Читать книгу The Last Leonardo - Ben Smith Lewis - Страница 11

Squinting at a computer screen one day in his home office, Alex Parish discovered the Salvator Mundi. It was listed for sale in an online catalogue of an obscure auction house in New Orleans, the St Charles Gallery. This was in 2005, three years and a few months before Robert Simon would board his flight to London carrying the painting under his arm. Parish thought the picture looked promising, and the price was so low that it was worth taking a small risk. He remembers: ‘I had a recollection of a similar thing that had come up with Sotheby’s a few years before. I bought the picture because I know this is just the sort of thing other people like to speculate on.’ He contacted Simon, who had himself also spotted the picture, as he subscribed to the gallery’s mailing list and received a hard-copy catalogue by post. Parish suggested they buy it together, fifty-fifty, the same way they had jointly bought many works before. Simon agreed.

Until he discovered the Salvator Mundi, Parish was a small-time Old Masters dealer whose career in the art world had been full of false starts, along with the treadmill of low-value backroom sales.

The art world has a glamorous image as a global nomadic court presided over by latterday kings and queens – the blue-chip gallerists (gallery owners), artists whose work fetches million-dollar-plus auction prices, and multi-millionaire collectors, around whom swarm smaller galleries and dealers and emerging artists. In the second half of each year the entourage moves en masse from art fair to art fair: Basel, the FIAC in Paris, TEFAF in Maastricht, Frieze London, the Armory and Frieze New York, Hong Kong, Miami, taking in auctions in London and New York on the way, in a blaze of parties and packing cases.

And yet, this is only the sparkling surface. Behind the scenes are many other people who are not born into riches, who do not have a large designer wardrobe or a taste for high society, and who are drawn into the art business not so much by a love of art, which everyone gives as their primary motivation, but by their hunger for an experience much more exciting, akin to gambling or hunting for buried treasure. For them, the attraction is the exhilaration of buying a painting from the first show of an unknown graduate artist, in the hope that five years later he or she will be part of a group show in a public institution. Or, as is the case in our story, coming across, after years of searching, an old painting ascribed to a third-rate provincial school but which, they believe, might be by an artist of great renown.

Such successes are far from guaranteed. Like any other industry to which people are drawn by the glow of fame and fortune emanating from those at the top, the art world has a very narrow peak of achievement and a wide base of footsoldiers, bottom-feeders and also-rans. One of those at the base of the hierarchy was Alex Parish. As he himself says, ‘I’ve been down to a suitcase more than once in my life.’ Born in 1954 into a lower-middle-class American family, he majored in art history at Ohio Wesleyan University and then moved to New York, where he worked in the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art. He left after two years and tried unsuccessfully to set himself up as a dealer, but ‘through a combination of zero training, zero initiative, a certain amount of youthful lack of discipline, etc., I ground to a halt after a few years’. He went to London in the early 1980s and took a one-year course in the art market, not at a prestigious establishment like Sotheby’s Institute of Art, but at a private school, the New Academy for Art Studies, run by art historians Lucy Knox and Roger Bevan. When he returned to New York, he worked for a while in another gift shop, this time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then ‘begged to get the shittiest job at the shittiest auction house in New York City, and managed to do it. I worked there for two years and ended up writing their catalogue.’ While he was there he succeeded in identifying an interesting-looking undervalued painting that had been consigned to auction, the kind of painting known in the trade as a sleeper. The Salvator Mundi can well lay claim to being the greatest sleeper ever discovered.

The painting Parish spotted was a seventeenth-century Dutch pastoral scene, which he brought to the attention of the renowned Old Masters gallery Colnaghi. It was a gesture that displayed an appropriate combination of knowledge and ambition. Colnaghi took him on, and he worked for them in New York for two years, from 1980 to 1982, but not in a high-profile position. It was not an easy business in those days, he recalls. ‘No one was selling old Italian pictures or English pictures, or anything like that, in New York at the time.’ After a couple of years he went to work for Christie’s. It was another low-paid job, but he was becoming increasingly fluent in the lingo of art market insiders: ‘I was essentially the guy on the floor, taking the pictures into the back room, black-lighting them [putting them under an ultraviolet light to show up how much over-painting had been done], turping them down [cleaning them with turpentine], showing them to all the trade [that is, not to private collectors but to dealers and gallerists, who usually get the first look at new arrivals].’ He had one further invidious task: ‘I was the one who always got sent down to the front counter to tell people that their van Dyck was really not what they thought it was, and thank you for coming.’

