The White Whale

The memoirs of a bad dealer.

I first met The White Whale in early 2017 in the company of Drew, a project-space-impresario-slash-art-­advisor. Drew had somehow managed to secure a short-term lease on an enormous and crumbling hotel in west London, using it to stage a number of exhibitions over the period of a year or so; he included several of the artists we represented in these shows. His backer – the owner of the building – was a Chinese billionaire who was planning to flip the building, and the place was always a wasp’s nest of property developers looking to press Drew for info about the hotel’s mysterious owner.

The White Whale wasn’t really a property developer but, as he once told me, ‘all my fingers are pie-deep.’ He was a tall man in the thrusting prime of early middle age with a powder-pink pallor and a short white beard like the dusting of icing sugar on a cake. By way of introduction, Drew brought him to an exhibition at my gallery in Clerkenwell where The White Whale seemed uninterested in the works on display. We soon fell to talking about Gilbert & George, however, and he told me he was principally interested in their early works – market rarities, especially if you didn’t want to buy at auction, which he didn’t.

‘I’ve always wanted to own one of the Drinking Sculptures’, he told me. ‘I’ve spoken to White Cube and [Thaddeus] Ropac but they haven’t got what I want. Drew told me you did a show of their older works where you worked before?’

‘Yes, I worked on the show of the Bad Thoughts series. It’s a little later than the Drinking Sculptures though – late seventies. Putting together the show we spoke to a lot of early G&G collectors. I could ask around for you if you’re interested. For the right number people might be willing to sell … ’

‘Oh yeah?’ The White Whale said. ‘Sounds good to me.’

I had no idea where to start. I called my former employer but he couldn’t help either. ‘See if you can persuade him to buy a Bad Thoughts picture instead’, he said, ‘then we’d be in business.’ The White Whale was a potential new client so ideally I wanted to be able to offer him what he was looking for. I did some digging around and found a set of Drinking Sculptures through a Brazilian I’d met at a gallery dinner a few months before. She was glamorous to the point of fragility and was the only person I have ever seen wear a ruff in earnest.

The problem was that the work – a multi-panel piece comprising nine glazed black-and-white photographs in what might generously be termed ‘authentically original condition’ – was in Brazil. In order to bring the works over, we would have to bring them into the UK on temporary admission licence. This, plus the shipping, would come to almost £2,000, but that was only a fraction of the profit we stood to make if the deal came off.

When the work arrived, they were accompanied by a complicated hanging plan drawn up by the artists. As a huge admirer of Gilbert & George, the almost archeological act of unboxing this work (technically all the individual pieces together formed one artwork, just as Gilbert & George like to be referred to as one artist) was a quasi-ritualistic experience in its own right. I squeezed into latex gloves and set about hanging.

Four hours later, after referring to installation images online and in G&G’s own Complete Pictures, the work was finally hung. Its clunky, asymmetrical shape belied the timid intimacy of the subject matter. Gilbert (short, thick set, Italian – the image maker) and George (tall, languid, bespectacled, English – the wordsmith) are dressed in matching three-button suits, staring into the middle distance with all the jaded ennui of youth.

I called The White Whale to let him know the work was hung and he told me he would walk over later that day; his office, whose reception was hung with two enormous Damien Hirst spot paintings, one of them warping slightly from the damp London air, was just around the corner from us.

He arrived and walked straight past me into the gallery and took the stairs up to the office two at a time. As he walked into the room, I wondered if he had forgotten his glasses when, rather than looking at the Drinking Sculpture hung on the chimney breast, he instead honed in on a small Eliot Hodgkin painting we had hung on another wall. I left him to it for a minute; everybody has their process.

After what felt like much longer than a minute he turned back towards me and slumped into a chair with the raised eyebrows of a man weary with self-enrichment. He looked up at the G&G as if surprised to see it.

‘That it?’ he asked.

‘That’s it,’ I affirmed, trying to sound chipper.

‘Bit small for the price, isn’t it?’

‘Same size as it’s always been.’ My attempt at levity was more for my benefit than his at this juncture. He got up and looked at it, leaned into it pugilistically. ‘It’s a real rarity,’ I said. ‘Should be in a museum.’ And then, appealing to his financial nous: ‘This series – all of early G&G from the early seventies to the early 80s is really undervalued by the market. They keep producing so much and White Cube sell them as best they can, but there’ll be a reckoning one day – just like there has been in the Hirst market – and I feel certain that the early works will be the works people want, that achieve the really big prices. They’re seminal.’

‘Really good to see it. Thanks.’ His voice was like a door shutting. He turned and looked me squarely in the eyes and held my gaze for longer than was comfortable. And then he was off, leaping down the stairs. I followed.

