All That Glitters
Profile 336pp £20
The Week Bookshop £15.99
In 2020, the American art dealer Inigo Philbrick was arrested by the FBI on the Pacific island of Vanuatu “and brought to Manhattan in handcuffs”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. The 33-year-old was “wanted for his part in one of the biggest art frauds in history”: through a complicated series of scams, including forging legal documents and “double-dealing priceless works of art”, he was accused of duping art investors out of around $86m. Philbrick (pictured) pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to seven years in prison; he served just four, and was released earlier this year. Now, Philbrick’s former friend and business partner, Orlando Whitfield, has written a “compulsively readable” memoir, which charts his rise and fall in “thrilling detail”.
The pair became friends in the late 2000s when both were studying art history at Goldsmiths’ College, London, said Georgina Adam in Literary Review. Both came from privileged arty backgrounds: Whitfield’s dad had run Christie’s; Philbrick’s was head of a museum in Connecticut. While still undergraduates, they set up their own dealership – I & O Fine Art – and Whitfield recounts many “amusing anecdotes” from this time, including their unsuccessful attempt to “prise a Bansky off a wall and sell it”. Philbrick rapidly ascended to the “upper echelons of the art world”, befriending powerful figures such as Jay Jopling and Sir Norman Rosenthal. While Whitfield was involved in his early dealings, the pair increasingly drifted apart: “I came to feel like a parvenu around him, a Nick Carraway to his Jay Gatsby,” Whitfield recalls. By the time the “edifice came crashing down in 2018”, when Philbrick sold a Rudolf Stingel portrait of Picasso “not once but three times”, they were barely on speaking terms.
All this is a “fascinating story”, said Susie Goldsbrough in The Times. So it’s a shame that Whitfield tells it so ineptly. “Majestically self-regarding” and lacking in self-awareness, he offers only limited insights into the “murky” art world, and nor does he reveal much about the motivations of his “high-lifeloving” friend, for whom he was clearly always a “useful idiot”. I found the book engaging and full of “telling moments”, said Philip Hook in The Daily Telegraph – such as when a Goldman Sachs trader admiringly lists practices common in the art world (acting on inside information, artificially inflating prices) which are forbidden on the trading floor. As for Philbrick’s motivations, he himself put it best. When a judge asked him why he committed his crimes, he simply replied: “For money, your honour.”