The court case

This is where the story starts to get weird, and it gives me no pleasure to have to repeat some of the things that I found. The search function took me not back to the Canals auction but to an article that described angry scenes in the Old Bailey thirteen years ago, when “Nick Bonhams” (sic) was cleared of causing the death by careless driving of a pedestrian. Again, the tone wasn’t right, veering from dispassionate reportage to slightly unhinged insult. A moment’s googling revealed that the article had been cut and pasted wholesale from the account of the trial run in the Independent at the time. It had been clumsily editedto remove anything that might have mitigated Nick Bonham’s role in the tragic affair, salted with a spot of invective, and put back out on the Net, along with another piece entitled ‘Thirteen years on and Still No Apology…’
I was left to wonder why, as well as the sale report, these two articles should appear, thirteen years after the fact, on a website devoted to IT security issues. ITBackbones, the site in question, is actually a sort of hub or whatever they call these things for a large number of websites carrying IT-related news, and every one of them was running these stories. My best guess was that the site was owned by or in some way connected to the family of the dead man. I wrote to the contact address, and wrote to AP to see whether they could put me in touch with Graham Heathcote.
In the meantime, I received a reply from Jennifer Tonkin. She had no biographical details of Canals and suggested I try Google or Wikipedia… I wrote back to explain what I’d already discovered and gave her the link to the article describing Canals’ post-mortem presence at the sale. She then replied at greater length: Bonhams no longer has a saleroom in Chelsea, Nick Bonham left the company years ago and the most recent auction they held in which a work by Studio of Miguel Canals appeared in the sale catalogue was the 11th February 2009 Pictures and Frames sale, a sell without reserve auction (held at Knightsbridge), but this lot was withdrawn prior to the sale date (lot 65). The Oxford salerooms sold four lots by the Studio of Miguel Canals in a general Art and Antiques auction on 20th October 2009 (lots 43, 48, 49 and 50 – sale 17296). The last auction entirely dedicated to the Studio of Miguel Canals was held on 5th December 2000.
I must confess I was a bit stumped. Without any answers from ITBackbones or Graham Heathcote, there was nowhere to go, and if they were involved in some kind of vendetta they were hardly going to write to me and acknowledge the fact… then I did a bit more poking about and it all started to fall into place.
The artist and the PCC
Right there on the ITB network was another Bonhams-related news piece, this time attributed to Reuters: ‘Royal Collection Was NOT Duped’.
“Following a recent article published by the Sunday Times of London which was defamatory, full of inaccuracies, unsubstantiated accusations and innuendo about a former South African who has sold paintings by an apparently ‘fake’ South African artist to well-known British collections, International Collectors and via Auction Houses, evidence has reached the Paarl Post that the female artist, poet and Anti-Apartheid Activist, Helen Anne Petrie (1932–2006), had indeed mainly lived and worked in Fish Hoek, South Africa.
“The UK PCC is investigating the concerns of the article, Case No 093340. Strutt is being represented by Attorney Penelope E Meyer.
“Mr Glenn Strutt, a respected art dealer in the USA and Europe (Who does NOT have a criminal Record, neither a record of ‘shady business’, as incorrectly reported), has provided irrevocable documentary proof that neither Bonhams nor the Royal Collection were duped, as was feared, when they purchased paintings from him in Britain.”
The rest of the article consisted of a biographical sketch of Helen Anne Petrie. Much of it was tangentially concerned with explaining why her work had rarely appeared in any exhibitions, and it was written in a style which, I have to say, one does not normally associate with the Reuters news agency: “(Petrie) did however not allow anyone taking her away from her beloved Fish-Hoek ‘Summer House’ and ended her days alone, with grey, messed up, wiry hair, wandering and talking to herself, shifting between worlds only she knew, known to the locals as ‘The Fish-Hoek Old Witch’… Anne Petrie, the woman, the benefactor, the pacifist, the friend… The TRUE Matriarch of South African Female Artists.” See what I mean? I headed straight for the Sunday Times archive.
The newspaper of record
On August 9th 2009, the Sunday Times carried an article entitled ‘Royal Collection duped over fake African painter Helen Anne Petrie’, in which writers Richard Brooks and Georgia Warren allege that Mr Strutt had “hoodwinked” the Royal Collection into accepting paintings by Petrie as part of a scam intended to inflate the value of her works – many of which had been bought by Mr Strutt on her death in 2006.
The basis of the supposed scam was an Internet biography of Petrie, allegedly by one Sebastian L. Schwagele of Geneva, according to which Petrie’s works are owned by the likes of Bill Clinton, Madonna and David and Victoria Beckham. Petrie’s paintings are also said to be in the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In fact, said the Sunday Times, none of her works are in these galleries. Nor is there any proof that her noted collectors have any of her paintings…
A Chandleresque interlude
“Listen, Shorty,” I snarled, “I never met a wiseacre yet who didn’t understand a smack in the mouth or a slug from a .45. Sing!” And I cracked him a good one, and then another just for the hell of it.
