The Error World (23 page)

With this horse's-mouth provenance, how on earth did I miss my chance? I asked myself this for nine years, from the moment I followed Hockney out of the gallery until the print—i.e. one of the five of them—came up for auction at Sotheby's in November 2001, and I was there with my paddle waiting for it. The collectors Reba and Dave Williams were selling their prints, Lucian Freud, Ben Nicholson and all. I was now more keen than ever on the lithograph that I had been introduced to by Kasmin and Hockney, and its greatness as a piece of art had probably grown in my mind beyond its true merit. But I felt it was my piece of art, just one degree from having sketched it myself.

Unfortunately, someone else felt a similar way. The bidding started at £5,000, and soon rose to £8,000, which was my absolute, 100 per cent limit. I raised my paddle again at £8,400. The person on the phone said something to the auction house staffer in the room, and the staffer relayed the news with a nod. £8,600. I bid £8,800. More phone talk. Another nod. The auctioneer looked at me with a look approaching pity, which I regarded as encouragement. My paddle said £9,000. Who
was
that person on the phone? Why did they want
Fish and Chip Shop
so much? After a few more back-and-forths I conceded defeat, and the auctioneer said 'It's yours!' to the faceless buyer at the end of the line. Worse was to come: the successful buyer's number—let's call it 666—was logged several times in what remained of the sale. They were buying a lot of work. Perhaps they were speculating, perhaps they were decorating a loft. At any rate, I couldn't see how they could have loved the picture like I did.

The next time I saw another copy of the print was at the London Art Fair at Islington's Business Design Centre. A lot of fairs were held here regularly, including the bi-annual stamp show Stampex. Alan Cristea, one of the art galleries that had established itself in Cork Street following Kasmin's departure, took a regular stand at the London Art Fair, and displayed its crowd-pleasing array of Hodgkins and Opies and Blakes and Caulfields, and in 2002 it had a copy of
Fish and Chip Shop.
I saw the left half of it first, from an angle of about twenty yards. Then I got nearer, and saw the right side. There was a little red dot on the side of its frame that indicated it had been spoken for.

'Just sold it,' a man confirmed.

'When exactly?'

'Half an hour ago.'

'Half an hour ago? Really? Can I ask for how much?'

'It was ten thousand pounds. Are you familiar with it?'

'Yes, I almost bought it myself once.' Almost, I pondered. Could have, but didn't. 'I have a sentimental attachment to it.'

'It was one of his earliest works,' the helpful man said. 'Done when he was still at art school in Bradford. The boy being served is Hockney.'

A long gap. 'The thing is,' I said, noticing it was a full red dot rather than just a half one (which would have meant that the buyer had an option on it and was thinking it over for a while), 'is there any chance the buyer will change his or her mind?'

'No! They've just given me the cheque.'

The gallerist seemed upset that I was upset. He came up with what he thought was compensation.

'We do have
Woman with a Sewing Machine,
which is from the same period. I'm not sure I have it with me, though.'

I knew this work. It was a bit static, I thought. A flat-faced woman with high hair at her Singer.

'Thanks,' I said eventually. 'I'll keep on looking.'

This has been the case, and now the price has risen out of my league. If
Fish and Chip Shop
came up for auction today, it would probably be nudging £15,000. Because by the summer of 2007, only fifteen years after Kasmin and his colleagues had judged the art world to be in trouble, the art world wasn't in trouble any more. In fact, it had gone totally nuts, with ordinary art reaching ridiculous prices and the money flooding in from big City bonuses and Russia. So Kasmin's fears—he told me in 1992 that he thought he was seeing something far worse than a recession, something approaching meltdown—turned out to be unfounded. One of the beneficiaries of the boom fifteen years later was Kasmin's son Paul, who had become a big dealer in New York. Not that this helped me: my
Fish and Chip Shop
became more unaffordable every year; once, when Hockney made it more than fifty years ago, it was worth about twenty large portions of cod. When I first saw it, it was about a thousand portions, and now it could feed the entire population of Bridlington.

