First edition published in 2016 by Awa Press,

Unit 1, Level 3, 11 Vivian Street, Wellington 6011, New Zealand.

ISBN 978-1-927249-51-2

Ebook formats

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Mobi 978-1-927249-53-6

Copyright © Penelope Jackson 2016

The right of Penelope Jackson to be identified as the author of this work in terms of Section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

National Library of New Zealand.

Cover image courtesy of

Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu

Photo of author with A Crown for the Kermadec King (2010)

by Greg O’Brien: Katie Jones

Cover design by Greg Simpson

Typesetting by Tina Delceg

Ebook conversion 2017 by meBooks

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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

Art Thieves, Fakers and Fraudsters

The New Zealand Story

Penelope Jackson

[Awa logo]

For my parents, Dorothy and Allan

ALSO BY PENELOPE JACKSON

Edward Bullmore: A Surrealist Odyssey

The Brown Years: Nigel Brown

Corrugations: The Art of Jeff Thomson (co-author)

Terry Stringer – Landscape of the Head

Penelope Jackson is an art historian, an independent curator, a founding member of the New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust, and a former director of Tauranga Art Gallery. She holds degrees in art history from the Universities of Queensland and Auckland, and has contributed to Art New Zealand, Art Monthly Australia, Journal of Art Crime and other publications. She has presented papers at the annual conference in Italy of the international Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the inaugural artcrime2015 symposium at City Gallery, Wellington. Her essay Legacy and Longevity: Protecting the past for the future was published in Art Crime and Its Prevention: A handbook for collectors and art professionals in 2016.

AUTHOR NOTE

I have endeavoured to fairly represent the artists, dealers, galleries, collectors and others involved in the matters covered in this book, and to seek permission where possible for use of sensitive content. In some cases, parties were invited to read a draft to confirm and/or clarify details. In other cases the person or organisation did not want to engage in dialogue or was deceased. If you have new information, please contact the editorial team at Awa Press. All currency in the book is given in New Zealand dollars unless stated otherwise. All dimensions are in height before width.

Foreword

I CALL IT THE ‘TREASURE HUNT INSTINCT’. We all have it: the desire to find what is lost, to learn what is secret, to see what is hidden, to recover what has vanished. It’s no surprise that publishers love to stud their thriller titles with these key words – in fact, it once occurred to me to name one of my books Lost, Secret, Hidden. That’s the sort of book I would buy without bothering to read what it was about.

This is one of the great appeals of a crime story, whether factual or fictitious. It begins with a question. Something has happened, and we don’t know why or how or who did it, or some combination of the above. And something has disappeared, whether an object or a person or a perpetrator. When I teach, I encourage writers to prompt questions in their readers, and then intentionally delay the answer to draw them along. Mysteries and police procedurals do this by their very nature. And when, on our path to answering the questions posed in the crime, we are drawn through an exotic world this is all the more enticing.

The world of art crime intrigues me for just this reason. I was always entranced by art and the opaque, glamorous universe of collectors, galleries, museums, conservators, curators and experts – that wealthy, intelligent, often fraught and sometimes corrupt landscape. This realm is populated by larger than life characters who would be difficult to believe as plausible in a work of fiction. An Irish traveller who is also a bare-knuckle boxing champion helps recover priceless old masters. An oddball loner makes lousy forgeries and passes them off to at least forty galleries, but gives them as gifts, asking nothing in return – and seems not to have broken the law in doing so. An Iranian millionaire art collector, with a lavish collection in his home, is caught slicing rare prints and maps out of books at the British Library. Can any of this be real?

Combine true crime with the pizzazz of the art world, throw in a population of Dickensian caricatures who happen to actually exist, and you have the makings of a sensational book. And this is one such book, swinging the telescope away from the often trod paths of art crime in the United States and Europe (and, lately, the Levant), on to the islands of New Zealand.

There should be a book like this for all 198 nations on the planet: every country has its share of colourful and important stories of crimes involving art. But the truth is that art crime has been largely overlooked until recently, often dismissed as concerning the trifles of the wealthy, an unimportant sort of crime, intriguing and cinematic though it may be.

