Beggars Banquet (13 page)

Jance worked out of Zurich for years, for no other reason, according to interviews, than that ‘they couldn’t touch me there’. There had always been rumours about him, rumours which started to make sense when one attempted to balance his few premier-league sales (and therefore commissions) against his lavish lifestyle. These days, he had homes in Belgravia, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and Moscow, as well as a sprawling compound on the outskirts of Zurich. The Moscow home seemed curious until one recalled stories of ikons smuggled out of the old Soviet Union and of art treasures taken from the Nazis, treasures which had ended up in the hands of Politburo chiefs desperate for such things as hard dollars and new passports.

Yes, if even half the tales were true, then Gregory Jance had sailed pretty close to the wind. I was counting on it.

‘What a waste,’ he said, as I gave him a short tour of the storerooms. The place was cool and hushed, except for the occasional click of the machines which monitored air temperature, light and humidity. On the walls of the Tate proper, paintings such as those we passed now would be pored over, passed by with reverence. Here, they were stacked one against the other, most shrouded in white sheeting like corpses or Hamlet’s ghost in some shoddy student production. Identifier tags hung from the sheets like so many items in a lost property office.

‘Such a waste,’ Jance sighed, with just a touch of melodrama. His dress sense did not lack drama either: crumpled cream linen suit, white brogues, screaming red shirt and white silk cravat. He shuffled along like an old man, running the rim of his panama hat through his fingers. It was a nice performance, but if I knew my man, then beneath it he was like bronze.

Our meeting -
en principe
- was to discuss his latest crop of ‘world-renowned artists’. Like most other gallery owners - those who act as agents for certain artists - Jance was keen to sell to the Tate, or to any other ‘national’ gallery. He wanted the price hike that came with it, along with the kudos. But mostly the price hike.

He had polaroids and slides with him. In my office, I placed the slides on a lightbox and took my magnifier to them. A pitiful array of semi-talent dulled my eyes and my senses. Huge graffiti-style whorls which had been ‘in’ the previous summer in New York (mainly, in my view, because the practitioners tended to die young). Some neo-cubist stuff by a Swiss artist whose previous work was familiar to me. He had been growing in stature, but this present direction seemed to me an alley with a brick wall at the end, and I told Jance as much. At least he had a nice sense of colour and juxtaposition. But there was worse to come: combine paintings which Rauschenberg could have constructed in kindergarten; some not very clever geometric paintings, too clearly based on Stella’s ‘Protractor’ series; and ‘found’ sculptures which looked like Nam June Paik on a very bad day.

Throughout, Jance was giving me his pitch, though without much enthusiasm. Where did he collect these people? (The unkind said he sought out the least popular exhibits at art school graduation shows.) More to the point, where did he sell them? I hadn’t heard of him making any impact at all as an agent. What money he made, he seemed to make by other means.

Finally, he lifted a handful of polaroids from his pocket. ‘My latest find,’ he confided. ‘Scottish. Great future.’

I looked through them. ‘How old?’

He shrugged. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven.’

I deducted five or six years and handed the photos back. ‘Gregory,’ I said, ‘she’s still at college. These are derivative - evidence she’s learning from those who have gone before - and stylised, such as students often produce. She has talent, and I like the humour, even if that too is borrowed from other Scottish artists.’

He seemed to be looking in vain for the humour in the photos.

‘Bruce McLean,’ I said helpfully, ‘Paolozzi, John Bellany’s fish. Look closely and you’ll see.’ I paused. ‘Bring her back in five or ten years,
if
she’s kept hard at it,
if
she’s matured, and
if
she has that nose for the difference between genius and sham . . .’

He pocketed the photos and gathered up his slides, his eyes glinting as though there might be some moisture there.

‘You’re a hard man,’ he told me.

‘But a fair one, I hope. And to prove it, let me buy you a drink.’

I didn’t put my proposition to him quite then, of course, not over coffee and sticky cakes in the Tate cafeteria. We met a few weeks later - casually as it were. We dined at a small place in a part of town neither of us frequented. I asked him about his young coterie of artists. They seemed, I said, quite skilled in impersonation.

‘Impersonation?’

‘They have studied the greats,’ I explained, ‘and can reproduce them with a fair degree of skill.’

‘Reproduce them,’ he echoed quietly.

‘Reproduce them,’ I said. ‘I mean, the influences are there.’ I paused. ‘I’m not saying they
copy
.’

‘No, not that.’ Jance looked up from his untouched food. ‘Are you coming to some point?’

I smiled. ‘A lot of paintings in the storerooms, Gregory. They so seldom see the light of day.’

‘Yes, pity, that. Such a waste.’

‘When people could be savouring them.’

He nodded, poured some wine for both of us. ‘I think I begin to see,’ he said. ‘I think I begin to see.’

There was no crime, because nothing was missing from the quarterly inventory. First, I would photograph the work. Indeed, on a couple of occasions, I even took one of Jance’s young artists down to the storeroom and showed her the painting she’d be copying. She’d been chosen because she had studied the minimalists, and this was to be a minimalist commission.

