The Cézanne Chase

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“A surprisingly sexy and dirty world where nothing is sacred—least of all, art….The beauty of
The Cézanne Chase
is in the technical details about fine art—great tips on conserving it, packing and shipping it, buying and selling it, and destroying it forever.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“A virtual primer of the art world…
The Cézanne Chase
is also a marvelous travelogue that transports readers to dazzling museums and art capitals of the world. The dialogue and descriptive portraits of cities are first rate…It offers plenty of action and a plot that is terrifyingly plausible. And we won't give away any more than that.”

—
The Bergen (NJ) Record

“Read the first few pages of
The Cézanne Chase
and you know you've discovered a very good thing indeed. A thrilling novel of the unexpected, an intriguing, behind-the-scenes look at the high-risk world of international art.”

—
Book-of-the-Month-Club News

“Readers will be drawn to the intrigue…steady action, looming suspense, and an appealing subject.”

—
Library Journal

“Swan has created a page-turner…The stakes are high and so is the suspense…With quick, sure strokes our author leads us to a violent climax, [keeping] the action moving like the bursts from an AK-47.”

—Bill Sweeney
, KSRO Radio (CA)

 

“Oxby is charming and disarmingly intelligent.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“A grand old caper yarn of classic design, filled with tantalizing details of forging techniques and facts about da Vinci's work….
The Da Vinci Deception
isn't just good, it's terrific.”

—
Book-of-the-Month Club News

S
t. Petersburg, for all its frayed edges, has remained the jewel among Russian cities. The city and its people survived revolution, a nine-hundred-day siege in World War II in which nearly a million died, then a kind of benign neglect brought on by decades of Communist rule. It is a city of islands and bridges, built on the banks of the twisting Neva river. In spite of all, St. Petersburg's important institutions have survived, as has the spirit of the natives, who affectionately call their city “Pete” as they did during the years when it was known as Petrograd or Leningrad. In spite of decades of adversity, the university, the libraries, and the museums have held together with remarkable tenacity.

One museum in particular was enjoying a renaissance: the Hermitage. Catherine the Great decreed that the magnificent salons of the Winter Palace be made into its galleries. From Peter the Great until the Revolution, agents of the czars and empresses scoured the world for great art, until the royal collection bulged to eight thousand paintings and five times that many drawings. Four buildings compose the Hermitage, a giant sprawl in which there are a thousand rooms and 117 staircases.

It was early morning. Pigeons scavenged on the broad sidewalks then separated as a young woman walked with a purposeful stride to a door leading to the administration offices. Ilena Petrov came early to the museum every morning. It was this show of dedication and her recent completion of studies in European art history that had helped bring recognition and a recent promotion. She had been appointed assistant curator for European art and sculpture of the period 1850 to 1917, a position of immense responsibility. The collection of paintings in the Hermitage from those years was among the world's largest and, without question, of incalculable value.

Ilena carried a heavy cloth sack, in which were books and notepads and a thermos filled with strong tea as well as a thick slice of plushka,
a sugary cinnamon blackbread baked by her grandmother. From a window in the reception office she could see the rising sun that reflected brilliantly off the spire above Peter and Paul Cathedral in the historic fortress across the river.

Each day, before the rest of the staff arrived, Ilena would go out into the long corridors and galleries, where she was alone in the silence. She went first to the Malachite Room to touch the carved figure of a cupid that had become her personal talisman then climbed the great Ambassador's Staircase up to the galleries that held her favorite artists. In room 318 were, among others, the works of Pissaro and Cézanne. Ilena had united their art by placing their paintings on the same wall, aware that the two men had been close friends and aware, too, that Paul Cézanne had not forged many long-lasting relationships.

Two windows in the small gallery room looked out to Palace Square and the Alexander Column, the pink granite of the ninety-foot high monument catching the early sun. Ilena entered slowly, her eyes taking in first a landscape by Corot then two village scenes by Pissarro. Beyond the doorway were two Cézannes. First was a landscape; next to it was a portrait of the artist titled
Self-Portrait in a Beret.

