Bruce Chatwin Read online

  “Bruce loved to be the centre of gossip, conversation, everything,” said John Hewett. The press cuttings confirm his talent for self-promotion.

  – The Daily Mail, 25 June 1959. The sale of the “Westminster Rubens” for £275,000, a new world record for a painting. Although he had been there but half a year, he occupied the centre of the picture.

  – The Sphere, 28 January 1961. Photographed on his own this time, the caption reads: “Mr Bruce Chatwin, already regarded as an expert on antiques”.

  – The Daily Mail, 24 November 1964. Another world record. Lot 32 – A Tahitian Woman and Boy, by Gauguin. He is shown lifting the painting. “It was Chatwin who arranged the Gauguin sale,” declares the paper. “Sotheby’s had a call from Mrs Austen Mardon, American-born widow of a tobacco company director. She has nine children, lives in Ardross Castle, Ross-shire. She said she had a painting to sell. Chatwin went to Scotland, was staggered to see the Gauguin hanging in a bedroom. Its whereabouts had been unknown for 40 years.”

  The newspaper suggests that it was Bruce who discovered the Gauguin, star lot in one of the biggest sales of Impressionist paintings and drawings ever held. In fact, Mrs Mardon – who had bought it in 1923 for £1,200 – knew perfectly well what the painting was. It boiled down to good luck that Bruce had gone on the valuation. He was accompanied by John Kerr, the expert in old books. They stayed a night in the castle with Mrs Mardon and her daughters. Kerr says, “They were faintly out of this world. Over dinner, we were told how they had toured all over Canada with the Gauguin in the boot of their car. One day they had stopped for a picnic in the snow and had driven off leaving the Gauguin behind.”

  The next morning, Bruce had to go on another visit. Kerr elected to take the Gauguin back to London by train. Bruce, strongly feeling it should not go in the guard’s van, booked the painting its own sleeper compartment. Kerr says, “We booked it in a child’s name, parcelled it carefully and at Inverness gave it to the Inspector, who said: ‘This has to go in the van.’

  ‘No, here’s the ticket for it,’ said Bruce.

  “The guard gazed at us rather quizzically: ‘But there’s nae bairn in there’.”

  Such stories did the rounds in Mrs Ford’s tearoom on the top floor of Sotheby’s. Bruce’s unstinting confidence more than compensated for his lack of training, experience and expertise. David Nash accompanied Bruce to the Parsee dealer Heeramanek in New York, then contemplating a sale of Buddhist and Hindu sculptures. “Bruce was enormously impressive at discussing in learned terms thirteenth-century Vijayanagara culture. I’d never heard of it. I thought: ‘My God, this man knows everything.’ Only later, I realised he’d read it up the night before.”

  “He had the right manner,” says John Kasmin, “a mixture of bluff, a good eye and an ability to deal with the rich. You have to assume everyone’s more uncertain than you. Being a tiny bit confident reassures everyone – like a doctor’s bedside manner when he doesn’t know what you’ve got.” When Kasmin sought his opinion on a ninth-century Indian bronze, Bruce took the pin out of his lapel and scratched the patina. Kasmin says, “It’s a manner you acquire at Sotheby’s. It was mildly reassuring.”

  Trained by Hewett, Bruce had developed a sure eye. The historian Kenneth Rose never forgot the manner in which Bruce swept into an Irish country house, declaring: “Henry Moore is a fake and Barbara Hepworth is a fake Henry Moore – a fake fake.”

  Most of the time, his assurance proved justified. He told Peter Levi how he went into a famous gallery in New York, saw a bronze horse and suddenly observed that it had a casting line right through it like a toy soldier. “He thought: ‘That is a technique the Greeks never used.’ It had to be withdrawn. Not unnaturally when he was seen coming in, it was like the arrival of the Goths. What appalling thing was going to happen next?”

  Fakes, on the other hand, were a product of Sotheby’s success. Encouraged by spiralling prices, a former Egyptian ballet dancer, Fernand Legros, and his friend Elmyr de Hory made a living on the island of Majorca painting Modiglianis, Derains and Dufys. Their fakes were “terribly obvious” to Bruce who spotted Legros early on. “I remember him making the most incredible scene at Sotheby’s and I said to the porter: ‘Please help me to get this gentleman out onto the pavement’.” The pair stayed at the Dorchester or Claridge’s. “If a dealer said that he wanted a Miró sketch or a Dufy watercolour, they’d actually go and paint it in the morning and put it on the radiator to dry.” Bruce only had to smell the paint.

