Left Field: CHAPTER 10 - Naive

 

One August morning in 1987 I came out of W H Smiths in the London suburb of Muswell Hill. Parked outside was a Peugeot with Zagreb number plates. I knew that because the first two letters of the registration were ZG, Renata’s city. A tall man was getting out.

‘Dobro jutro,’ I said. 
 

Surprised to be greeted in his own language, he introduced himself and I invited him home for coffee. He was Ivan Prpić, a professional violinist, in London taking master classes from Yifrah Neaman. In the course of the next few months we became friends and, before his return to Zagreb, he mentioned that he was looking for someone in the UK to help him represent his father-in-law, the artist Ivan Rabuzin. 
 
His off-hand remark excited me. Perhaps this would be a way out of my depression over Ben and, in any case, I had been teaching for 16 years and was burnt out. The classes I taught were developed to offer a bit of culture to apprentices at college on day release. At Kilburn Polytechnic these courses had been given the title of Liberal Studies. Neither I, nor the students, took this seriously and whenever I could, I’d organise ghost trips to galleries and museums which neither they, nor I, had any intention of visiting.

When in college, I was supposed to show them slides of Renaissance art or hire in cultural films – like The Seventh Seal – ones you had to read.

Then there was music. In one class we were playing the Rolling Stones and they wanted ‘Street Fighting Man’ at full volume. As I bent down to turn the knob, I was kicked in the arse by Suggs, later the lead singer in the band Madness, who was an electrical apprentice at Smith’s Industries.

At the door stood the Principal. ‘What’s going on here?’

I said, ‘This week we’re listening to contemporary music. Next week it’ll be back to Mozart.’

He looked unconvinced. ‘I see,’ he said and left the room. 

It was all a con and I had had enough. The two Ivans might have needed a dogsbody in London, but I saw their offer quite differently. It was my escape route. I said I’d love to help them as I knew Rabuzin’s naive style of painting, spoke Serbo-Croat and spent every summer in Yugoslavia. The truth was that I had no background in art and the only original Rabuzin I had seen was owned by Dr Kruzic, a gynaecologist friend of my wife. I didn’t even speak Serbo- Croatian that well, but Ivan agreed to let me help him promote Rabuzin and so started my career in the art world.

Naive  artists work without formal technical qualifications and with a remarkable indifference to perspective. Uninfluenced by art traditions, they paint pictures mirroring their memories, desires and dreams.
When most people think of naive art, the names that come to mind are Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses, but southeast Europe has produced many primitive painters: the peasant Ivan Generalić , the postman Ivan Lacković and the carpenter Ivan Rabuzin, among the most well known.

Rabuzin had buyers such as Yul Brynner and Woody Allen, whose Rabuzin paintings can be seen in Annie Hall.

Rabuzin’s pastel-coloured silk screen prints sold well in the Far East and he was known in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, but his reputation had never been established in Britain. My job was to find a London gallery that would represent him and try and get his work onto quality products such as Rosenthal vases and Halcyon Days miniature boxes.

I bought a copy of the trade journal Galleries to see if there might be a London venue specialising in primitive and naive art. The only ones I could find were the Portal Gallery, who represented Beryl Cook, and the Rona Gallery which was located in Weighhouse Street, off Bond Street. The Portal was not interested, but Stanley Harries, the director of the Rona, was. 

At that time, Stanley was representing the naive artist Dora Holzhandler and British figurative painters. He knew of Rabuzin and had sold a work of his some years before. He thought it would be difficult establishing a market for him in London, but said he’d give it a try. If I was prepared to help in his gallery, I could work from a small room on the first floor and Ivan Prpić, would have an office when he was in London. 

Stanley was a lovely man. Every morning when I arrived, he would greet me with ‘Hello, old chap. So good to see you.’ His assistant, Sheldon Williams, was an authority on Caribbean naïve art. The author of Voodoo and the Art of Haiti, he looked like a Fifties dandy with swept-back hair and a constantly changing parade of floral bow ties. 

