Getting the interview was thrillingly complicated. Between me and a drink with the country’s most crooked art dealer (allegedly) was a chain of go-betweens, each one seeming less salubrious the closer I got to Peter Gant. I was being tested, but I also suspected that the process was less important for my vetting than it was for conferring the pleasures of a vaudeville cloak-and-dagger to its participants. It just never seemed entirely serious.
Still, I was told, Peter would not want to meet with some grasping hack, but a man who appreciated art and literature – and enjoying a drink wouldn’t hurt either. As I wrote in 2016, at the end of his long trial in the Victorian Supreme Court:
I first met Gant at a bar in September 2014. He had just been charged with multiple counts of fraud. Beside his glass of red wine was a copy of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a hilarious spy farce. I wondered if the book was a hint. All around him there seemed to be hints. Sly references to crookedness. Before meeting Gant, everyone who knew him seemed to be winking at me, coyly declaring their knowledge lest they be thought naive. And here, placed before a man charged with ornate deception, was a novel about a man who embarrasses British spy agencies with ridiculous lies. I wondered.
Gant has always gambled. With money, the law, his health and freedom. He has spent large sums at the track, indignantly and serially offered his middle finger to authority, and engaged a war of attrition on his liver. Meeting me was another gamble. He had offered me an exclusive interview, apparently on the grounds that I was well read. He told me he wasn’t looking for any favours, and never dictated what I could ask.
Gant resembles an old trackside bookie – profane and proudly disreputable. His friends say he is a bright and charming raconteur. Many other people – and the public gallery for Gant’s trial was filled with them – see him as an amoral conman who has been able to play the law for too long.
Six months before I met Gant, he’d been charged with knowingly selling forged Brett Whiteley paintings for several millions of dollars. Gant was the dealer; Mohamed Siddique the alleged forger. A conservator, Siddique had studied at London’s Chelsea College of Arts before moving to Australia in the early 1980s. His speciality was restoration. He’d advised several galleries, and earned good money restoring valuable pieces for wealthy owners. “He has great skill and discipline,” one Melbourne art figure told me. “In fact, he’s a great recipe for a forger – someone who has both the art and the science.”
I was never sure why Gant agreed to speak with me, on-record and over several drinks. I’m still not. Awaiting trial on serious criminal charges, speaking to a journalist seemed reckless. Possibly it was merely cathartic – an impulsive, but soothing ventilation. But Gant struck me as a man who sees the world as a giant billiards table and he’s always playing the angles. And so perhaps he was playing one here. I also thought that Gant just loved risk and hated boredom.
We spoke for almost four hours. He enthused about Rothko, Raphael and Saul Bellow. But what most excited Gant were not his art heroes, nor his ostensible innocence, but the philistinism of the mega-wealthy. You might say that Gant had feelings similar to the late critic Robert Hughes – “art prices are what you see when you peer up the anus of ‘culture’” – and his contempt for certain individuals was unfiltered.
Gant described Andrew Pridham, the investment banker, chair of the Sydney Swans and alleged victim, as a “fucking moron”. About the art appraiser and scholar Professor Robyn Sloggett, whose opinions were first sought by Pridham, then by police, and finally by the Crown at trial, he was similarly unkind.
Even as he professed his innocence, I had the strong impression that Gant was doing everything he could to suggest to me his motivation for these alleged crimes: not personal enrichment, but punishing those whose obscene wealth had traduced the splendour of art. Pridham, for example, was wealthy but tasteless, a gauche man who acquired art not for its aesthetic pleasures but its Big Dick Energy.
What I thought I heard – implicitly, between the lines of his voluble hatred – was that if someone was to exploit the credulity of the fabulously wealthy who treated art as a mere status enhancer or investment opportunity, then, well, he wouldn’t shed any tears.
A few months before the trial, in 2016, a detective called me. He was curious about our interview and wondered if there was anything in my notes that weren’t included in the published article. There were, but I politely told him he’d have to get a subpoena to discover them – I wasn’t going to volunteer them.
As it was, the lawyer appointed to read my copy before publication recommended the removal of certain inflammatory quotes of Gant’s about Pridham and Sloggett – the venomous diatribes I mentioned above. I think the argument was that they might be considered intimidatory. I have no view on the evidentiary value of these unpublished quotes, and the detective left it there – I never heard from him again.
*
The five-week trial was fascinating, and I enjoyed that for much of it one of the paintings sat just a couple of feet behind those of us on the media bench – given its enormous size, I don’t think they had any better place to display it. It was a curious thing: the provenance of this outsized painting behind me was being examined in a court of law, and its value was suspended within uncertainty.
I won’t exhaustively detail the trial or evidence here – I’ve done that before. But after the ABC’s two-part documentary series about the trial aired late last year, I was surprised to read from some critics their frustration with the supposed philistinism of the judge. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald’s art critic, John McDonald, after watching the ABC series (but not having sat for the five-week trial):
What was most surprising about the trial, as portrayed in the documentary, was the contemptuous attitude shown by both lawyers and judge for what they called “connoisseurship”. The idea seemed to be that people giving their views as to why a painting was or was not a Whiteley, were mere poseurs whose comments lacked any hard basis in fact. As art appreciation is not a science, such comments will always have a subjective element, but it’s pure ignorance to imagine there is no value in these impressions.