  His growing confidence expressed itself flamboyantly. In June 1963, David Ellis-Jones, who had joined the Impressionist department, was labouring doggedly on the William Cargill sale. “Bruce had been away on a trip at the wrong time of the year. On the first day of the sale this hurricane comes in and very grandly points at a Renoir drawing of a nude: ‘Oh, that’s ghastly, I even think it’s a fake.’ He looked around and said, ‘That’s a fake. That’s a fake. That’s a fake,’ and walked on. You had to take stock. We then investigated all of these and withdrew them from the sale. And he was right.”

  Ten years later, Bruce’s friend Tilo von Watzdorf held the first serious sale of modern American art at Sotheby’s. “A couple of months before, Bruce sails in and sees a Jackson Pollock on the floor, a 1951 black and white head of a man. ‘That’s a fake.’ I was annoyed because I’d worked so hard, I’d already checked that picture with colleagues in New York and Bruce had never had anything to do with contemporary art or Pollocks. He’d just shot from the hip. ‘Bruce, listen, give me a break for once.’ Then the moment the catalogue came out, Sotheby’s was served an injunction by Marlborough Fine Art. It was a fake, made in north Italy. He was triumphant.”

  Bruce’s readiness to pronounce this or that a fake could be tiresome to those around him. To Peregrine Pollen, the theatricality seemed modelled on Joseph Joel Duveen who when asked by J. P. Morgan to admire five of his Chinese porcelain beakers, looked at them, took a walking stick and smashed two. Nor was the Chatwin eye infallible. The daughter of Lord Carnarvon’s head digger once offered Bruce and Erskine a purple faience Ushabti figure with Tutankhamen’s inscription. She said, probably truthfully, that it had been given to her father by Carnarvon himself. Erskine was about to buy it, until Bruce shook his confidence. “Bruce took me aside and said: ‘It’s a fake.’ That unhitched me. ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s an absolute bloody fake.’ I didn’t buy it. It wasn’t a fake, but he was in ‘it’s a fake’ mood. Everything was a fake when he was in that mood.”

  Mrs Clarke, whose husband Tim was Head of the Porcelain department, spoke for not a few people within Sotheby’s when she said, “We thought he was a bit of a fake.”

  Impressionists, unlike Antiquities, was not a field in which there could be unlimited discoveries. Wilson found the paintings: Bruce catalogued them. The information came mostly from the back of the picture. Since this was illustrated in the catalogue, it did not require description. Bruce had to detail the artist, the title, the medium, the size, the owner, where the painting had been exhibited, which books it had appeared in.

  The part of the process Bruce enjoyed best was travelling, at the firm’s expense, to verify a painting. Each Impressionist artist had spawned an “expert” who gave out certificates of authenticity: Paul Brame in Paris for a Degas; John Rewald in New York for a Gauguin. Some artists were yet alive to deliver their own assessment. In Paris, Bruce met Braque, dressed in a lilac track suit. “I had a marvellous morning sitting in Braque’s studio while he painted one of those great birds, which actually was his soul going out through the studio roof.” Braque looked at Bruce’s photograph. “I’ve got very feeble eyes, can you tell me whether it’s a fake or not?” Bruce told him it was. “He said, ‘Bon.’ He signed the photograph. ‘That this is not by me’.”

  Bruce admitted to Colin Thubron: “It was obviously great fun for a little kid from Birmingham to suddenly find himself in the company of Braque, Giacometti and Picasso.” As for the
experience of dashing round the world and pontificating “with the maximum arrogance” on the value or authenticity of works of art, “I just took to it.”

  He loved the rushing about, the whole business of being in a bustle. Postcards to Brown’s Green snapshot a hectic itinerary. “Had amusing time in Paris and Rome.” “Went to Matisse chapel, Vence.” And from New York: “An average of 4 parties a day, 4 times the work, 4 hours sleep, 4 times as expensive – and I’m fine. B.”

  Although Bruce did not see his parents often, he conveyed to his mother fragments of his life that he knew would enthral. On 4 May 1960, he invited her to see the Pierre Balmain Summer Collection and a Preview of French Impressionist Pictures, including La Solitude by Corot. Tickets cost three guineas. The dress was black tie.

