LONDON - The gripping book "Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners" isn't coming out until next month, but it's already making big waves in England. Its author, current National Portrait Gallery director and former Tate Gallery program director Sandy Nairne, has told a firsthand tale of his sudden transformation from curator to art sleuth after two J.M.W. Turner paintings belonging to the Tate were stolen while on loan to Frankfurt in 1994.
To investigate, Nairne traveled to Frankfurt and entered a tangled web of dealings with the European underworld in an attempt to get the paintings back. Ultimately, a shady lawyer brokered a deal that resulted in the art's return.
But beyond its narrative of intrigue, Nairne's book — a tell-all in the mold of Thomas Hoving's "Making the Mummies Dance" — is causing controversy because of what it reveals about the Tate's handling of the crisis.
A SWEET DEAL WITH THE INSURANCE COMPANY
According to the Independent, Nairne describes how Tate Gallery director Nicholas Serota and paymaster general (a ministerial post overseeing government funds) Geoffrey Robinson struck a deal with Hiscox Insurance. Following the theft, £24 million ($40 million) in insurance money was sitting in an inaccessible bank account, growing to £26 million with interest. The Tate proposed taking this sum and buying back title to the paintings with three payments of £4 million to the insurers, the last one to be made if the paintings had not reappeared by July 28, 1999. According to Robinson's memoirs, the third payment was never made, meaning that the Tate paid out only £8 million, keeping £18 million. Robinson also claims that the insurance money was spent on the new Tate Modern, while Nairne says that this was just an accounting trick and that the funds were used for a new storage facility in Southwark. The museum then got extremely lucky: "Shade and Darkness" was recovered in 2000 and "Light and Color" in 2002. Robert Hiscox, managing director of Hiscox Insurance, told the Independent that ultimately it was a "good deal for the country, but a terrible deal for us."
THE TATE MAY HAVE LIED TO THE MEDIA
When "Shade and Darkness" was recovered in 2000, Serota, according to the book, did not want the news to get out yet. He imported the piece into England as "a 19th-century landscape," misleading British customs. When rumors began to circulate about the recovery of the painting, Nairne writes, the Tate issued a false press release in November 2000, stating that "currently there is no new information, nor are there any current discussions being conducted" about the stolen paintings. In a recent statement, the Tate said that this was merely a draft press release that was never issued to the media and that "the recovery was at a critical stage which is why the wording in this draft was deliberately obscure." Yet, according to Nairne, one newspaper did not run its story after the statement was drafted, and afterward, he writes, "my fears about further investigative pieces… receded."
PAYING A RANSOM TO THE THIEVES
According to Nairne's book, the Tate spent £3.5 million on its investigation, and a certain portion of these funds were directly paid for the recovery of the stolen paintings. In the Sunday Times, Waldemar Januszczak took Nairne to task in an interview for paying a ransom to the art thieves, a group supposedly known as the "Balkan bandits." Nairne insists that the money was not a ransom, but a "fee for information." Januszczak is not convinced, asking, "it's a gray area, right?" Nairne replies, "No. It's gray as you go into it, but you have to find a way out of it that becomes clear." Nairne was careful to specify to Januszczak that "technically, I don't know where the money went," since he paid it to a shady lawyer named Edgar Liebrucks, who represented such unsavory characters as a Balkan mafioso known as Stevo V.
NAIRNE'S PERSONAL MOTIVATION FOR WRITING THE BOOK?
Despite what looked to be a close working relationship with Serota, Nairne was turned down for the position of Tate Modern head in 2002, and then left to take his job at the National Portrait Gallery. Serota cannot be exactly thrilled over his former employee's account of what Art Watch UK's Michael Daley calls "the workings of the Tate's controversial management culture." According to the Independent, a spokesperson for Nairne simply says that "after eight years of not being able to talk about the operation to recover the Turners, Sandy just really wanted to get it off his chest."
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