Clients would come to the Rona to ask about a Holzhandler and Sheldon would enthuse them with a long talk on voodoo art. This didn’t endear him to Stanley who didn’t have any Hector Hyppolites or Wilson Bigauds for sale. When Sheldon was manning the gallery alone and someone knocked on the door to ask how to get to Bond Street station, he would show them the way and leave the front door wide open. Though he never said so, I think Stanley was happy to have me there to keep an eye on him.

There were many interesting visitors. George Melly often dropped by. Known as ‘the jazz musician with the big personality and the big hat’, few people know he was an authority on primitive art and the author of The Tribe of One, an outstanding book about British naive art.  

Then there was Gustav Delbanco, then over ninety years old and living alone in a huge house in Hampstead. He came from a German-Jewish family who could trace their roots back to Venice. His expertise was the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and his evaluations were respected by the British Museum, among others. He and I got on well and I used to visit him for tea. The house was dark, there was no central heating and the place had that musty smell I associate with houses inhabited by the elderly. He always had a cake on the table, and we used to talk about everything from art to politics.

After the Second World War, he and his two partners, Henry Roland and Lillian Browse, opened a contemporary art gallery in Cork Street. Though never one of London’s richest galleries, it became one of its most prestigious. Their first exhibition was of Rodin, whose work had been neglected in Britain. They exhibited Josef Herman, a Jewish socialist, who fled Eastern Europe and ended up living in south Wales. He was nicknamed Joe Bach by the miners he painted. Other artists included Philip Sutton, famous for his bright canvases and expansive drawing style, and the American Alfred Cohen, with his vibrant flower compositions, portraits and English countryside scenes.

Gallery gossip had it that Gustav and Henry Roland adopted a double act with female clients. Roland would seduce them and Gustav would then move in and strike the deals. Perhaps it was the other way round. Gustav was a man of extraordinary charm and wit. I asked him why he’d never written a book and he replied, ‘Who cares what I think?’
In his house there were wonderful Rodin figurines and a Degas sculpture of a dancer. ‘Compare it to a Rodin,’ he would say. ‘Do you see that the Degas is cold and lifeless. Degas didn’t like women. Rodin did.’

The walls were full of artists he’d represented and, every time I visited him, he would walk me round the house and tell me stories about them.

A third gallery visitor was Mervyn Levy: writer, artist and art critic who’d had his own BBC TV series in the 1960s, Painting for Housewives. He’d been a childhood friend of Dylan Thomas and they’d shared a flat together in the thirties. Mervyn was a small, dapper man with a moustache and neatly clipped white beard. He wore pink shirts and never less than two Swatch watches. He always had an attractive young girlfriend in tow. We planned to write a play about Dylan together, based on Mervyn’s memories, and he would invite me to the Chelsea Arts Club to discuss our project. We never got far after the first three bottles of wine.

Ivan Prpić, Stanley and myself planned a London launch for Rabuzin but, before we did that, we needed an English- language book about the artist. We invited Mervyn to write it. Ivan told him that funding was available from the Rabuzin family and a fee of £4,000 was agreed.

The book, published in 1990, is full of phrases such as ‘light is what Rabuzin seeks, and light is what he finds. His art is born of light ... The marvelous mature landscapes are bathed in pure radiance; as though there had never been any darkness.’ Mervyn told me he couldn’t stand Rabuzin’s work, but ‘he who pays the piper gets his tune’.1

Rabuzin was a man who took himself seriously. He always wore a suit and tie and spoke slowly, seeming to weigh his words before he let them escape from his mouth. When I first met him, he couldn’t quite understand what I was doing in his village, and I knew I had to earn his respect. He had no such problems with Mervyn who was known in the art world and had been paid to be appreciative of his work. The two of them had an impressive natural cunning, each using the other for their own purposes. 

