I can tell Colette is itching to join them. This is her passion, and if all goes to plan it will be what she does with the rest of her life. She will join the ranks of these experts in addition to becoming a very wealthy woman in her own right.
Colette has idolized Mare Lindquist since she started interning for the auction house, but she always assumed she retired early.
Stella filled her in on what actually happened to Mare. Last year, Mare had questioned the provenance of a Matisse that Louis Swanson acquired and convinced the Christie’s brass that they shouldn’t represent it in a public auction. While many of the Swanson deals happened on the private market, the public ones, the auctions, were important to continue to increase the value of other paintings by an artist. It wasn’t that Mare thought the Matisse wasn’t real. That wasn’t in question. The painting was originally owned by a Jewish merchant family from Algeria who fled during World War II, after which the artwork was stolen by the Nazis. Louis Swanson deliberately concealed evidence, “sanitized” the provenance, and created a false ownership chain to hide the truth. Mare tracked down the original ownership, but Louis quickly had it buried along with her career at Christie’s.
The painting went to auction and sold for more than the estimate—a whopping $68 million. Had Lindquist been successful in exposing what she learned, the artwork’s value would have collapsed to about $12 to $15 million. But that didn’t happen.
It’s been resold since to the Russian financier Alex Olevsky for $90 million, clearing an easy $22 million profit for Swanson. Now Lindquist is all too willing to exact retribution.
“It’s clear as day,” she says now, spite dripping from her tone. “These were painted within the past twenty years. I will testify that this painting is a fraud.”
“And so will I,” Eliza Sachs chimes in.
“Me too,” Amy adds.
The entire room seems to release a collective sigh of relief. I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding in. Lucie releases her favorite joyous French exclamation. “Youpi!,” which translates to something like “Yippee!” I should be elated, but I still can’t muster any kind of enthusiasm.
Lucie squeezes my hand. Colette grips the other. Whatever happens next, at least we’ll be doing this together.
“I’ll speak with the authorities about the counterfeit paintings,” Caroline says through a rare smile. “Ms. Sachs, Ms. Lindquist, Ms. Fox, you will obviously be very well compensated for your expert opinions in all of this. And, Ms. Lindquist, I imagine you will also feel quite vindicated once my father’s schemes are revealed.” She looks over at her grandmother.
“And as for you. We have a lot to talk about.” Caroline strides across the room to stand by her side. “It’s high time we brought you back from the dead.”
38
Claire
It begins withone letter.
If Jo and I learned anything from compiling the correspondence between Theo and his brother, it was that things can be said in the written word that could never be revealed in real life.
And that is exactly what we do. I was terrified of making contact at first. Even here in America Jo could still have me arrested for what I did. But I had to do it. The pull was as strong as her own obsession with Vincent’s legacy. I reached out first through the curators of the Armory show.
When she responds from an address in the borough of Queens, there is nothing threatening in her words. But we are shy and tentative at first.
Jo has been living here in New York for many months. She followed Vincent and his wife, Josina, so she could help court American collectors. Vincent has graduated from school with a degree in engineering, but he is also helping his mother with herwork. The show I saw at the Armory is just the beginning of what she plans to do next. Her dreams of having her brother-in-law’s art travel around the world and hang in the grandest of salons have finally been realized, but she is not finished yet. She plans to take this show out west, she tells me, to California. But we quickly move on from the paintings. It is not what she wants to talk about.
We write about Theo first. She revealed she had been melancholy about him lately but could not pinpoint why.
“If men are in a mood like the one I’m in at the moment—then they seek a way to numb the pain—a moment’s pleasure with women—oh, how I understand Theo’s old life in Paris—poor darling, how often he felt unhappy and then sought—sought solace with girls like you,” she writes. “We women bear it, but—it makes us ill and miserable, and what’s the good of that!”
Jo also admits that knowing her husband had been intimate with women like me always brought on feelings of inadequacy that she did not entirely recover from during their brief marriage. I could never imagine her admitting this to me face-to-face, but in her letters, she writes openly and honestly about her anxieties and anguish. How it was only once she was with Isaac that she felt like she was capable in the bedroom.
“I also wish you had told me about your relationship with Theo sooner,” she writes. “We lost so many years where we could have reminisced about him, where we could have shared our memories.”
And so I recall for her every conversation Theo and I had about her during their courtship, how smitten he was with her from the moment he met her.
“Theo loved you exactly as you were,” I wrote. “He didn’t expect you to be any better, or smarter or prettier. He thought you were perfect.”
“And that was what I needed,” she writes back. “It’s what Icame to love the most, how he allowed me to inhabit my own skin.”
I tell her that in many ways Theo did the same for me, that he gave me the confidence to think I deserved more out of life. It was his true talent. It’s what he gave to Vincent over and over as well.
She responds with a long missive about Isaac. I shudder reading his name, but I know she needs to write about him. Johan finally succumbed to his many illnesses, and Jo recently found herself a widow once again. She tells me how she and Isaac reconciled briefly after Johan’s death, how they fell into their familiar game of cat and mouse.
“I was terribly ashamed that you saw me act the way I acted with him. I was much too old to be treated the way he treated me. And though I had no interest in ever being someone’s wife again, I also did not want to be only a mistress. I understand why you tried to keep us from one another. He told me it was likely you who hid his many letters from me. Back then I would not have been strong enough to quit him on my own, but I was able to do it the second time around and now I believe we can finally be friends. He has been very helpful to me in my work. But it does help that there is now an ocean between us. If I am telling the truth in these pages, it may be the only reason I do not run back to him.”
I apologize over and over for the things I have done until she tells me I must stop. Then she writes the words I didn’t know that I had been longing to hear.