Out on the street, before I could speak, he walked over to my motorbike which was parked on the pavement opposite the gallery.

‘This yours?’ he asked.

‘Yep.’

‘Sexy, yeah. Bet the girls bloody love it.’ After leaning over to twist the throttle and make vroom-vroom noises, he moved round to the back of the bike and started pretending to fuck it. Gyrating and grinding his crotch onto the darkly open O of the exhaust pipe, his left hand gripped the passenger seat as he swung a pretend lasso above his head with his right. ‘Woooh, baby! Ride it!’, he bellowed.

Reflected in the plate glass windows behind him, I saw my face redden, my smile wrinkle like crêpe paper. The staff inside the estate agency, with whom I was on a friendly-morning-wave-but-we’ll-probably-never-speak terms, looked out in horror. He handed me his phone and implored me to take a picture of this bizarre man-on-machine action. The photograph I took and handed back to him showed The White Whale in full swing, his crotch in battering-ram contact with the back of my motorcycle, his back arched, a diamanté glint of saliva on his teeth.

He did not buy the Gilbert & George. After a week of silence I’d called him to ask his thoughts and he told me he didn’t think the work would be so small. When I pointed out that I had provided him with the dimensions weeks before, he parried and said it wasn’t correctly priced. I asked him what he thought would be fair and his suggestion was rock bottom, a toxic asset offer, a third of my asking price. I told him that would be impossible. ‘Find me something that represents real value,’ he said. ‘Then we’re talking. Everything I do, it has to be about value.’

I had long been convinced that Frank Auerbach drawings were undervalued, or at least some of them at any rate – and that you could own a small masterpiece for a fraction of the cost of one of his oil paintings, which sell for millions. German-born Auerbach, who has lived in London since the 1940s, is a prolific artist and uses drawing as a practice akin to a gymnast’s warm up. It is an integral part of his process, and it’s quite a process: Auerbach paints every single day of the year and has done so mostly in the same north London studio since the 1950s. If you agree to sit for Auerbach it is a weekly commitment which precludes holidays, sick leave or even conversation during the sitting.

There are many thousands of Auerbach drawings – and he is still making them. Often small and often square in format (typically no bigger than 25 x 25 cm), they employ a range of different media ranging from very early examples in which just charcoal is used to others that use oil pastels, felt tip, Tipp-Ex, pencil and crayons. Some are as heavily worked as a piece of paper can be without disintegrating; others have the windswept look of a treeless hillside, a scant few lines conjuring a landscape or a face with an agitated prowess. They have that quality I enjoy most of works on paper: they seem to remain forever in the midst of their own creation.

I loved the so-called School of London painters – Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Leon Kossoff, Howard Hodgkin – and Auerbach is the last of them alive. I was amazed, when I looked into it, at what I could afford. I needed to narrow down the field not only on aesthetic grounds, but with consideration to longevity. The pencil works were fine and would last, of course, but had something lacking; the felt tip works looked vibrant, but the further back I looked at them, the worse their condition became. There is very little you can do to stop felt tip from fading. Finally, I had my criteria: no pencil works and no works with felt tip.

After a long period of searching – of asking dealers and advisors and collectors – I came upon a set of four drawings for sale at Bonhams in their Modern British day sale, estimated at between £16,00–£18,000. They were in great condition, having been owned by the ExxonMobil corporate collection since the early eighties, and looked as if they had never been taken out of the crate. Their heavily worked surfaces were crusty, the line work was aggressive, haphazard and assured. They were exactly what I was looking for.

Certain I would be outbid, I nevertheless went along to the auction on a bright June morning in 2017. The room was sparsely populated (the sale coincided with the opening of an art fair across town) with only a few people sitting in the hundred or so chairs laid out; the phone bank, however, was fully manned. When the lot came up I raised my paddle. ‘£16,000, do I hear 17?’ said the auctioneer. ‘17’, came the bid from one of the phones.

A good auctioneer makes the upward back and forth of bids seem almost like a contrapuntal crescendo, predestined and climactic. ‘£18,000?’ he asked. I raised my paddle. ‘Will your bidder give me 19?’ he asked his colleague on the phone. After a few seconds of whispering down the line she shook her head. ‘Fair warning,’ he called (‘Going, going, gone!’ is only in the movies). ‘Sold’ he snapped as the gavel came down. The Auerbachs were mine.

A few weeks later, after I’d reframed them and hung them in the gallery, I called The White Whale. ‘I have some really beautiful Frank Auerbach drawings’, I told him. ‘Early eighties, they’re in superb condition. Really lively works and great value.’

‘Frank who?’ he asked.

‘Auerbach. Good friend and contemporary of Lucian Freud. His work is in the best museum collections all over the world. Had a Tate retrospective in 2003. The paintings go for millions, but you can still buy good drawings for much less, and these are some of the best.’