Minimalism, interestingly, proved the most difficult style to reproduce faithfully. In a busy picture, there’s so much to look at that one can miss a wrong shade or the fingers of a hand which have failed to curl to the right degree. But with a couple of black lines and some pink waves . . . well, fakes were easier to spot. So it was that Jance’s artist saw the work she was to replicate face to face. Then we did the measurements, took the polaroids, and she drew some preliminary sketches. Jance was in charge of finding the right quality of canvas, the correct frame. My job was to remove the real canvas, smuggle it from the gallery, and replace it with the copy, reframing the finished work afterwards.

We were judicious, Jance and I. We chose our works with care. One or two a year - we never got greedy. The choice would depend on a combination of factors. We didn’t want artists who were
too
well known, but we wanted them dead if possible. (I had a fear of an artist coming to inspect his work at the Tate and finding a copy instead.) There had to be a buyer - a private collector, who would
keep
the work private. We couldn’t have a painting being loaned to some collection or exhibition when it was supposed to be safely tucked away in the vaults of the Tate. Thankfully, as I’d expected, Jance seemed to know his market. We never had any problems on that score. But there was another factor. Every now and then, there would be requests from exhibitions for the loan of a painting - one we’d copied. But as curator, I would find reasons why the work in question had to remain at the Tate, and might offer, by way of consolation, some other work instead.

Then there was the matter of rotation. Now and again - as had to be the case, or suspicion might grow - one of the copies would have to grace the walls of the gallery proper. Those were worrying times, and I was careful to position the works in the least flattering, most shadowy locations, usually with a much more interesting picture nearby, to lure the spectator away. I would watch the browsers. Once or twice, an art student would come along and sketch the copied work. No one ever showed a moment’s doubt, and my confidence grew.

But then . . . then . . .

We had loaned works out before, of course - I’d told the dinner party as much. This or that cabinet minister might want something for the office, something to impress visitors. There would be discussions about a suitable work. It was the same with particular benefactors. They could be loaned a painting for weeks or even months. But I was always careful to steer prospective borrowers away from the twenty or so copies. It wasn’t as though there was any lack of choice: for each copy, there were fifty other paintings they could have. The odds, as Jance had assured me more than once, were distinctly in our favour.

Until the day the Prime Minister came to call.

This is a man who knows as much about art as I do about home brewing. There is almost a glee about his studious ignorance - and not merely of art. But he was walking around the Tate, for all the world like a dowager around a department store, and not seeing what he wanted.

‘Voore,’ he said at last. I thought I’d misheard him. ‘Ronny Voore. I thought you had a couple.’

My eyes took in his entourage, not one of whom would know a Ronny Voore if it blackballed them at the Garrick. But my superior was there, nodding slightly, so I nodded with him.

‘They’re not out at the moment,’ I told the PM.

‘You mean they’re in?’ He smiled, provoking a few fawning laughs.

‘In storage,’ I explained, trying out my own smile.

‘I’d like one for Number Ten.’

I tried to form some argument - they were being cleaned, restored, loaned to Philadelphia - but my superior was nodding again. And after all, what did the PM know about art? Besides, only one of our Voores was a fake.

‘Certainly, Prime Minister. I’ll arrange for it to be sent over.’

‘Which one?’

I licked my lips. ‘Did you have one in mind?’

He considered, lips puckered. ‘Maybe I should just have a little look . . .’

Normally, there were no visitors to the storerooms. But that morning, there were a dozen of us posed in front of
Shrew Reclining
and
Herbert in Motion
. Voore was very good with titles. I’ll swear, if you look at them long enough, you really can see - beyond the gobbets of oil, the pasted-on photographs and cinema stubs, the splash of emulsion and explosion of colour - the figures of a large murine creature and a man running.

The Prime Minister gazed at them in something short of thrall. ‘Is it “shrew” as in Shakespeare?’

‘No, sir, I think it’s the rodent.’

He thought about this. ‘Vibrant colours,’ he decided.

‘Extraordinary,’ my superior agreed.

‘One can’t help feeling the influence of pop art,’ one of the minions drawled. I managed not to choke: it was like saying one could see in Beryl Cook the influence of Picasso.

The PM turned to the senior minion. ‘I don’t know, Charles. What do you think?’

‘The shrew, I think.’

My heart leapt. The Prime Minister nodded, then pointed to
Herbert in Motion
. ‘That one, I think.’

Charles looked put out, while those around him tried to hide smiles. It was a calculated put-down, a piece of politics on the PM’s part. Politics had decided.

A fake Ronny Voore would grace the walls of Number 10 Downing Street.

I’d discussed the loan with Jance. He’d told me to switch the copy for some other painting, persisting that ‘no one would know’.

‘He’ll know,’ I’d said. ‘He wanted a Voore. He knew what he wanted.’

‘But why?’

Good question, and I’d yet to find the answer. I’d hoped for a first-floor landing or some nook or cranny out of the general view, but the staff seemed to know exactly where the painting was to hang - something else had been removed so that it could take pride of place in the dining-room. (Or one of the dining-rooms, I couldn’t be sure how many there were. I’d thought I’d be entering a house, but Number 10 was a warren, a veritable Tardis, with more passageways and offices than I could count.)

I was asked if I wanted a tour of the premises, so as to view the other works of art, but by that time my head really did ache, and I decided to walk back to the Tate, making it as far as Millbank before I had to rest beside the river, staring down at its sludgy flow. The question had yet to be answered: why did the PM want a Ronny Voore? Who in their right mind wanted a Ronny Voore these days?

The answer, of course, came with the telephone call.