absolute certainty. In his 1997 book on the artist, Blackley warned there was no comfort to be had from information adhered to the reverse side of Goldie paintings. 'It should be noted,' he wrote, 'that several of the forged Goldie paintings that have appeared in recent years [have] come complete with such a label, itself a forgery of Goldie's distinctive script.'
Goldie was one of the few artists of his generation to make a comfortable living from his art. His studio in central Auckland was conveniently located for his patrons, and for his customers, who included tourists visiting the city by ship. He regularly took as subjects Maori who were attending hearings at the nearby Native Land Court and were introduced to him by Robert McVeagh, a solicitor fluent in Maori who often attended hearings at the court. Commercially astute, Goldie paid his sitters a meagre fee and regularly copied his own works.
As Goldie's career developed he took up opportunities to exhibit overseas. In the early 1930s three of his paintings were shown at the Royal Academy in London, and he exhibited regularly with the Salon de Paris throughout the decade. This made his work even more desirable and Goldie did not shy away from pricing it at the high end of the market. At the 1904 Canterbury Society of Arts annual exhibition both portraits he put up for sale had price tags of more than £27 while oil paintings by other artists were priced at less than £10. One of Goldie's contemporaries, Sydney Lough Thompson, who also painted Maori portraits and had trained in France, was much less financially successful. In 1910, when both men exhibited at the Canterbury Society of Arts, Goldie's Tikitere Mihi, a portrait of an Arawa chief, was priced at £73.10.0 and Thompson's Aged Warrior at only £50.
Goldie's painting technique required little deconstruction by the viewer. His portraits, which carried titles such as Forty Winks, Planning Revenge, A Hot Day and A Noble Relic of a Noble Race, were formulaic in both composition and choice of palette. Their heavy black frames, made of native timbers, harked back to Rembrandt and the Dutch golden age and were designed to project an 'old master' image. Because the paintings are such prototypes, when one goes missing its owners can usually supply very little information that will identify it: their descriptions could apply to many Goldie portraits. However, as Ngahiraka Mason, the former curator of Maori art at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, has suggested, Goldie's portraits provide an irreplacable record of ancestors.
Today many collectors assume a Goldie painting is a safe investment, as buyers did a century ago. The works are easily recognisable and resale is almost guaranteed. They regularly hit the headlines for the prices fetched at auction, and these are often the highest in a sale. In 1984 Peter Webb, an art auctioneer, predicted that any Goldie portrait had the potential to sell for more than $100,000. Four years later one sold for $110,000. In 1976 it had sold for $18,000.
In 1991 the National Art Gallery – now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa – helped push up the value of Goldie paintings when it paid an astonishing one million dollars for a pair of 1903 portraits, Ina Te Papatahi, A Ngapuhi Chieftainess and The Widow (Harata Rewiri Tarapata, Ngapuhi), known colloquially as Darby and Joan.
Goldie paintings continued to appreciate. In 2008 Auckland's International Art Centre reported that its top five sales were Goldie portraits. Prices ranged from $165,000 to $400,000. In the same year another auction house, Dunbar Sloane in Wellington, sold A Noble Relic of a Noble Race, believed to be Goldie's last painting, for over $400,000. Even at a time of economic recession, the sale reached the top end of the estimated reserve. The subject, Wharekauri Tahuna, a Ngati Manawa and Tuhoe priest and chief, was believed to be 102 years old when he sat for Goldie, and is the subject of three other Goldie portraits, two of which are in Auckland War Memorial Museum and Te Papa respectively. In March 2016, the painting sold for $1.3 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a New Zealand painting.
In 2010 the internationally renowned opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa put Forty Winks, a Goldie portrait of Rutene Te Uamairangi from her personal collection, up for sale. In its announcement of the coming auction, the International Art Centre mentioned the work's remarkable provenance: it had been owned not only by Dame Kiri but also, until 1948, by Goldie's wife, Olive. As Dame Kiri had been just four years old in 1948, the painting must have had at least one other owner but this was not mentioned. Perhaps the name of the other owner, or owners, had not been recorded. This lack of a complete provenance did not deter buyers. The sale attracted considerable media hype and the painting fetched $573,000.
FOR AN INVESTOR with little specialist art knowledge, a Goldie painting is seen as a dead cert. When in 2009 the Auckland Art Gallery announced that American millionaires Julian and Josie Robertson had gifted it a valuable art collection that included works by Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin and Mondrian, the prime minister, John Key, was quick to point out that Goldie was his favourite artist. He would, he said, rather have a Goldie than a Picasso or a Cézanne. Many purchase a Goldie work with the intention of onselling it and making a tidy sum. A Tauranga grocer told me he had purchased a Goldie portrait in lieu of a pension fund. He might be lucky – or not. Like many investors, he could have unknowingly purchased a forgery or stolen work.
In the six decades since Goldie's death, criminal activity has swirled around the artist's work. The catalogue of thefts demonstrates the lengths to which perpetrators will go. On September 7, 1973 two works – Memories, Te Hei, A chieftainess of the Ngatiraukawe (1909) and Pipi puzzled (1919) – were stolen from the National Art Gallery in Wellington. Both portraits were hurriedly removed from their frames and the thieves made a rapid exit. At the time each work was valued at $6,000. They were subsequently located after a Taupo police detective, Rex Hawkins, received information that they were being offered for sale in the area.
George Packwood, the curator of the National Art Gallery, wrote about what happened when he helped police retrieve the paintings by posing as a well-known art historian, Gordon Brown.