Fiction and movies are largely to blame. The media tends to focus each year on a half dozen filmic heists from major museums, the ones that make the headlines. Public, police, policymakers and criminals alike ‘learn’ about art crime at the movies, from Thomas Crown and Cary Grant and Ocean’s Twelve. On the one hand, this means that just about anyone you stop on the street will find the subject of interest. On the other hand, it means that no one, not even the authorities, have been taking it too seriously: it feels like a non-threatening, ‘victimless’ sort of crime, in which you can root for the bad guys because they aren’t really all that bad.

It’s true that it is extremely rare for violence and art crime to merge. Thank goodness. But it is reductive and uninformed to consider art crime victimless. There are two ways to argue. If you are an art lover, there is of course no need to argue at all. Art, as the zenith of what civilisation is capable, must be protected. If art does not draw out your sympathies, we might point to the criminological argument. Multiple sources, from the United States Department of Justice to UNESCO to Interpol, have labelled art crime as having among the highest-grossing criminal trades worldwide, with tens of thousands of reported art thefts each year – some 20,000 in Italy alone. It is a significant funding source for organised crime groups of all sizes.

Despite this, it is only in the last few years, with the rise of high-profile fundamentalist terrorism in the Levant, that the world has caught up with the experts and realised that art crime is not just interesting but very serious. While the data is not complete, it is clear that illicit looting of antiquities for sale to the West is a major funding source for terrorism. The world has taken notice: beyond the sparkling glamour there lurk shadows.

Thankfully, New Zealand is remote from the rumblings of the Middle East. It is a place where art crime is fascinating, serious and important to curb, but not so scary. It is certainly replete with larger than life characters, but they – at least the forgers among them – tend to be the type with whom you’d like to have a beer. (I can probably do without the gangsters, who can be found in even such an ideal place as New Zealand.)

I first encountered Penelope Jackson’s work at the annual conference of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, held every summer in Amelia, Italy, in the midst of ARCA’s unique Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, the first interdisciplinary academic programme in the field. Penelope gave a talk on Goldie forgeries, which she writes about in the first chapter of this fine volume. I was immediately impressed. She tells her true crime tales with verve and a keen eye for observation, bringing the characters to life. Most of all, she places them into a criminological and national context, making her stories of interest to New Zealanders by holding up a mirror to their own darker sides and the penumbral recesses of their cultural history. And for foreign readers the locale of New Zealand adds intrigue and colour, for while most writers on art crime deal in the same few dozen retold tales of high-profile European events (I’m guilty as charged), the lesser-known stories are often the freshest and offer the most enlightenment.

Let’s take a walk, then, along new trails, blazed in a place that is beautiful and, for most of us, far-flung, guided by a true expert.

Dr Noah Charney

Founder, Association for Research into Crimes against Art

Introduction

LIKE MANY ART HISTORIANS it was my dream to rediscover a forgotten artist and tell his or her story. My chance came in 2003 when I was mesmerised by a painting hanging in Tauranga City Library. Derelict was by Edward Bullmore, who had painted it in 1957 at the age of twenty-four. It depicted an abandoned wooden boat washed up on the mudflats of Tauranga Harbour, and seemed to me to have been influenced by two doyens of the Canterbury school of landscape painting, Russell Clark and Bill Sutton. However, the painting had a surrealist aspect that was at odds with the school’s teachings. Bullmore was clearly pushing the boundaries. Derelict was enchanting – beautiful, well painted, and on display in, of all places, a city that was bereft of a public art gallery and showed little interest in preserving its artistic and cultural heritage.

Eager to find out everything I could about Bullmore, I quickly discovered there was little written about him, and yet he had had a burgeoning international career in the 1960s. He had indeed studied at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts. His paintings had featured in the cult movie A Clockwork Orange, and hung alongside works by Jean Miro, Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Yves Tanguy, Paul Klee, André Masson, René Magritte, André Breton and Pablo Picasso in an exhibition, The Enchanted Domain: Surrealist Art in Exeter, England in 1967. His achievements had, meanwhile, gone almost unnoticed in his homeland.