Rabuzin lived in Kljuć, in a large modern house on the site of his childhood home. The windows offered magnificent views across the valley to the hills which were the source of his inspiration. The rooms were oak-panelled, oak-floored and doored. However, the result was like taking a Beverly Hills villa and depositing it in the middle of the Croatian countryside. The rest of the village remained medieval with unpaved roads, clucking chickens and peasants driving horse- drawn carts. I doubt whether the local priest appreciated it when Rabuzin constructed a ten-metre totem pole in his front garden which looked like it had been shipped from the Tlingit Indian Reservation. His paintings represent an idealised countryside with a deliberate symmetry linking nature and man. His pastel colours contain landscapes with puffy clouds, small doorless houses and oversized flowers. The world as it isn’t. Beautiful fakes.

now go to CHAPTER 11

NOTES

1 Rabuzin, Mervyn Levy, Imprimis, 1990

Left Field: CHAPTER 11 - Café Slavia

We are surrounded by fakes. There are fake pearls, fake fur, fake blood, fake signatures. Some fakes are not just meant to deceive, but to impress as well, like fake books that fill the shelves of people who wish to appear more learned than they are, or fake aristocrats who purchase their fake titles. Fakes can be used negatively, such as documents created to justify the attack on Iraq. Or positively, inflatable tanks placed on the cliffs above Dover before D-Day.

The art world is rife with fakes, where they are called forgeries. They are as old as the Old Masters and often the Old Masters were the greatest forgers of all. Michelangelo produced replicas of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s drawings that were so good, Ghirlandaio thought they were his own.

I spent a lot of time in Ključ, helping catalogue Rabuzin’s prodigious output. After one visit in October 1990, I returned to Zagreb a few days before my flight to London. I arrived on a Friday and my plane had been booked for the following Tuesday. I had planned to spend my three free days with my friend Darko Glavan, a rock critic. Unfortunately, when I got there, Darko said he had to go to Paris that weekend to visit Jim Morrison’s grave and write an article on The Doors.

I went to a bar on TkalčićevaStreet that was frequented by artists. There I bumped into Marko Tomić, a wheeler-dealer who was always introducing me to ex-communist party ‘bizinessmen’, all of whom knew someone who knew someone who had a Picasso they wanted to get out of the country. It was less than a year since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eastern Europe was full of art works migrating westward, lured by the promise of insanely high prices.

Over a beer, Marko said, ‘There is interesting painting in Prague. I’m going there to authenticate it. Come with me, David. It will be, as you English say, jolly good fun.’

I shook my head. ‘I have to go back to London.’ ‘When do you leave?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘We have time.’

‘But it’s Friday afternoon.’

‘We go now.’

Marko had many crazy qualities, one of which I shared:
impetuousness. Two hours later, we set off in the pouring rain in his beat-up, unheated Citroën deux chevaux. There was a leak above my head. Cold and wet, I climbed into the back seat for the rest of the journey.

The tin snail’s windscreen wipers were worn and their scritch-scratch was tortuous to listen to. The car’s signal lights were broken and when Marko overtook lorries, I shut my eyes and prayed. I didn’t think we’d make it but, 650 kilometres later, at three in the morning, we arrived in Prague.

Marko drew up outside a large house in the leafy suburb of Karlin. An old man answered the door and led us into a cellar. At its centre was a one and a half metre circular wooden castle, complete with battlements and flag.
  
I stared at it.The old man smiled at me. ‘Prague Castle. I make.’ He walked to the side of the room and turned on a tap. There was a large wheel with yoghurt cartons attached to its outside rim. As each carton filled with water, the wheel started to turn. Like a large clock, the wheel had cogs connected to the rim of the castle which began to revolve.

‘I see you like,’ the old man said. ‘Turn off after you enjoy.’

He pointed to a camp bed in the cellar’s far corner. ‘There you sleep.’
The old man and Marko disappeared and I was left alone in the basement. When I tried to turn off the tap, it came away in my hand. The castle cranked and groaned. What could I do? I had no idea where Marko or the old man were. The noisy castle kept me awake.
In the morning, Marko brought me a coffee. ‘So you like this,’ he said, nodding towards the turning contraption.

