In the summer of 2020, I opened Instagram to find a message from a friend of a long-ex boyfriend. A technician at a blue chip London commercial art gallery, I hadn’t heard from him in years. “Hi Nancy,” he said, “this is a bit weird but I think I might know where Inigo Philbrick is”.
I told him to call me. He never did. A couple of days later, I read in the paper that Philbrick, an art dealer who was wanted for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft in the US, was already in custody.
Philbrick had perpetuated one of the most complex and audacious frauds in art history. Over the course of years he duped wealthy clients, selling shares in expensive artworks (he sold up to 220 per cent of a Rudolph Stingel painting to several people, most of whom weren’t aware of the existence of any or some of the others) that were not always in his possession, or his to sell, many times over, until his web of lies had created a knot so tight he could no longer unpick it.
This book, by recovering art dealer Orlando Whitfield, to whom Philbrick — his friend since university — entrusted his story while hiding out on Vanuatu before his arrest, is a fairly damning indictment of this murky world.
But it is also a memoir, of another young man whose relationship with the art market was always uncomfortable, even when he was immersed in it, and of a friendship that, it seems, he was the last person to realise was always tragically unequal.
Whitfield, the son of an art historian father with whom he had a tricky relationship, met the American Philbrick, whose mother was an artist and father a museum director, studying art history at Goldsmiths in the early 2000s.
Well-read and confident, with a sort of Home Counties-lite style and remarkably driven even then, Philbrick stood out there “like a Hollywood smile at a coal-miners’ strike”.
He rarely attended class, preferring to dabble in “research projects” for White Cube, then London’s hottest commercial art gallery, which he had mysteriously managed to talk his way into.
Whitfield, who comes across as a painfully aimless soul, was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. So when, after a summer spent ferrying fro-yos by taxi as an intern at Christie’s New York, Whitfield was invited by Philbrick to “work together on a few deals”, he leapt.
A breakdown left Whitfield on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital
And so begin two art world careers, travelling on different, if initially parallel, tracks, though it’s clear that at first Whitfield believes that he and his friend are in the same carriage.
That this is false is clear to anyone else from the moment Philbrick reveals, after one of their early deals (the sale of a watercolour by Paula Rego), that he has been secretly working directly for the seller, while letting Whitfield deal only with the buyer.
It's an innocuous enough deception, but a deception of his closest friend and nascent business partner it still is, and it is evidence, Whitfield writes, of a desire “always to be in possession of one trump card… secrecy meant control”. This will be Philbrick’s defining characteristic in the wild ride that follows; that and an apparently unquenchable thirst for money.
Whitfield weaves his own story — which we know from the first page almost ended in 2018, after a breakdown left him on suicide watch in a psychiatric hospital — alongside that of Philbrick’s, as the pair work briefly together, then drift apart.
While Whitfield shifts from art to publishing and back again in a longueur of indecision and dissatisfaction, Philbrick single-mindedly, ruthlessly chases the cash as a dealer, working with ever-bigger players on increasingly byzantine deals worth ever more eye-watering sums.
The motley supporting cast of art world characters, all of whom are men, range from White Cube founder Jay Jopling, who bankrolled Philbrick’s early venture Modern Collections before their relationship went south, to Hugo de Ferranti, a successful secondary market dealer with “a ten-acre voice, a booming blend of English officer-class indifference and Riviera poolside weariness” with whom Philbrick briefly pairs up to sell art to big clients.
That relationship soured too, as did so many others — mentors, clients, other dealers — Philbrick’s deceitfulness “was bewilderingly self-destructive,” says Whitfield.
Philbrick’s crossing of the Rubicon, Whitfield suggests, is the moment when he tells Jopling that he has sold a painting they co-own to an entirely fictitious buyer, falsifying documents to prove the man’s existence, in order to have control over the work.
Whitfield’s careful explanation of how everything went wrong happened is incredibly stressful to read
From this point everything goes slowly, inexorably, intricately, tits up. Whitfield’s careful explanation of how it happened, with details gleaned from the numerous documents Philbrick sends him from Vanuatu, is incredibly stressful to read. But it does also raise some fascinating questions about how such activity is positively nurtured by the world in which Philbrick was operating.
“The manic complexity of Inigo’s scheme now seems to me analogous to the art market as a whole — deliberate, wilful obscurity as a modus operandi,” writes Whitfield. “It’s a multi-level illusion, one in which ordinary materials are elevated in cultural and financial status and vast sums are generated by a self-selecting few adhering to a set of unwritten conventions and rules that benefit only them, and that work to keep the club as small as possible.”
Whitfield writes beguilingly and amusingly, enhanced by an art dealer’s eye — the home to which his father is moved to recuperate from an illness has “walls the colour of prosthetic skin”, while the corrosive power of money is described as causing “an insidious craquelure to appear over the surface of everything it touches”.
His delicious description of the interior and clientele of the Connaught Bar, followed briskly a brief sketch of Cipriani (“not a room for the mere Haves, this is a room for the Have Yachts”) made me laugh out loud.
What Whitfield doesn’t do is convincingly explain Philbrick’s appeal. He describes him as “a brilliant raconteur”, but provides no evidence other than his own nostalgic swoonings. His friend is financially generous, but it feels like a tactic to inspire confidence.
Philbrick spends intimate dinners looking at his phone and routinely leaves messages and calls unanswered, including when Whitfield is on the brink of an emotional collapse. Plus Philbrick incessantly addresses Whitfield as “playboy” or “player”, for which I strongly believe he should have been deported.
Philbrick is a walking red flag, and yet Whitfield remains in thrall to him, for years. Even after his resurfacing in Vanuatu, Whitfield initially plans to collaborate with his friend, on Philbrick’s suggestion, to write a longform article giving the fraudster’s own account of the events that led up to his flight from justice, a course of action that would have the inevitable effect of attracting the attention of the FBI.
But giving a flying f*** about anyone else was evidently never Philbrick’s strong suit. Why it took so long for Whitfield to work that out is the overriding mystery here. Can the late night, youthful, earnest discussions about books and art that Whitfield describes as their moments of true connection really have been so dazzling?
Still, it’s fitting. Philbrick’s brass balls are quite something — asking Jopling and his staff to sign NDAs to protect the identity of a client who literally doesn’t exist is one hell of a play — but the glamour that so often adheres to con artists, which is ultimately what Philbrick became, is absent here, for all his one percent trappings. Even washed down with champagne, this story leaves a nasty taste.
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield is out now (Profile Books, £20)
Nancy Durrant is a former culture editor of the Evening Standard
