most elegant thieves of all, The

Policy Review, Apr/May 2003 by Bering, Henrik

TOD VOLPE. Framed: Tales of the Art Underworld. CUTTING EDGE PRESS (EDINBURGH). 271 PAGES. L15.99

OVER THE PAST Couple Of years has come a steady flow of revelations about that perennially glamorous subject, the international art scene: stories of boardroom intrigues and of illegal price-fixing between the two auction giants, Sotheby's and Christie's, of bidrigging and of "death patrols," the distasteful practice of monitoring society death notices in order to contact the bereaved families concerning possible sales before the deceased has even been laid to rest.

Add to that the contributions of Tod Volpe, a key figure in the art market for more than two decades. He was responsible for launching the Mission arts and crafts craze in the 1970s, which turned a style into an international phenomenon. This made him one of the most successful postwar art dealers, with clients including Barbra Streisand, Jack Nicholson, and Andy Warhol.

Successful, that is, until the day in 1997 when the police entered his house in the Hamptons and arrested him. He was charged with 3 8 allegations of fraud and embezzlement that could have landed him a sentence of i o to 12 years in prison. In the event he served two, but his career as an art dealer and consultant was clearly over.

Now he has published his memoir, Framed: Tales of the Art Underworld, one of the most revealing and useful books about the art world that has been published since Robert Lacey's classic Sotheby's: Bidding for Class. Like the latter, Framed is one these books that deserve the epithet "delightfully scandalous." It is also a cautionary tale of greed and stupidity that will make you think twice about ever again entering an antiques store alone and unarmed.

VOLPE'S BACKGROUND for entering the art world is somewhat unusual. He came by way of the funeral business. Coming from a poor Italian background, he started as an embalmer's apprentice with a prominent New York mortician. Here he became an expert at drumming up business: He learned to carefully cultivate cops, nursing homes, and hospitals to furnish him with customers. One scene finds him in a rowboat on Christmas Eve, picking up floaters from the Hudson River in the middle of a snowstorm. And most important, he learned how to handle grieving relatives, developing a soothing and unctuous manner which would prove very useful later on.

These passages are Dickensian in their ghoulish hilarity, told with great gusto. For his twenty-first birthday, Volpe was presented with a 4oo -pound corpse wrapped in a red ribbon, the preservation of which was the task of the day.

For an ambitious man, the funeral business was clearly a bit of a dead end, and after a while he shifted to reading art history at New York University and working as a stagehand at the Met in the evenings. His aim was to become an art dealer. On weekends, he scavenged the flea markets for antique finds, for which he had a keen eye. He financed his purchases by stealing from the stagehand coffee fund of which he was in charge, instead buying discount doughnuts and coffee. When people complained, he would shut them up by saying it was their alcohol habits that had dulled their tastebuds.

His great model and inspiration was the art rogue Joseph Duveen, who in the 190 os and 3 Os provided plutocrats and Hollywood moguls with choice European paintings and old aristocratic portraits at astronomical prices. The buyers could then point to them as their European ancestors. Duveen would stop at nothing: If the lady in a portrait was a little too old and wrinkled, his restorers would tart her up to be a delightful young girl. Lord Duveen's exploits included bribing servants and once supplying two little orphaned Japanese boys to satisfy a client's sexual peccadilloes.

Together with his cousin, Volpe bought an old warehouse in the SoHo section of New York in 1968 and opened the Jordan Volpe Galley. The gallery was founded on a bright idea: At a friend's house he had seen an old recliner, which he bought for $75. It was marked with a joiner's compass and the words "Als ik kan," which means "the best that I can," the mark of the furniture maker Gustav Stickley, who at the start of the twentieth century rebelled against Victorian opulence in favor of simpler, more puritan designs. The design intrigued him.

Volpe and his cousin then proceeded to amass huge amounts of this type of arts and crafts furniture, which went under the name of "Mission" and which until then was perhaps better known for its secondary utility as firewood. It was Volpe's genius to envision it and market it as something new and deeply desirable. Suddenly everybody wanted a piece of Stickley furniture.

Volpe's innovation was in the presentation of objects. He could make pieces of modest value look like priceless artifacts. Lit in surprising ways, a banal object could be transformed into sculpture. If ever there was a style that could do with a bit of fancy extra lighting, it is Mission. Volpe's methods of presentation have since been imitated all over the world.