At Christie’s, Parish found once again that he had a talent for spotting sleepers. ‘I was working late one night in 1985,’ he remembers. ‘I was the only person around from my department, and a picture came in. I got a call from a girl downstairs, “Please come take a look at this painting before you leave.” I went down and there was an enormous picture, four feet by six feet, with a couple of mirrors, just dropped off by some picker.’ A ‘picker’ is a dealer-middleman who buys from myriad regional auctions, from the estate sales of deceased collectors and from antique shops across the United States, and then takes the works to New York and consigns them for sale, hopefully for a higher price. ‘I looked at it, and I was like, “Oh my God, this could be by Dosso Dossi.”’ You need a thorough knowledge of sixteenth-century Italian painting to know a Dosso Dossi when you see one. He is one of those few artists, like El Greco or Gustave Moreau, who seem to exist outside history. His mysterious paintings of obscure allegories and mythological scenes, featuring magicians, pygmies and unicorns alongside the more conventional array of saints and madonnas, all bathed in the gentle, golden evening light of Venice, reach forward from the Renaissance to the Primitivism and Surrealism of the twentieth century.

‘So I told the girl, “Don’t tell anyone about this. It could be worth $100,000,”’ Parish told me. ‘And I called my boss, who was still over at the main building, and I said, “I think there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And he was totally dismissive. “Shut up. Get back to work.” End of story. What was I to say? I’m just a flump. He was an expert. So I totally forgot about it. About two weeks later, I’m in a meeting with someone, and I get a call from him and he says, “Oh my God, there’s a Dosso in the warehouse.” And I’m like, “Yes.”’ Parish’s deadpan indicates a life full of rejections because he didn’t come from the right social strata for the art world.

Experiences like these led Parish to an epiphany. ‘The pickers and runners would arrive at Christie’s with a truckload of paintings, and I would value each picture. I’d look at what they had and it was like, “No, that’s $4,000. That’s $2,000. We don’t want that, we don’t want that, we want this.”’ He could see that most of the runners did not know enough about art history to know what they were buying. ‘I saw a gap in this supply chain for someone who had the knowledge to go out and look in the backwaters of America.’

So he set himself up once again as an independent dealer, specialising in Italian painting. Once again, it didn’t work out. It was still difficult to find buyers for the Italian pictures he unearthed. In the meantime, his wife gave birth to triplets and he moved out of New York to a larger house. He now had a large family and a small income. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, buying old paintings and then ‘shovelling’ them through the auction houses. It was around this time that he became a born-again Christian, a highly unusual commitment for someone in the art world.

Help came around 1996 in the form of a phone call from the largest Old Master dealership in the world, founded by Richard Green. Green has galleries on Bond Street in London, but was looking for someone to find paintings for him in the United States. ‘In their heyday, they were flipping,’ says Parish – using another art market term, this time referring to fast-turnaround buying and selling – ‘something along the lines of six hundred pictures a year – two hundred at fairs, two hundred through their galleries and two hundred through auctions.’ Parish worked for Green’s son Jonathan, who told him, ‘Go and look for pictures for us.’

Jonathan Green sent Parish into the hinterlands of America to scour auction houses, estate sales and remote regional galleries for promising works of art. ‘I needed to be trained at first, because I didn’t know anything about the breadth of merchandise they bought, but it turned out to be a happy marriage because I didn’t hugely affect the bottom line there,’ Parish told me, indicating that his salary was modest. Meanwhile, his contract permitted him to buy and sell works of art for himself on the side, although a gentleman’s agreement meant his employer got first refusal. In addition to travelling, he subscribed to trade newspapers and catalogues, going through them and asking for Polaroids of any pictures that looked promising. But, he says knowingly, ‘Within a few years the digital revolution totally reinvented this business.’

At the time, the United States was awash with paintings whose value their owners did not have a clue about. From the late nineteenth into the middle of the twentieth century, American collectors had ‘vacuumed up’ European Old Master paintings, usually buying from impoverished European aristocrats whose wealth had been eroded by the recessions of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, and by the two World Wars. ‘All the Americans were desperate for class, and all the Europeans were desperate for money,’ says Parish. This was the era in which the precursors of today’s billionaire art collectors, robber barons like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon and John Rockefeller, amassed peerless collections which later formed the foundations of the country’s great museums. But less prominent middle-class families also collected. The paintings they bought were often unsigned and in poor condition. Over the years they had been damaged, become the victims of misguided restoration, and been passed down from generation to generation until they reached the hands of people who weren’t interested in art. ‘These pictures were finally starting to bubble up into the market.’

Thus was born a perfect storm of lightning-fast information technology, surging supply and deep demand. Parish was a like a meteorologist who tracked the new commercial climate. ‘There was this frontier in terms of Old Masters, where all these pictures were coming up and no one knew what they were being sold, and I was looking at that frontier.’