Contemptuous? This wasn’t my memory of the trial. The Crown’s case rested, overwhelmingly, upon circumstantial evidence – compelling piles of it, to be sure, but little if any of it met the threshold of a criminal trial. If Justice Michael Croucher was contemptuous of anything, it was circumstantial evidence.
*
With an alleged forgery of notionally much older provenance, experts might forensically prove its inauthenticity through material analysis – pigment X, for example, was not invented until 1930, while this artwork purports to be from 1860. And more than just paint might be tested for anachronism – the material it was painted upon can be analysed, for example, or its framework if that, too, purports to be contemporaneous.
But these paintings were, reputedly, made in 1988. This fact alone does not mean that certain materials can’t be tested for anachronism, but their relative modernity makes it harder. And, sure enough, none were found.
Having little forensic evidence for the paintings’ fraudulence, the prosecution relied upon plenty of knowledgeable – but ultimately subjective – opinion. Brett Whiteley’s widow, Wendy – both muse for her late husband, and posthumous guardian of his legacy – testified to the crudeness of the paintings, and how her first glimpse of them invited nausea. Viscerally, she registered their falsity.
Then there was Professor Robyn Sloggett. She remarked that Whiteley was renowned – adored, in fact – for the fluency and spontaneity of his hand, and these works (she highlighted salient features with a laser pointer) were dead. They featured birds, for example, a recurring motif for Whiteley, and something that he could typically paint with awesome suggestiveness. With a just a few unfettered strokes, he could capture velocity and grace, and yet these birds “[are] actually painted as if it was, I don’t know, a wet rag being thrown out of a window or something,” she said. “It just has none of the velocity or fineness or the sense of being a bird and it’s this idea of sensibility [that’s] important in terms of Brett Whiteley’s work…”
As I wrote in 2016:
The Crown had offered a witness who could say it was a poor and contrary painting but could not say it had been created by the accused. This was the burden of proof upon the Crown. Sloggett’s cross-examination by the defence appeared to irritate her, so jarring or unfamiliar was the questioning of her expertise. But her expertise itself was never in question, only its relevance in this courtroom. The verisimilitude of Whiteley’s birds may be appreciated by scholars, but it is of scant relevance in a criminal trial. Average painting might cause an expert to question authenticity, but it does not prove a work to be fake. In the absence of the jury, the judge put it another way: “That’s perfectly okay in discussion in cafes in Fitzroy. It’s all very interesting and I’m sure very enlightening and it may well be accurate, but this is a criminal trial.”
Last year, John McDonald had a different view. He wrote: “One of the experts smeared [by defence lawyers] was Robyn Sloggett, of the University of Melbourne’s Art Conservation Lab, who they caught in a muddled statement about a bird on the canvas flying in one direction or another. Nothing could be more pointless.”
Pointless? A major witness for the prosecution was saying that the painting was fake, in large part because of those damn birds – while the judge was pondering the relevance of that very testimony. I’ll confess, though, that the instinctive defensiveness of an art critic about the legal testimony of another amuses me.
Is McDonald, who didn’t follow the trial, suggesting that Sloggett’s judgement is infallible, and that – even in a court of law – her views of the brush-strokes of seagulls should be automatically triumphant? I hope not. Because Sloggett’s judgement, as refined and sincere as it was, cannot be expected to receive the same unquestioning respect in a court of law as it might in a lecture hall. And yet, McDonald was right: the description of birds was pointless – just not in the way he thought.
The difficulty of accepting the testimony of Sloggett and Whiteley as inviolable in a criminal trial was neatly demonstrated by the defence during cross-examination. Contested here was the supposedly consistent brilliance of an artist who was also a heroin addict who fatally overdosed in ‘92. Good as he was, might it not be possible that he produced some average work? (Answer: Of course.)
In her testimony, Sloggett had described the works as being produced by a “dead hand” – i.e. not Whiteley’s, but some crookedly inferior imitator. Wendy Whiteley agreed. But then, while sitting in the witness dock under cross-examination, the defence drew her attention to an interview she gave just a few years after her husband’s death. The one in which she says: “Don’t you really want to ask me if I think heroin had a detrimental effect on his work?... Yes, I think it did… I felt that some of the paintings were dead, sitting solidly on the canvas, heavy, overworked.”
And there it was. The unwanted resonance of the word “dead” – used both by Sloggett to describe the paintings at trial, and by the artist’s widow to describe Whiteley’s own work. And so the great man was both capable and incapable of painting with a dead hand. How might this be reconciled beyond reasonable doubt? Well, it couldn’t be.
I watched the trial and reported on it. Judge Croucher wasn’t ideologically dismissive. And he wasn’t anti-intellectual. Croucher’s responsibility was upholding the law, and ensuring that the evidence provided in his court met precise and unforgiving standards. That wasn’t a reflection upon Professor Sloggett or Wendy Whiteley – it was a reflection of evidentiary law.