As I dug deeper over the following months I learned to my surprise that behind Bullmore’s exciting body of work lay a story of intrigue. More than 150 of his works had simply disappeared while being supposedly minded by his younger brother. As I researched and wrote up Bullmore’s life and work for a retrospective exhibition, the complexity of locating his works, and troubling questions around their ownership, whetted my appetite. Had the works been stolen? And if so was this an isolated case? Or was art crime taking place on an extensive scale in New Zealand?

AMERICAN CRIMINOLOGIST JOHN CONKLIN has defined art crimes as criminally punishable acts that involve works of art.¹ The definition is justifiably broad. Such crimes include straight-out theft, fraud in the form of forgeries and fakes, vandalism, wartime confiscations, and association with other crimes, such as artefacts being used as bargaining chips.

For most people, knowledge about art crime comes from sensationalist media reports of high-profile cases, such as the revelation in 2016 that the august Alexander Turnbull Library, a department of the New Zealand National Library charged with collecting heritage material, had purchased a fake Lindauer despite being told it was probably just that, and from movies with handsome male leads, such as The Thomas Crown Affair, Gambit and The Monuments Men. In reality art crime is far from glamorous. In my search for information I have not come across any villains or victims remotely resembling Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth or George Clooney.

Although many of the books and movies are the products of vivid imagining, this is a realm where truth can be stranger than fiction. Real events, such as the discovery in 2012 of a major collection of more than 1,200 artworks looted by the Nazis and sequestered in a Munich apartment for six decades, have captivated the world. The owner of the apartment, Cornelius Gurlitt, was the son of an art historian and picture dealer who had been under orders from Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, to amass modern artworks for a vast museum Hitler planned to build in Linz, his hometown in Austria.² The case helped stimulate greater awareness of historical art crimes, and offered fresh hope that stolen artworks could still be recovered more than half a century later.

THE QUESTION I ASKED MYSELF was how New Zealand fitted into this picture. Did this country too have a history of art thefts, fakes and forgeries? I quickly found it was not an easy question to answer. Many cases go unreported. Those that are reported rarely receive specialist attention from the police. In this we follow much of the rest of the world. Art crime specialist Noah Charney observed in The Art Newspaper in December 2013 that police forces seldom distinguish between stolen art and other stolen goods. ‘A Rembrandt,’ Charney noted, ‘is classified with a CD.’

In New Zealand little attention has been given to classifying art crime, and the police force is too small to support the sort of art crime squads or art loss agencies that exist in other countries. In late 2015 Dr Catherine Gardner of the New Zealand Police, preparing to address the inaugural symposium of the New Zealand Art Crime Research Trust, researched ‘theft of art’ in police records. Ninety-three cases had been registered since recording began. Most were not well defined and the file often appeared to be a dumping ground for difficult and obscure cases. One record concerned the theft of a person’s hair extensions.

When I began researching art crime in New Zealand, the task felt at once daunting and exciting. Initial searches threw up a large amount of material, mainly newspaper clippings. I began to get a sense of the scale and enormity of the work ahead. In August 2013 Kathryn Ryan interviewed me on her Radio New Zealand programme Nine to Noon. Within minutes of the interview ending a number of people had contacted me with their own stories. Some wanted to know if I could help them locate missing artworks. Others asked if there was a book on the subject. There seemed to be a big story to tell.

One thing, though, surprised me. I was no stranger to research: I had curated exhibitions and worked in public art galleries for most of my career and found organisations and individuals usually helpful and generous in adding to our canon of art history. Yet when it came to art crime a number of people actively avoided my quest for information. I was sometimes challenged as to whether shining a light on these activities and opening old wounds was helpful to the art world. Some institutions wanted to conceal the fact that artworks had been stolen from them, or they had purchased or otherwise acquired paintings of dubious provenance. I came across roadblocks where information was kept strictly confidential and thus unobtainable.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised. Art crime, especially theft, had been on my radar for a while – and in one case had