That was my first mature experience of object desire. As a child I had coveted toys and such, and of course some early error stamps, but as a child one has no easy method of obtaining something one desires beyond nagging or the upcoming birthday. We do not have credit cards or the possibility of the remortgage. But by the time I had started getting mad for stamps again when I turned forty, all that had changed. I had three credit cards and I began to hear voices in my head: Why would anyone pay £5,000 for a tiny bit of postage? And I began to answer: Because it is exceptionally good value.

The only other piece of art I had wanted as much as the Hockney was much cheaper. In theory. In practice, as David Brandon had told me, if it's not available then the price is immaterial.

As far as I could tell, Terry Frost had a few things in common with David Hockney. They were both popular artists fond of experimentation, they both made prints, they were both personally and creatively accessible. They both delighted in light and colour, they were both Royal Academicians, and they both smoked. In 1978, Frost started making bold ceramics—mugs and plates in limited editions and unlimited editions to be sold in the Tate and Royal Academy gift shops, and on one trip to St Ives with my wife in the late 1980s I bought four of the mugs from the back of a gallery—two red and black, two yellow and black. We got them home and started drinking out of them until one got broken and we decided they should be put on a shelf for display only. Then something tipped, and I decided that these mugs should form the basis of another collection. And so it was happening again, like it had happened before and would always happen: I wanted more of something I had never wanted before. Before the Internet, this collection would only be added to by subsequent trips to St Ives. Then I bought a couple of plates at auction. Then I bought a mug on eBay in 2001. I have five Frost plates, and seven Frost mugs, and to me they are stunning: bold, solid, sunburst. They brighten any room. There are two plate designs and two mug designs I don't have, and this wouldn't normally bother me; they'll turn up, I think, and their value is uncertain, and I may get a bargain. Unfortunately I have an adversary, an unexpected one; he is a dealer, a trader with Frost ceramics on display in his window, and he won't sell. Why won't he sell? I don't think it's money. I think it's personal.

He is a man called Henry Gilbert, known to his friends as Gillie, and he runs a shop in St Ives near the Barbara Hepworth Museum called Wills Lane Gallery. At least I like to think of it as a shop: you go in, he greets you, you look around, if you see something good and can afford it then you can buy it. This works for most things in the shop, but not the Frost ceramics. The reason for this may be gamesmanship—the unique power of the dealer over the collector—and it may lie deeply embedded in the creative history of St Ives, or at least from that point where Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson came down during the war to live in nearby Carbis Bay and unleashed the wild and elemental area in stone and marble and carved relief and paint.

The reason why St Ives attracted Hepworth and Nicholson and later Rothko and Pollock was the same reason it had attracted holidaymakers and artists almost a century before: the remarkable Mediterranean light. For the tourists the light illuminated the beaches and the cottages set into the hillside, and for the artists it illuminated a new non-figurative way of imagining the natural world; no view was ever the same twice, as the granite, slate, heather, wind and sea created a space where the artist could quite realistically believe themselves to be part of the landscape rather than just a chronicler of it.

Gillie, who was an architect, came down and became a friend of the scene: not only Hepworth, but also Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Naum Gabo, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and the Leach family. He formed a close bond with two men in particular: John Wells, a doctor based on the Isles of Scilly who came relatively late to abstraction, and Terry Frost, who came to Cornwall in 1946 after four years as a prisoner of war. When Frost died in 2003 at the age of eighty-seven, Gillie (who I judged to be in his early eighties at the time, firmly established as the oldest and most anecdotal Trustee of Tate St Ives) set up a sunny shrine to his friend: some handmade Christmas card collages Frost made each year, a couple of small prints, and some mugs and a plate. Every time I went in there—which was approximately every nine months—we would do the same dance.

'Hello Gillie, how are you?'

'Hello!'