‘Like it? It kept me awake and I couldn’t turn the water off. Find a way to stop the damn thing.’

He shrugged. ‘That not matter. We go now to Café Slavia and wait Maja. You will like her. She very beautiful.’ 

Located on the banks of the Vltava River, the Slavia was typical of the cafés you find throughout the former Austro- Hungarian Empire: varnished wood panels, sturdy chairs and tables and newspapers slung over wooden dowels. Old men sip their coffees while playing chess and fur-coated women gossip in low voices and eat éclairs and chocolate gateaux.

Marko and I sat drinking foul kavas. In those days of glasnost, but before the arrival of Starbucks, Czech coffee was dark, strong and served in mugs. Oily, gritty coffee grains floated on the top of the cup and stuck to your lips.

Marko kept getting up to make phone calls, returning each time to say, ‘Maja is on her way.’

I trusted his word as much as I did his driving, but we were a long way from Zagreb and there was nowhere else for me to go.

After three hours, Maja finally arrived. Marko was right; she looked like she belonged on a catwalk. Tall, leggy and sultry, she had the appearance of a tigress who would eat her own cubs if necessity demanded it. She was poured into her Levis and over her white silk blouse was an expensive black- leather jacket zipped to just below the last button.

She took us to a waiting car. As we drove through the town, I felt like the castle, going around in circles. We were. After a 15-minute journey, I could see the Café Slavia two hundred metres down the road.

‘We get out now,’ Maja said.

She led us into a small gallery. As the door was closed, so were the curtains. A jacketed guard appeared from nowhere. He revealed an Uzi sub-machine gun.

Marko whispered, ‘I have told them you are English lord. Expert on Renaissance art.’

I was shaking with a mixture of fear over the gun and anger with Marko. ‘You’ve done what?’ 

Another man came up from the cellar with a large painting covered in linen. He placed it on a table. ‘I am Karol. This is my gallery.’ He lifted the cloth. ‘Please look. We think this is Jacopo Bassano. It is going to Munich, but first we need authentication. Your fee will be two per cent of sale price.’

Not knowing what the hell I was doing, my instincts told me to play for time. I pretended to examine the picture and concentrated on two or three parts of the painting, as though I had noticed something that would attract the attention of an expert. The fish on the kitchen floor, the figure of Judas Iscariot slumped in a chair, the haloed Christ sitting at the dining table, talking to his disciples.

I then turned my attention to the scratchings on the back, the woodworm holes in the frame. I took a notebook from my pocket and wrote a lot of gobbledegook. Hoping my voice wouldn’t shake, I told Karol that I must have professional photos of the painting and that, after studying them, I would give him my answer from London.

Karol snapped his fingers and Maja stepped forward with a camera. ‘She will take them and bring them to your hotel.’

I couldn’t tell him that I was staying in a cellar in the suburbs with a pirouetting castle. I left it to Marko to sort that one out. After he’d said something to them in Czech, I asked Karol, ‘Does this painting have any provenance?’

‘It does, but the paperwork is unreliable. That is why you are here.’

After we left the gallery, I said to Marko. ‘You bastard! We’re going back to Zagreb tonight.’

‘We can’t do that,’ he said. ‘We have to wait for the photographs.’

‘Oh yes. And which five-star hotel is this lord staying at?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Marko said, waving a soothing hand. ‘I told them you travel incognito and I would pick up the photos from Maja at the Slavia.’

I was in the shit now, up to my knees. I had to get away from Marko to think things through. I told him I’d get myself back to the house that night. I headed across the Charles Bridge on foot. I wanted to see that damn castle for real.

When I landed at Heathrow, I rang Mervyn and told him what had happened. He said he would make an appointment for me at a major London auction house with the person who dealt with seventeenth-century Renaissance art. I felt better when he said he would come with me.

In the meantime, the calls from Prague and Zagreb continued. Every time the phone rang, my legs buckled. It was Karol, Maja or Marko wanting to know if the painting had been authenticated.

A few knee-knocking days later I met Mervyn at the auction house and the two of us were introduced to the expert. He was, in fact, a young aristocrat, someone I will call ‘Charles’.