She approached the portrait then was suddenly jolted by an awareness that something was terribly wrong. Drawing closer, she saw that Cézanne's face seemed to have been painted over. Now she could touch it and saw that the paint where the head had been was a jellied mass, sagging away from the canvas. It was the canvas she had seen, bleached to a ghostly white.

Ilena screamed, a long, pitiful cry. She brought her hands to her face and stared in shock and disbelief. For minutes she stood, trembling, as if rooted to the spot in front of the canvas. Anger overwhelmed her. Who could be so cruel, she asked aloud. She backed away then turned and ran. Not until she had reached the head of the magnificent stairway did she stop. She sat on the top step, her body bent forward, her head lowered and resting on arms crossed over her legs.

She began to weep.

C
hristie's salesrooms were on the second floor of the building on New York's Park Avenue and 59th Street, space the two-hundred-year-old London-based auction house had occupied since coming to America in 1977. Christie's, like its fierce competitor, Sotheby's, was one of those places where an obscure painting could be given the imprimatur of greatness by dint of someone paying many times more than it was worth, and where art-world insiders set prices by helping to establish the reserve, the confidential minimum price agreed upon by the seller and the auction house below which the painting will not be sold. The presale price is higher than the reserve and is generally publicized in advance of the auction so that the auction house can encourage the bidders to accept the presale price as an arbitrary minimum.

The auction at hand had been widely advertised in the media and through special mailings to known buyers and had attracted an overflow of the serious and curious. They were jammed into the square, high-ceilinged main gallery. An adjacent, smaller gallery was also filled to standing room an hour before the auction began. Serious bidders were in view of the auctioneer, but others, who wanted anonymity, were represented by a surrogate or a member of Christie's staff, several of whom were positioned at a bank of telephones at the side of the auctioneer's platform. Some of the more than two dozen reporters were more interested in the well-heeled socialites and occasional show-business celebrities who attended auctions for the excitement, as well as to occasionally add to their collections.

Interest was focused on the Jacopo da Pontormo portrait titled
Halberdier
, a painting of a young man holding a staff and wearing a sword. The portrait until six months before the auction had been prominently displayed in New York's Frick Collection where it had been for twenty years. It was always believed that Chauncey Devereau Stillman had placed it there on a permanent loan. The surprise
decision to enter the painting at auction was a sad development for the Frick and a happy one for the Stillman Foundation.

Jacopo da Pontormo was a reclusive painter who, so evidence indicated, had studied under Leonardo Da Vinci in the early years of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's reputation, in need of a boost, had received one when the young man in the portrait was identified as Cosimo de' Medici of Florence, a speculation that roused heated controversy among art historians and let loose a flood of contradictory stories in the press. The controversy proved helpful to Christie's, which had mounted an energetic promotion to lift the presale price to $20 million.

Standing room was five deep, and the air in the gallery had grown stale and hot. In what had become his accustomed position, Edwin Redpath Llewellyn sat at the end of a row at the front of the gallery, squeezed against the wall and fanning himself with a bidder's paddle ...paddle number eighteen.

Llewellyn attended auctions with the enthusiasm of a low-handicap golfer at St. Andrews. He knew how to bid, rarely making the mistake of entering the competition when he was unfamiliar with the artist, the painting, or those he was bidding against. He was dressed in his go-to-auction uniform: gray trousers, blue-and-white striped shirt, club tie, and a pocket handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his elegantly frayed blue blazer. In one hand was a catalogue that detailed every item in the evening's sale, and cupped in the other was a pair of opera glasses. Llewellyn was an authentic connoisseur who understood fine art and could articulate his preferences and his prejudices. He was also rich, divorced, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After making several preliminary notes, he settled to watch the room fill, paying attention to the overflowing crowd as they took positions along the sides and across the back of the room. Llewellyn recognized some of the faces: Dupres, the wily one from Paris; Elton, the London barracuda; Takahawo of Tokyo.