“Okay, okay!” he yelped. “Stop with the fisticuffs, big guy! I’ll tell you what you wanna know! From what I hear, the whole scam is a ‘seeding operation’ to get this Petrie into the public eye an’ make a quick buck, see? It’ll all make sense if ya just spend a bit more time on the Web!”
“Geoff, my ankle hurts,” the dame breathed into my ear. Boy, could she breathe. “And I don’t understand what’s going on…”
Okay. This is where it gets really tangly-uppy, as we gumshoes call the tough cases, but it’s also where everything becomes relevant to anyone who ever thought of buying a painting at an auction.
The back story
It seems that Glenn Strutt’s connection with Bonhams (the firm) goes back 18 years, when he tried to interest then-director Nick Bonham in some artworks. Bonham could see they were not the real thing and sent him away. Strutt then befriended Bonham’s ex-wife, Kaye, and, two years ago, introduced her to the work of Helen Anne Petrie. As far as I can ascertain Kaye Bonham took Petrie’s claimed reputation and artistic standing at face value. There were, after all, two Petrie’s in the Royal Collection, and a lengthy Wikipedia entry claiming her as a lost gem. Last September, Bonhams sold three Petrie paintings in London for £28,000. The most valuable, ‘A Forest Track, Zanzibar’, fetched £14,400.
Bonhams now accepts it “might have been misled to some extent about Petrie’s artistic importance”. I haven’t been able to find out what tipped the auctioneers off, but they really might have spotted a couple of glaring inconsistencies in the ‘biography’ before the works came under the hammer. It’s claimed that Petrie spent time studying privately with Gillian Ayres RA, but Ayres insists that she has never taken private pupils and has no knowledge of Petrie. And the artist Jan Vermeiren, with whom Petrie allegedly studied in Holland in 1954, would have been only six years old at the time (bright child, that Vermeiren – Ed).
The sock puppet
You can’t check this stuff out for yourself quite so easily now, because the moderator types at Wikipedia have removed the biography and all entries referring to Helen Anne Petrie and the Strutt Family Trust, and blocked everyone who has attempted to reinstall them on the grounds that they are ‘sock puppets’. This was a new one on me. A ‘sock puppet’ is an identity assumed for the purpose of lending support to your position. In short, all the people who tried to back up the original posting of the ‘biography’ were found to be the same person. As the Wikipedia discussion page says:
‘Schwagele’ is responsible for creating and submitting this information on the internet art sites – including registering as User:Helen Anne Petrie and submitting the latest version… and probably this incarnation User:Helen anne petrie (1933–2006) one week later. Until independent scholarly sources from the international art community write about this person, the bio should be deleted… Seems more like an attempt to promote sales than a hoax…
Incidentally, I think this is fantastic and in every way fabulous. I know a lot of people mistrust Wikipedia as being a place where anyone can write anything, but in fact it’s a place where a community of thoughtful, intelligent and educated people share their knowledge of the world for free, and if you post up some rubbish for comic or criminal purposes, pretty soon someone will come along and take it down. If only this were true of any of the hundreds of free ‘news’ and PR sites, which it appears that Strutt and his proxies used. Once I’d realised that ITBackbones was just such a free portal, and has nothing to do with what’s posted on it, I had my answer as to why all that poisonous stuff about Nick Bonham was up there.
The takedown
This whole case is best understood as a sort of timeline of events:
1991(ish): Strutt tries to interest Nick Bonham in moody artworks, with no success
1996: Nick Bonham involved in fatal traffic accident
August 2009: Sunday Times article exposes Petrie scam
September 2009 : Free Internet ‘news’ sites flooded with cut-and-paste articles casting Nick Bonham in a poor light
October 2009: Free Internet news sites flooded with articles insisting that Glenn Strutt is “a respected art dealer”; Helen Anne Petrie, “a neglected genius”, blah, blah.
Almost as amazing as these attempts to – how shall we say? – big up Petrie in the art market is that, even now the jig’s very obviously up, Strutt continues to fight his corner. Sort of. Lawsuits are announced, although there is no record with the Press Complaints Commission of case number 093340, or any case mentioning the names Petrie or Strutt. Under the name Marlene Duval and Associates (a PR company), he continues to scatter the Internet with articles that try to place Petrie in the pantheon of South African artists, on one spectacular occasion copying a highly critical piece from South African Art News word for word and claiming it as support. Unfortunately, Helen Anne Petrie – a sad lady whose life was spent caring for her mentally ill brother – died alone and troubled, her only solace, quite possibly, having been painting her undistinguished but perfectly likeable amateur oils. And now poor Miss Petrie’s name will forever be attached to what appears to be a rather nasty scam.
And the lesson of this strange and not very pleasant case? Simply that whenever you are thinking of splashing out on a painting, a pair of loafers, a mobile phone, a television or a designer dress, make sure that you like it and that you want it. Ignore the auctioneers, the salesmen and the writers of colour supplement articles who tell you that the Queen or Robbie Williams own one. If you don’t really like it for what it is, irrespective of any stellar connections it may possess, walk away.
Now, where did I put the dame?