  Hugh says, “He put Margharita back in touch with her London before the war.” Seeing mother and son together John Hewett thought they were brother and sister.

  “Guess where I’ve been, Mummy.”

  “Buckingham Palace?”

  “No, Clarence House.”

  He had been to deliver a picture to the Queen Mother.

  The Corot sale, which took place in the same month as Sarah Hunt dismissed him as “too boring”, marked a break with the schoolboy commuter from Ealing. From the spring of 1960, Bruce mixed with the cream of the beau monde.

  Whatever pain he suffered over Ivry’s marriage was soon forgotten. “Have just got Avril’s [Curzon] mother’s invitation for the 24th with a note from A. saying that you’re having a dinner party,” he wrote to Ivry on 10 October 1960. “Should love to come.” Within a year of her visit to London, Bruce was able to tell Margharita of how, while holidaying at Este near Venice, he had taken tea with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The Duke, who was dressed in yellow from tie to toe, spoke in a faint American accent. “What was Wallis like?” Margharita wanted to know. The Duchess had told Bruce, who was suffering from jaundice, to put on some dark glasses and to catch the next plane home.

  Bruce’s host at Este was a young English artist, Teddy Millington-Drake, a grumpy and mischievous Old Etonian who spoke in a slow drawl. “He came for the weekend and stayed six months,” he complained of Bruce who, after he started writing, liked to stay with him in Patmos and Tuscany. Millington-Drake was the son of the diplomat Sir Eugen, ambassador to Montevideo at the time of the Graf Spee’s sinking; his mother, Lady Effie, was the daughter of the first Earl of Inchcape. He was 27 when he met Bruce, at dinner with the frame-maker Alfred Hecht. “Teddy was an unrepentant queer long before such things existed,” says Lucie-Smith, who had known him at Oxford as a camp dandy in jeans with chintz turn-ups. “Bruce envied him his ease with his sexuality. He had only minimal artistic talent, but he did have money. He held up a distorting mirror of what Bruce wanted and all he didn’t want to become. Exploiting Teddy, just a little, was a way of getting on terms with his own mixed feelings.” Their friendship endured until Bruce’s death.

  In 1961, Millington-Drake had rented the 35-room Villa Albrizzi at Este. He hung Indian Rajput textiles on the wall and down one wall painted the words of a favourite poem of Bruce’s, Baudelaire’s “Invitation au Voyage”:

  Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté

  Luxe, calme et volupté.

  That summer, Millington-Drake invited Bruce in a party with Colette Clark and Emma Tennant. For much of the visit Bruce lay in bed, yellow-faced with the jaundice he had contracted “from a needle giving me an anti-histamine shot for a mosquito bite in Sicily”. Hugh Honour was another visitor. He wrote: “The talk that summer of this brilliant adolescent was all about recent sales of Impressionist and other modern paintings and was very different from his later conversation. It was smart and acid.” With his head propped against the pillow in a French Empire bateau-lit, Bruce resembled to Emma Tennant “a Germanic folk-tale hero, a grown-up Hansel who has leapt from the cage where the wicked witch imprisoned him.” On her return to England she would spend a surprisingly chaste weekend with him in Great Bedwyn. “Bruce”, she wrote, “is a man with no woman in him, no wish for women either.”

  One day at Este, Bruce felt well enough to visit Bertie Lansberg, an 80-year-old Brazilian of German-Jewish extraction who had bought and restored Palladio’s Villa Malcontenta. As he walked through Lansberg’s hall Bruce pointed to a lump of marble half hidden under a console and exclaimed: “Look! A Greek kouros!” It turned out to be ten inches from the buttocks and pelvis of a greyish marble kouros. “Lansberg was delighted,” wrote John McEwen in his tribute to Millington-Drake, “and immediately said he would give it to Chatwin who, to Millington-Drake’s embarrassment, kept him to his word, returning with a sack to claim it the following week.” Tennant was with him when he collected it. “What does Bruce do, to secure his prize? I remember only an interminable wait, with Teddy’s small figure, very dapper as ever in a dark linen jacket, wandering around the artefacts and pictures, sighing as if once again disappointed . . .”

  Bruce smuggled his gift out of Italy in the lower bunk of a sleeper. The fragment became known as “The Bottom”.