‘Where did you see this picture?’ he asked.

‘In Prague.’

‘In a gallery or someone’s home?’

I gave him the name of the gallery and told him about Karol.
I didn’t mention the machine gun.

Charles looked briefly at the photos, then at Mervyn. He waved his hand. ‘A fake,’ he said authoritatively. ‘There’s a lot of this stuff about these days.’

I felt relieved. If the painting had been genuine, I would have been implicated in what was possibly an art crime. Now I could extricate myself from a situation I had foolishly stumbled into.

Back at the Rona gallery, I told Stanley the whole story. He listened and smiled wryly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

I explained that I had felt too ashamed. Then Stanley told me about an incident he’d had some years before.

‘I was in Los Angeles where I was asked to visit the home of a millionaire who said he owned a Picasso. When I saw it, I told him it was a fake. That evening his bodyguard came to my hotel. Fortunately for me, we had become drinking buddies. “Get out of town,” he said. “You have given him information he doesn’t want repeated.” I left on the next plane.’

Stanley laughed. ‘Do you know what the French say about Corot? That in his lifetime he painted one thousand canvases and that three thousand are in America.’

That evening the phone rang. It was Karol again. I told him that I needed more time. There was some confusion between the picture he had shown me and another of Bassano’s paintings. ‘Ring me next week,’ I said.

To my relief, there were no more calls.

Six months later, I was at a party and met a lecturer in the Art Department at University College, London. He was an expert in late Renaissance paintings. I told him about my misadventure in Prague. He asked me if I still had the transparencies of the fake Bassano. I said that I did.

‘Could I see them?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

I sent them to him. A few days later he called me. ‘That’s no fake. It’s one of Bassano’s kitchen paintings. This one has been lost for years. It’s worth millions.’

What a fool I’d been. A fake art expert and a fake lord.

Now as I look at the transparency of this painting, I see a cook scrubbing a copper pot. There is a hole sunk into the stone floor where a half dozen still-alive fish have been netted. Surrounded by cats and cooks, they know their fate has been sealed. My eye is drawn back to the central character in the foreground, Judas Iscariot, who sits in a pose of regret and shame. He is dressed sumptuously in fur-lined robes, a glint of an earring below his crimson turban. He is staring at a goblet of red wine and a loaf of bread.

Like all Renaissance paintings, it is an allegory. The more you study it, the more you see. The long white towel draped over a hook could be the swaddling used for Christ on the cross and the shine of silver in Judas’ ear could represent the shekels he received for his greed.
I share his emotions of regret and shame brought about not, as in his case, by the betrayal of another person, but the betrayal of myself. I had been the real fake. 

Now go to CHAPTER 12 

Naïve art

Naïve artists work without formal technical qualifications and with a remarkable indifference to perspective. Uninfluenced by art traditions, they paint pictures mirroring their memories, desires and dreams. When most people think of naïve art, the names that come to mind are Henri Rousseau and Grandma Moses, but southeast Europe has produced many of these painters. Among the best known, the peasant, Ivan Generalić; the postman, Ivan Lacković and the carpenter, Ivan Rabuzin.  Rabuzin's buyers included Yul Brynner and Woody Allen - you can see one in Annie Hall. His pastel-coloured silk screen prints sold well in the Far East and he was known in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, but his reputation had never been established in Britain. My job was to find a London gallery which would represent him … There were only two possibilities, the Portal Gallery, who represented Beryl Cook, and the Rona Gallery. The Portal weren't interested, but the Rona was. A regular visitor there was Mervyn Levy: writer, artist and art critic who’d been a childhood friend of Dylan Thomas. Mervyn was a small, dapper man with a moustache and neatly-clipped white beard. We planned to write a play together about Dylan, based on Mervyn’s memories, and he would invite me to the Chelsea Arts Club to discuss our project. We never got far after the first bottle of wine. Read more about my years in the art world at Left Field. 

Pic. Ivan Rabuzin