Occasionally he didn't recognise me, but I didn't mind that. Usually I was just delighted to find him in. Often the lights were on, and it was regular trading hours, but Gillie was elsewhere, possibly in his inner sanctum, a little office at the far end which looked like it had been hit by jungle animals. Somewhere in that sanctum, perhaps on the floor, was a cheque of mine. I had given this to Gillie in exchange for a small painting by the architect Ffiona Lewis, but as my bank statements came in each month the cheque failed to register. After six months the cheque became void, and perhaps it lay in the office with other cheques of a greater magnitude. I should have spread the word—Free Art!—but thought this would be bad karma, and Gillie's place was all about karma. I had been told that sometimes he wasn't in the gallery, and wasn't in the inner sanctum, but he had left the door open. Occasionally he would even leave it open at night, all those Christopher Wood paintings and white reliefs by Ben Nicholson in perspex cases, leaning up against William Scott pears and cups in their boxy white frames, and he would return the next day and everything would be exactly as it was. The shop was protected by angels, and the world loved Gillie; there was no more logical way of explaining it.

Whenever he was in, Gillie had a strong hand to play: the art of temptation. Our conversation usually proceeded in a predictable manner. He asked me what I did for a living. I said I was a writer—journalism and books. He spoke of the writers he knew.

'Have you seen the court building in Truro?' he would ask.

'I love it,' I would answer.

'It was designed by Evans and Shalev.'

'Who also did the Tate,' we'd say together.

Once I mentioned stamps, but it took a while to find the right way in. 'Terry Frost designed a stamp,' I said.

'Did he?'

'Well, actually no. He didn't design it, because it appeared in 2004, the year after he died. But they used one of his paintings, and one by Sonia Delauney, to illustrate the centenary of the Entente Cordiale. In a unique and symbolic move, France issued the same stamps, but in euros rather than pence. They almost caused a philatelic revolt, such was the dismay at the simplicity and childish nature of the design.'

'Did I tell you about my brother?' Gillie would ask.

'Yes. He went to the LSE.'

'That's right, he did go to the LSE.' He explained that he died.

'I went to the LSE too,' I'd say, to lighten the mood. 'Economic History. I met Veerasamy Ringadoo, the First President of Mauritius.'

'Did you know...' then a few names I hadn't heard of, followed by 'Do you ever go to the Alba?' This was a good fish restaurant on the harbour front.

'Once,' I said. 'It was delicious.' And then, running out of things to say, I said, 'Urn, has Tate St Ives changed things much around here?'

We were obviously skirting around, waiting for the main event. Gillie sat in a brightly coloured plastic chair by the door as I looked around. Every time I went in there the good stuff was more depleted. When I started visiting in my late teens it was mostly original oils on boards, and the last time I went it was framed Andy Warhol posters. In recent years, many of Gillie's best works appeared in the London auctions and did well, especially works by John Wells, who was newly in demand. But the Frost mugs and plates hung around, occasionally moving from one window-sill to the other, leaving a soft ring of dust behind each time. I can't imagine I was the only one after them, but when I returned each time and found that they were still there it was with relief, and a certain satisfaction that Gillie had proved as stubborn with his other visitors. There was no price on them, just as there was no price on most of his works; the very good ones were priced in his head, and they probably swung wildly according to his mood. On one occasion I was in the shop when an American came in and saw a Barbara Hepworth print. These were not her key works, and you could snap up a fair one for a couple of grand.

'How much?' the American asked.

'Priceless,' Gillie said, unwilling to sell at ten times its market worth.

If he didn't like you he probably wouldn't even sell you a Warhol poster.

After another ten minutes of friendly but familiar conversation—had I seen the Hepworth outside the St Ives guildhall, had I been to her grave at Carbis Bay—I realised it was time to step up to the plate.

'How much for the plates?' I said. 'And the mugs?'

'They were designed by Terry Frost,' he would say.

'Yes. How much would you want for them?'

'They're not for sale at the moment,' Gillie replied. 'Terry died in 2003.'

'When do you think they will be for sale?' I doubted whether Count Ferrary ever had to pussyfoot around like this.

'In four months?' Gillie said, and the question mark was doom-laden.

'So if I came back in four months, I might be able to buy them?'

Nine months later, when I came down again, the mugs and plates would still be there, and their imminent departure would still be four months away.