The Fly Trap (20 page)

But Malaise discovered that, unfortunately, the other people involved were not entomologists, and in a 1968 article—obviously about the painting ascribed to Michelangelo that subsequently disappeared—he returns to the problem of recalcitrant art experts who insist on saying no. It is money that’s taken the fun out of things. The experts simply don’t dare to say yes. If they sometimes do so anyway, he snorts, then you can be sure that the expert in question has made certain that he will get a share of the profits. He continues:

Collectors of natural objects are almost always supported by their scientific colleagues, but in the art world, this solidarity seems to be lacking. An incorrect identification of a plant or an insect matters little, but in the art world it can have huge economic consequences and liabilities. A private collector has a hard time getting his acquisition acknowledged, and often this recognition does not come until after his death, when his collection has passed into public ownership. At that point, some art historian comes along and “discovers” the masterpiece. But the collector can get much pleasure and learn a great deal by doing his own detective work.

Say what you like, he never grew bitter. His good humour seems to have worked like a vaccine against the kind of distress that so often leads men like Malaise to a breakdown. Moreover, he unquestionably had hopes for the future. Sooner or later, some expert would rediscover his Watteau, for, as I read on the bus, Ragnar Hoppe at the National Museum had said that it came from the right period and had the right coloration, figures, style and conception but was nevertheless not a Watteau, unclear why not. And his two fifteenth-century works by Andrea Mantegna, one of them a sketch for a fresco in the Eremitani Chapel in Padua, what would be their fate? Or the little portrait of an old man that he ascribed to Frans Hals or possibly Judith Leyster, which Rembrandt himself had later copied? Maybe the future was his very best friend.

It was pitch black on the jetty, with an ice-cold southwest wind blowing from the bay.

On Saturday I read the catalogue that Dackenberg had sent me on the Internet. The gift turned out to consist of thirty works of art, of which five had been stolen and one was simply missing. In addition to those I already knew about, the list included a number of interesting works that contributed to a picture of the collector’s taste. Malaise identified a small painting on slate of the
Descent from the Cross
by Jacopo Bassano (1510–92) as the original for a famous altarpiece (not identified), while he believed that a badly worm-eaten panel—
Madonna and Child
—was by Pietro Lorenzetti, died about 1348. He attributed a couple of somewhat larger canvases to the Dutchman Aert van der Neer (1603–77) and to the Spanish baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). A bit unexpectedly, the list also included a couple of nineteenth-century artists, H. C. Bryant and H. W. Hubbard, neither one of whom I’d ever heard of.

The story of how Malaise acquired a landscape of Jan Frans van Bloemen (1662–1749) was rather bewildering. According to his report, the painting was originally purchased directly from the artist, in Rome, by the Russian Czarina Catherine II, whereupon it wound up in the palace of Tsarskoye Selo outside St. Petersburg. A long time later—in 1925, to be exact—the revolutionary government decided to weed out the paintings from the royal palaces, and the van Bloemen, in spite of having been selected by the Hermitage Museum, was for some odd reason sold to the writer Alexei Tolstoy (1882–1945), who for some other odd reason was acquainted with René Malaise from his time in the Soviet Union. What the final transaction looked like was not on record.

What portion of all this was true? Umeå clearly lacked the resources for a closer investigation of the authenticity and provenance of the paintings. They simply had no money for material analysis and X-ray photography, and so the catalogue was based on Malaise’s own attributions, even though these were often followed by a tiny qualifying question mark. But did I not sense a certain restrained enthusiasm here and there nevertheless? “Malaise’s own list of the donated works includes several of art history’s most prominent names: Mantegna, Zurbarán, Watteau, etc. If these should prove to be correct, the collection is nothing short of sensational.”

In one case, at least, Malaise was guilty of a mistake. It concerned Padovanino’s painting of Tarquinius and Lucretia, an imposing work that Malaise supposed to have come to Sweden from Russia after the October Revolution in 1917, but which experts had traced as far back as 1856, at which time it had been hanging in the De Geer family palace in Finspång here in Sweden for many years. But of course that didn’t lessen its value.

