The Art of the Matter

The greatest scandal in modern art history. An unwitting catalyst. Amrita Jhaveri brings to mind a James Bond heroine - smoky combination of beauty, brains and bravado. She was in Mumbai recently to release her coffee-table book - 101: A Buyer’s Guide to Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists. But she refused interviews.

Jhaveri, of course, is well-placed to advise people on how to buy art. Daughter of a wealthy Malabar Hill Gujarati family, and a graduate from Brown University, she was the first Indian to be offered a job at Christie’s, where she was widely considered an accomplished art specialist. But her personal life quickly overtook her professional. At Christie’s, Jhaveri met Charles Davidge, 55, the cockney son of a clerk who had risen to become managing director of the 200-year old auction house. By all accounts, Davidge - already twice married, once to a Russian admiral’s daughter - was smitten by the 30-year old.

Their romance though apparently piqued Christie’s new owner, Francois Pinault, who did not like Davidge. Sensing that he was going to get the boot, Davidge spilled the beans on his former employers, in return for immunity from federal prosecutors. His revelations blew the lid of a scam that rocked the four billion-dollar-a-year auction world.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s - both terribly elite and pedigreed - have traditionally been rivals for centuries. However, sometime in the mid-90s, its owners met and agreed to fix prices, instructing their managers (one of whom was Davidge) to skew all big sales. Davidge’s carefully kept notes described years of price-fixing and collusion, recounting secret conversations and meetings in apartments, restaurants and limousines to discuss ways to stifle competition - strictly taboo under American anti-trust law.

Based largely on his evidence, a Grand Jury indicted Alfred Taubman, former chairman of Sotheby’s, and Anthony Tennant, former chairman of Christie’s in 2001. Davidge walked away with a $10.2 million severance from Pinault, and took a long vacation with Jhaveri in South America. The couple apparently later sent wedding cards to a few close friends in England and America accompanied by first-class air tickets to India. They tied the knot at Jagmandir, the island palace in Lake Pichola near Udaipur.

Since then, Jhaveri has been actively building a private collection of art. Works from this have been exhibited internationally. Describing why she wrote 101, Jhaveri says, “As a collector myself, I found there was no resource for new collectors entering a growing market. I wrote this to create access to independent information.”

Transparent practices from someone who knows.