Parish acquired from a colleague a database of five thousand auction houses across America. He whittled the list down to about a thousand that sold paintings. If the auction houses didn’t upload online or send out hard-copy catalogues, Parish got on their electronic mailing lists and asked for jpegs of anything that looked interesting. ‘I was in a tiny office, surrounded by books, and I spent – I’m not kidding you – fourteen hours a day going through this thing. Hunting, hunting, hunting. I mean, literally: click, click, click, click. I was not going to let a picture sell in this country that I didn’t know about.’

Soon Parish was buying a painting a week for Green, using this database. Green requested ‘sporters and nautical’ (that is, paintings of sporting scenes and sailing ships) or ‘Victorian and silks and satins’ (eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraits of noblemen and ladies dressed in expensive fabrics). The art market had embraced the online database, and Parish was poised to show what a powerful tool it could be.

Parish often turned to other dealers he trusted, like Robert Simon, to share the financial risk of buying works in which Green wasn’t interested.* At his peak Parish was holding stakes in up to seventy pictures over the course of a single year, taking 50 per cent, 33 per cent, and occasionally 25 per cent shares in the purchases. It was a very hit-and-miss business. ‘If I had a picture for $1,500 and it brought $15,000 at auction, then that to me would be like, “Hallelujah!” I had a couple of years in a row where I would land one picture, be it for $500 or $5,000, and it would come back at about $100,000. It was really great. I think I did that three or four times in a row.’ But there were also times when pictures Parish bought and consigned to auction did not sell. ‘It’s difficult, particularly when you’re buying from the internet and you’re buying from small photographs, which is what the trade had evolved into. You have to “spec” from photos. And it is speculation. A certain percentage of them, when you see them in the flesh, are stinkers. They come back to punch you in the nose. I was selling those things off at whatever price I could get, 99 per cent of them at a loss, just to get some seed capital back.’

And then one day Parish was clicking away as usual when he spotted the listing for the Salvator Mundi in an online catalogue from the St Charles Gallery in New Orleans. It was Item 664. ‘After Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452–1519)’ it began, and then, ‘Christ Salvador Mundi, oil on cradled panel, 26 inches by 18½ inches.’ Was the misspelling of the Latin ‘Salvator’ perhaps due to a Spanish-speaking typist? ‘Presented in a fine antique gilt and gesso exhibition frame.’ The estimate – an auction house always states the price it thinks the lot may achieve – was just $1,200 to $1,800. The painting was illustrated in the hard-copy catalogue that Robert Simon saw at the same time, with a very low-resolution black-and-white photograph. Christ’s clothes had become a gloomy grey, his cheekbones and forehead glimmered oddly out of the murky darkness, and the fingers of his blessing hand seemed illuminated by pale candlelight. ‘It looked kinda interesting. School of Leonardo is always interesting, and the price was very good,’ Parish told me with a grin.

Parish asked the St Charles Gallery down in New Orleans to send him a photograph. ‘When it arrived, I pulled it out, I held the picture, and in an instant I could see, like any Old Master dealer can, this part is totally repainted, this part is pretty much untouched, and this part, which included the hand, was like, “Oh my God, that’s period! That’s period.” You know what that means? Period means it’s of the era it’s trying to be. You see seventeenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures, nineteenth-century rehashes of Renaissance pictures. This was clearly of the era it purported to be from. And it was pretty good quality. I’m looking at the hand and I’m looking at the drapery and I can clearly see this is not simply one of numerous copies. This is an extremely good, high-quality copy.’

He and Simon decided to buy it. The rest, as they say, is art history.

Nothing in the known universe, no item, object or quantity of material, has ever appreciated in value as fast as the Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was sold in May 2005 to Simon and Parish for $1,175 – a sum considerably less than the figure of ‘around $10,000’ the pair later quoted to the media. In 2013 they sold it for $80 million, then four years later, in 2017 – a mere twelve years and six months after it was sold for not much more than $1,000 – it was auctioned by Christie’s New York for $450 million.

* Jonathan Green recounts a story of how he found himself in a taxi with Parish in London in the mid-2000s. Parish pulled out his mobile phone and showed Green a detail of a blessing hand. It was from the Salvator Mundi, but Green didn’t know that. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked nonchalantly. Green nodded appreciatively. Green says Parish never offered him the painting, and told me, with magnanimity, ‘I don’t hold anything against him.’ Parish has a different version of the story. ‘I had bought the Salvator Mundi at least a year or two prior to leaving Green, and I’d mentioned it to them a couple of times, but they were so contemptuous of me in some respects. You know, “Just, shut up. Go get us coffee.” That kind of tone of voice. So, OK. Okie dokie …’ Parish drew out the last two words with his excellent drawl, and never finished the sentence.