‘They got his stuff in the Tate?’ he interjected.

‘I don’t know exactly what they will have on view, but I’m sure there will be some.’

‘How about you show me? This weekend? I feel like I need to know more before I buy.’

‘Sounds great’, I said. ‘See you there.’

Acting as a museum guide for collectors is not unusual for an art dealer. It allows you to put the work(s) you’re trying to sell in a far grander context than you might be able to achieve in your gallery and you can find out more about your client’s taste at the same time.

The White Whale and I arranged to meet at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. It was a clammy day in early September and I was still waiting on the front steps at 20-past. I sent him a text to no avail. I was just about to walk away when a taxi pulled up and he got out, followed by a young woman. He was looking flushed, grinning widely. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ he said. He put his arm around my shoulder and whispered conspiratorially in my ear, ‘She kept trying to take my willy out in the cab.’ With this image now shared we climbed the steps up to the museum entrance. ‘This is Lucy, by the way,’ he said as he held the door open.

The Tate was quiet that afternoon. As we left each gallery behind us, we passed through archways and doors and turned corners into long hallways of seemingly endless parquet flooring. I longed to leave them to each other, to remain in the emptiness of each of the rooms we were leaving behind us. The White Whale and his friend – who told me they had met online the previous week, and who had travelled down to London from Scunthorpe that day – remained awkwardly entangled like a child’s attempt at joined-up writing. ‘He paid for my train down,’ Lucy told me proudly. ‘First class. It’s only my second time in London.’

After we had walked around for a while we found two Auerbach paintings hung in the same room, facing off on opposite walls. ‘I always like to look at his paintings from the side,’ I started out, ‘the layers of paint applied over years. You can start to feel the presence of the sitter and of the artist himself.’

Neither of them were listening. The White Whale had his hand deep inside Lucy’s raincoat, his face muzzled in her dyed black hair. Remembering those moments in a school classroom when whatever nefarious activity was going on at the back of the room would be brought to a swift hiatus when the teacher stopped speaking, I too stopped; they did not. Embarrassment washed over me like nausea and I walked away for a while, pretending to have suddenly seen something really remarkable in a painting by David Bomberg.

‘She fancies a cuppa.’ Five minutes or so had passed and The White Whale was suddenly standing next to me while, in the background, Lucy was fixing her makeup in the reflection of a glazed painting.

‘Great. Shall we go to the member’s lounge?’ I asked.

I knew when I was facing defeat and so, when we sat down together and a pot of tea had been brought, I gave up talking about art. ‘What do you do, Lucy?’ I asked. Her smile was immediate and directed at The White Whale.

‘Go on’, he said, ‘Tell him.’

‘Well … I’m a domme. A dominatrix.’ She was diminutive, doll-like. I didn’t believe her.

‘I’d never have guessed that’, I said.

‘Oh you should see her in action,’ The White Whale enthused. ‘Go on, Lucy, tell him what you told me about that bloke and the Queen.’

‘Should I?’ she asked, giggling. ‘Oh, alright, yeah. So, I had this fella come see me a few months back. Ordinary sort. Chubby, business man, fifties. Wife won’t do the things he wants. Nothing too heavy, you see, just a bit of spanking and the like. Gimp mask, ball gag, strap-on.

‘He starts coming every week for an hour or two. His missus must not see him with his trousers down, because he liked me to leave my mark, if you know what I mean. Anyway, last week he comes as usual and he’s bought me a present, some thigh-high patent leather boots with a heel on ‘em this fucking big. He asks me to try them on. “Very nice” he says. Then he takes off his clothes and he’s wearing these Union Jack boxer shorts and he gets on all fours and gets me to run at him and kick him as hard as I can in the balls.’

Tears were streaming down The White Whale’s face. ‘You didn’t tell him the best bit!’ he said. ‘Tell him what he made you say!’

‘Oh yeah’, Lucy said, ‘when I kicked him he made me scream “This one’s for the Queen!”’

I knew exactly how the man felt. In my experience of the art market, most deals – the overwhelming majority – die on the vine. You’re selling something no one needs to people who don’t need to care. But this ordeal, more than any other, was the moment when I realised that, for many of these guys, the deals themselves were the point. Whether they bought the artwork or not seemed to matter far less; it was some kind of victory or one-upmanship that kept them coming back.

I gave up on The White Whale after this and it wasn’t long afterwards that I gave up on the art market altogether. I saw him once, a few years later, still tall and sneeringly powerful at a distance. He was looking at a painting in an auction pre-sale viewing. As he walked away he seemed to limp, to grimace with stiffness or pain. I wondered if perhaps he’d been kicked in the balls.