In McDonald’s piece, he expresses frustration that photos taken by Siddique’s suspicious colleague, and heavily relied upon by the prosecution, weren’t sufficiently incriminating. These photos, the prosecution argued, showed the various stages of the forged paintings’ progression – including their preliminary sketching. Robyn Sloggett submitted the paintings to infra-red scanning, revealing their skeletal sketches, and said they matched with the photos of the paintings’ early stages.
McDonald writes:
The single blockbuster feature of Sloggett’s testimony was when she produced photographic evidence of the drawing beneath the painted surface of one of the paintings. These drawings were an exact match for those in the half-completed picture that had been secretly photographed by two of Aman Siddique’s colleagues in 2007. It was incontrovertible proof that the work in the studio and the work in court, which was sold as a Whiteley, were one-and the-same.
If McDonald had followed the trial, he would have realised that the photographs were too blurry to make a definitive judgement. Unfortunately for the Crown, who had depended so much upon them, the man who took them had to climb upon a table and then stretch his arm up over the wall – which didn’t touch the ceiling – to take them. They weren’t very clear. To ask the jury to compare the photos with Sloggett’s infra-red scans was to invite them to “experiment”, Croucher felt. In a pub, one might agree that the images bear similarity. But in a criminal trial? Incontrovertible? Far be it for me to question Croucher’s judgement.
Now like McDonald, I have long assumed the men’s guilt. Unlike McDonald, I don’t think the case was sufficiently strong to convict them. This seems a hard thing for many to accept. At the time, I spoke with plenty of folks who were knowledgeably invested in the art world and knew of Gant’s reputation. They’d sniffed the funk around the paintings, had read the great volume of circumstantial evidence and had assumed Gant’s guilt – and were then painfully frustrated by the difficulty of proving criminal intent in forgery cases. They knew they were guilty – so why didn’t the law?
I can understand Wendy Whiteley’s frustration. She was, and remains, appalled. She’s adamant that the paintings are fake, their sale a crime and their very creation a blasphemy. She’s invested, obviously, and when we spoke just after the trial, she was irritated by my answer to her question about what I thought of their guilt: that they likely were, but it was not proven beyond reasonable doubt and that the verdict was suspect and would likely be overturned.
But that so many others seem wilfully ignorant of the basic principle of evidentiary burden only confirms for me that our appreciation of the law extends only so far as we think that its judgements are correct.
*
One of the most fascinating moments of the trial for me was when, in the absence of the jury, the judge fretted about the potential for an unsafe verdict – that is, a guilty finding rendered upon circumstantial evidence.
The Crown had a terribly weak case, the judge complained, and he was of a mind to dismiss it. On a Friday afternoon in the middle of the trial, Judge Croucher said he’d take the weekend to think about it – as a matter of principle, he was loathe to dissolve a jury. It was an awesome power, and an undemocratic one, and he would use it sparingly.
On Monday, it was decided. He would not dismiss the jury, and instead retain his faith that it could distinguish between substantial and circumstantial evidence. I suppose he would come to regret this, because the jury found the two men guilty. Gant was sentenced to five years jail; Siddique to three years, with all but 10 months suspended.
I was surprised, to say the least. But I was not surprised when, one year later, the men’s convictions were overturned on appeal. I wasn’t surprised because I’d heard the judge repeatedly voice his misgivings in the absence of the jury and, “by the barest margins” even permit the trial to continue.
In the final judgement of the Court of Appeal, a bedrock of procedural fairness is cited from the 1975 case Barca v The Queen: “When the case against an accused person rests substantially upon circumstantial evidence the jury cannot return a verdict of guilty unless the circumstances are ‘such as to be inconsistent with any reasonable hypothesis other than the guilt of the accused’”.
The judgement went on:
“We have not been privy to the reasons which led the prosecutor to approach their evidence as she did. Nor can we guess at them. The result was… the jury were left effectively to speculate about the import of the evidence of these two critical witnesses. Such speculation, which the prosecutor effectively invited by the manner in which she couched her closing address to the jury, may well have contributed to the error in the jury’s verdict.
“It is not necessary to pursue this possibility. Nor is it useful now to contemplate how the Crown case, or the police investigation, might have been conducted differently. The critical point is that, as we have explained, the jury were bound to reject the Crown case as advanced before them, and to acquit both the accused.”
Gant and Siddique were free. And the paintings? The Appeals Court could make no judgement about their authenticity. Wendy Whiteley wanted them destroyed. They weren’t. Andrew Pridham donated his to the Melbourne University, where it remains in storage – a potential example for teaching student conservators about fakes, Robyn Sloggett says. His money – he bought it for $2.5 million – remains lost.
The whereabouts of the other painting, sold to car dealer Steve Nasteski in 2009 for $1.1 million, is unknown – though Nasteski received a refund for it in 2013. I like to think that the third painting, never sold but which formed a part of the trial, is displayed in Peter Gant’s billiard room.
Having written this, I now realise I’ll have to reach out to Peter again – and hope that his abhorrence of boredom and love of risk might compel him to answer the phone. Or perhaps, having dodged jail and now approaching 70, he’s assumed all the risk that he can take. I guess we’ll see.