Arrived at Rotorua 12 midday and was taken in rental car to Wairakei. At Huka Falls, met the rest of police and plans were outlined. From there proceeded to Wairakei Golf Club, where we stayed until 3.45 p.m., and then on to Wairakei Hotel, where a room was booked for me to pose as expert on Goldie paintings. After a short time a man was brought to the room carrying a pillowslip from which two packages were taken. One of these contained the two Goldies, which were given to me to inspect. The man who brought the pictures in informed me he knew they were genuine because they came from the Auckland Museum. ... I said I could not guarantee the Goldies as the real thing. The buyer said he would not take them under these circumstances. ... As soon as he had gone the police were informed ... and the man was arrested.
The Goldie works had sustained minor damage when they were cut from their frames. On December 1, Phillip Wayne Allen was charged with stealing the two paintings. The informant was paid $1,200, a considerable sum at the time.
Public reaction to the crime was mixed. Many people were appalled that paintings had been stolen so easily from a national institution, but someone distributed a flyer that proclaimed: 'They've gone missing! Isn't it marvellous!' Possibly the person simply didn't like Goldie's work, but he or she may just as well have viewed the artist as a ruthless entrepreneur who made a good living out of painting Maori sitters while paying them poorly. Feelings towards Goldie's work have always been mixed.
THE SAME YEAR the National Art Gallery's Goldie paintings went missing, another opportunist set to work at Auckland Grammar School, a prestigious boys' secondary school that had been founded in 1868 and attended by Goldie himself. A Goldie painting The Dignity of the Maori Ngaheke, also known as Perira Te Kahi, had been gifted to the school in 1948 by Eliot Davis, a former student, prominent businessman, member of the Legislative Council, and racehorse owner. The painting hung in the school hall. In 1973, perhaps as a result of media coverage of the National Art Gallery heist, it was stolen, although it was later returned.
On February 9, 1987 the school's art collection was again targeted and, as well as an early lithographic print of a Maori chief from a Goldie portrait, three other valuable works were stolen: Portrait of Sir George Grey by Louis John Steele (an oil painting measuring 500 x 450 mm); A View of a West Coast Gorge by John Barr Clark Hoyte (a watercolour, 600 x 350 mm); and Eleven Forty-Three and Still No Sign of the Train by George Baloghy (acrylic on canvas, 920 x 615 mm) dated 1981. The total estimated value of the works was around $55,000. All had been removed from their frames.
The Baloghy painting was found soon afterwards in a gutter on the corner of Shore Road and Burwood Crescent in the suburb of Remuera. It had been folded eight times so it resembled a small package. Neither the Hoyte nor Steele work has ever been found.
The Dignity of the Maori Ngaheke was not taken this time, but it is not unusual for a work to be stolen repeatedly. Jan van Eyck's multi-panel masterpiece Ghent Altarpiece, completed in 1432, has been stolen from its home in Ghent's Saint Bavo Cathedral seven times, including by German forces in the First and Second World Wars. It has also been burned, forged, illegally sold, and attacked by iconoclasts. One panel is still at large.
In 1981 a Goldie painting, The Scribe, was stolen from the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt. The theft, which was reported in The Evening Post, exposed problems with the Dowse's security system: the perpetrator had taken the painting from an unlocked temporary storage space in an area with supposedly restricted access. The gallery was unsure when this had happened and admitted the painting may have been missing for as long as two months. Local auction house Dunbar Sloane had valued The Scribe at $15,000 to $20,000. According to the Dowse it was the first piece of art to go missing from the ten-year-old gallery.
Three days later a rendezvous was orchestrated between police and a third party. The Evening Post noted that 'the party who returned the painting would not be the basis of the police enquiry'. No one was ever charged with the theft.
Embarrassingly for the gallery, it did not own the stolen painting but was caretaking it for a private collector. How well a work is secured and protected from damage, vandalism and theft can be integral to attracting gifts and loans for public collections. To protect a work fully a museum or gallery may need to place stanchions and safety glass around it and alarm it individually, as well as have security staff patrolling the exhibition space. This can be achieved in large institutions, but smaller regional galleries are typically constrained by their budgets.
And there's another problem: barricades around an artwork can diminish the experience for viewers, and uniformed security guards make an exhibition space seem uninviting. Such issues are international. London's Dulwich Picture Gallery has had a small 1632 Rembrandt portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III stolen four times – in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983 – because it cannot provide the level of security required. Known as the 'Takeaway Rembrandt', the painting is so well known to the public that any thief would have great difficulty selling it and any purchaser would have to be extraordinarily careful when exhibiting it. However, this does not seem to lessen its appeal as a target.
The Mona Lisa, arguably the world's most famous painting, was stolen by a misguided Italian patriot in 1911 (he was caught two years later and the painting returned), and has been attacked several times, including being sprayed with red paint in 1974 and having a cup hurled at it in 2009. The bulletproof glass installed to protect it has kept Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece undamaged.
THE RATE OF RECOVERY of stolen Goldie paintings is small and this is consistent with art theft worldwide. In December 2013 The Art Newspaper reported that internationally as little as 1.5 percent of all stolen art is recovered, although the rate is higher for famous works because of the difficulty of reselling them. As artworks are original and irreplaceable, there can be more value placed on their safe return than on punishing the criminals. Deals behind the scenes are common. While some thieves steal a work for their personal pleasure, others plan to use it to bargain their way out of another crime, or to make a political gesture.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Penelope Jackson.
Excerpted by permission of Awa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Front Cover,
Title Page,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Foreword,
Introduction,
ONE Gold from Goldies,
TWO The forger,
THREE The Macchiaioli affair,
FOUR Caveat emptor,
FIVE The loss of Psyche,
SIX Urewera Mural,
SEVEN All in the family,
EIGHT Lot No. 60,
NINE Pania of the Reef,
TEN For love of Elena,
ELEVEN The copycats,
TWELVE Holden heist,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgements,
Endnotes,
Sources,
Illustration credits,
Further reading,
Photos,
Index,