  Wilson, seeking to prise from Christie’s their traditional clients, trained his young men to cultivate connections and to nourish their contacts. The saying went that both auction houses dealt in the three Ds: Divorce, Debt and Death. The difference between them was that at the death Christie’s would send a wreath to the funeral while Sotheby’s sent a representative. Increasingly, Bruce became Wilson’s representative. “He was a bird-dog,” says Lucie-Smith. “When someone had got something, Bruce was sent to get it out of them. There are a lot of nutty people in the art world and they come no nuttier than those who have inherited. He was good at managing nuts.”

  Such a collector was George Spencer-Churchill who lived near Oxford. One day Bruce drove down to Northwick Park with Robert Erskine, George Ortiz and Peter Levi. Bruce, says Levi, was extremely witty and distinctly smartish. “It wasn’t name-dropping, although names were dropped.” They drove in Erskine’s 1936 Aston Martin, and Bruce told a story about a car drive with Picasso. “Someone in the car said to Picasso, ‘I don’t know what’s to happen about Princess Margaret’s marriage. She looks very glum.’ Picasso talked over his shoulder: ‘It’s perfectly simple, she bathes him too much. Everyone knows you shouldn’t wash a commoner’s back’.” Levi was impressed. “I’d heard people make jokes about Snowdon, but no one who’d been in a car with Picasso.”

  They arrived at Northwick Park where Spencer-Churchill had laid out his collection of Greek and Etruscan bronzes on a square table in a ranked pyramid with the largest in the centre. Among the bronzes was one modern toy soldier, brightly coloured, and he would ask the question, “All are BC: except one. Which is the AD one?”

  “He’d been shot through both temples, which left him a bit strained,” says Levi. “His habits were so odd that he had the dining room wired and if someone upset him he’d turn up the music, Wagner, very loud. He was known always to put water in the claret and when he invited us to supper, he said: ‘I only have a boiled egg, you know’.”

  Taking up a gold weight made of haematite, Spencer-Churchill rubbed the back of Bruce’s neck with it.

  Declining supper, the four escaped to the Lygon Arms and ordered a magnum. Levi asked Bruce: “How do you know these marvellously funny people?” It was his job, Bruce said. He had to know them. “If they have stuff which they one day might sell, better it comes to us than to Christie’s.” In the event, Spencer-Churchill sent his collection to Christie’s.

  Until he turned against it, Bruce revelled in the names, the gossip and his contacts in this country-house world. He exhibited a genius for taking on the plumage of his prey. “If seriousness was required, he was good at that,” said Hewett. “If he went for a walk, or sailed, he immediately fell into the role. He was a chameleon, but a nice one.”

  Then there was his talent for mimicking the people he met. A vigorous social life offered him plenty of scope to “do the police in differen
t voices”, as T. S. Eliot wrote of Dickens. Bruce was a mimic after the manner of Gustave Flaubert and Konrad Lorenz who, he wrote, “became the wretched jackdaws”. He remembered books and objects and people with his grandfather Leslie Chatwin’s total recall. “Bruce on form could be the song the sirens sang,” says the artist Howard Hodgkin, who met him at this time. “You could be sitting with him and suddenly he’d be the Countess of Sutherland or Mrs Gandhi or Diana Cooper or almost anyone you could think of. In a crowded restaurant you wished you weren’t with him.” There was an additional quality to his mimicry. He did not transform his voice into the other person: they co-existed. There was Bruce’s voice and, within that, the echoing tones of the person he was imitating. “This gave the hallucinatory feeling of being confronted by two people,” says Lucie-Smith. Bruce – and Bianca Jagger’s mother, as it were, selling refrescos on a beach in Nicaragua. “Talking to Bruce,” says the collector Werner Muensterberger, “you could see how he got carried away with his own fantasy and even in his imitation of people how he elaborated on them: it was close, but not exactly what he had seen or heard. Someone who embellishes like that is seeing themselves as the exception: ‘It could only happen to me’.”

  At various moments he would lose himself so completely in the role that he lost the scent and became the person he was mimicking. By 1961, the subject of Bruce’s favourite imitations was his boss at Sotheby’s.

  Wilson was shaped like a penguin, tall and slightly portly. His face was smooth and unlined and he had narrow, darting blue eyes which looked amiably down his nose. The only time he went out of doors was to admire his garden or to shoot (which he did badly).