And Moretto! The treatment of this work in the catalogue grows into a sinuous, Bible-invoking essay on the gentle sensuality and dreamy melancholy of the North Italian Renaissance and becomes a multifaceted homage to the painting, which is of course a copy, but which so captivated Dackenberg that he finally went to Venice to see the original. I can’t imagine that Malaise believed in very much beyond himself, but of course he smiled in his heaven as I sat by my computer and read, astonished and delighted, while dusk fell across the islands.

By Sunday morning, I had a clear picture of the situation. René Malaise was an incurable optimist, an adventurer who managed to live both well and long on a meagre diet of pure self-sufficiency and happy calculations worthy of someone in a novel by Balzac. Every time he saw one of his paintings in the Prado or the Louvre or the National Gallery in London, he drew what was for him the obvious conclusion—that the museum had managed to get its hands on a copy. The original, or at least the sketch or first effort, was in his house on Lidingö, an upscale island suburb of Stockholm, and the greatest original of them all was he himself.

But in Malaise’s company, you can never be completely certain. He clearly knew a lot and was so audacious that in the summer of 1955 he went to the Eighteenth International Congress of the History of Art in Venice, where he gave a lecture on his Moretto to art experts from the whole world. Yes, he was often wrong, and yes, all his life he willingly let himself be duped. That was easy to see. The hard part is to figure out when he was right. Maybe the thief was the greater expert. I decided to follow a lead that was swept aside decades ago.

…

Finding stolen art is difficult, but thanks to the Internet it has become a tiny bit easier. The great auction houses put their catalogues on the Internet—with pictures and other relevant information—and since I had now seen both the Polack and the Michelangelo in
Collectors’ News,
I went into both Bukowski’s and Auktionsverket’s archives to examine the fine-art auction catalogues of recent years. There was, of course, no Polack, not one, and entering Michelangelo in my search engine seemed merely ridiculous. But once you’ve started wandering through digital art exhibits, it’s hard to stop, so I started poking through the catalogues, one after another, and when I got to the last of them several hours later I’d forgotten what I was looking for. So my surprise was all the greater.

I recognized it immediately. In the Little Bukowski auction catalogue number 157 I saw the same picture I’d seen two days earlier in
Collectors’ News
. Item number 225, “Rembrandt, school of. Oil painting. Old man. Relined canvas, 30 × 25 cm.”

I sat perfectly still for a long time and just stared at the screen, while a short list of stupid questions (What is going on? Is this possible? Why now?) took turns running through my head. The fact was, Little Bukowski’s auction number 157 had not yet taken place. It was to be held on Monday, 26 January 2004. The next day.

The article in
Collectors’ News,
number 3, 1968, lay open on the table beside my computer. It was titled “Tales from a Painting’s Fate.” I don’t know how many times I read it before I finally fell asleep in the wee hours.

The painting shows a man supporting himself on a cane. Malaise caught sight of it in Auktionverket’s showrooms on Torsgatan (they moved from those premises in 1961) and thought he knew enough to identify it at once as Dutch, painted in the seventeenth century. But that wasn’t all he saw. “At that period, the brushwork could only be the work of Frans Hals or his pupil Judith Leyster, plus to some extent also the ageing Rembrandt and a few of his students.” Excited by this unexpected find, he went home to study up. The hands and the nose were definitive, he writes. The painter was Frans Hals, without a doubt. “I was in great suspense when the painting came up for auction the following Monday. It caused no great stir and I was able to acquire it a good deal cheaper than I had anticipated.” So begins the article.

The writer then goes on to develop his theories about the painting. Malaise the entomologist dives enthusiastically into an ocean of esoteric art literature and comes up quickly with the proof he’s looking for. True, the painting is not reproduced anywhere, but he finds it nevertheless, in an old German book that refers to an auction in The Hague on 7 October 1771, when a work of Frans Hals’s went under the hammer—
A Man Leaning on a Cane
—whose dimensions are given as 29.7 × 24.3 centimetres, which, when checked against actual measurement of the mounted canvas, matches to the millimetre. “That seemed to settle the question, but then I happened to see the same painting in the National Gallery in London. The man in this painting was depicted actual size (format 134 × 104 cm) and, although unsigned, it was confidently identified as painted by Rembrandt about 1660.”

