Art dealers

Thursday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

The Exchange will delight anyone seeking an impossible story made possible

“I have been instructed to tell you that what you are proposing is entirely impossible. Nevertheless, in Iran, even the totally impossible becomes possible at times.” Such was the mysterious riddle that confronted the English art dealer Oliver Hoare as he sat across from an Iranian contact in Paris in 1992. He had just presented a madcap plan: to reunite the state of Iran with one of its most prized but long-lost manuscripts.   The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is an illustrated epic poem comprising 50,000 rhyming couplets. Completed in the mid-sixteenth century, this “book of Kings” is one of the most exquisite examples of Islamic art and poetry ever to have been produced.

Thursday

Laura Allsop

Inigo Philbrick, the art world’s wheeler dealer stealer

A few months after going on the lam in late 2019, the thirty-two-year-old wunderkind art dealer Inigo Philbrick sent his friend and colleague Orlando Whitfield a trove of documents. Philbrick wanted his old friend to write a sympathetic account of the misdeeds he stood accused of — since described as the biggest art fraud perpetrated in US history, for which Philbrick was later convicted and imprisoned. Whitfield has instead written All That Glitters, a memoir chronicling their friendship and dealings during a heady “gold rush” decade in the art world. Going through Philbrick’s correspondence and the court documents, Whitfield realized his friend was not the person he purported to be, certainly not the one his clients believed he was.

Philbrick