So his smaller version is a copy.

But no. At this moment, anyone else would have understood that the curtain had gone down, but not Malaise. He goes on autopilot instead and rolls out a charming little story.

The painting Malaise has purchased is once and for all so masterfully realized that it cannot possibly be a copy. An expert can see this at once. In all probability, he reasons, the National Gallery has got its hands on a copy of his original. And the beauty of it is that their copy may very well have been painted by Rembrandt van Rijn. In broad strokes, the idea is that Frans Hals painted the old man at home in Haarlem, gave the painting to Judith Leyster, who moved to Amsterdam, where she installed herself as Rembrandt’s mistress (or so Malaise has heard) before later marrying the painter Jan Molenaer. So it is by way of her that the painting made its way to Rembrandt—who found its artistry so exceptionally interesting that he copied it in order to learn a new technique, and because he was an honourable man, he did not sign it. Congrats, London, a genuine Rembrandt! “Judith Leyster’s connection to my painting is based on pure guesswork, of course, but that Rembrandt owned, or at least saw and copied, the painting must be considered quite certain.”

Behold the imagination needed to invent a better fly trap!

What remained was the question of why the painting was for sale at just this very moment.

Now it was my turn to theorize. And first of all I turned to the National Gallery, whose most famous works are on the Internet for public viewing, including the portrait we’re talking about of the old man with the cane. They really were very similar, aside from the size, of course. Of greater importance for my theorizing, however, were two things that had happened since Malaise was in London in the 1960s. In the first place, according to the museum’s home page, they had found a signature under the varnish—Rembrandt—and, second, with the help of various sophisticated analyses, they had determined that the painting was a forgery, possibly painted as late as the early eighteenth century.

Did Malaise know that, or suspect it, when he put together his gift to Umeå University? But if that was the case, we can be absolutely certain that he would have forgotten both Hals and Leyster and crafted a completely different and more straightforward history and attribution. Which isn’t hard to guess at. Intriguingly, one of the two Rembrandt paintings in Dackenberg’s catalogue of the stolen works bore the title
Portrait of Old Man.
No picture, no measurements. Was that the one to be sold the next day?

And in that case, why? For a good twenty-five years, no one had lifted a finger to shed light on the theft of Malaise’s paintings, no one had even bothered about them until I began poking into the whole thing this winter. It couldn’t simply be a coincidence. Off the top of my head I could count a number of people who, in light of my researches, had good reason not to have a stolen painting on the wall, if that was what they had. There was no lack of motive.

I decided to go to the auction, more as a spy than a speculator, even though there wasn’t much I could possibly learn—I already knew the auction house would refuse to identify the seller. Moreover, I couldn’t afford to bid. The minimum bid was listed as 15,000 crowns. But at least I could finally lay eyes on the actual canvas in the flesh, and I could see who bought it.

…

I often go to art auctions. It’s true that I seldom can afford to buy, but there’s something about the atmosphere that makes me prefer them to galleries and museums. I suppose it’s the excitement that attracts me.

In any event, when I walked into Bukowski’s, down at Nybroplan, this grey, gloomy January Monday, the usual clientele was already assembled, a mixture of dealers and pensioners. It was going to fill up. I was nervous. In order to get a full view of the room and see who bought the portrait, I took a seat farthest back in one corner. It was icy cold. People came and went the entire time, and consequently the door out to Arsenalsgatan was rarely closed. There was a draught. I’m going to catch cold, I thought, but I stayed where I was for the sake of the view.

Nothing sensational happened. Item number 161, a painting of the Holy Family by an unknown Flemish artist, went for 195,000 crowns, well above the 25,000-crown minimum, but on the whole it was a rather uneventful affair. And draughty, as I mentioned. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and moved farther forward in the hall, not far from the table with a green cloth and lots of vases full of tulips, where five people were dealing with the telephone bidders. A video camera behind the auctioneer registered the tiniest gesture by any of the numbered paddles. My pulse rose.