Escape Artist
Inigo Philbrick. Even the name is extravagant. A touch of Dickensian grandeur; a little pan-European romance. It would look good engraved in marble. If you attached it to the protagonist in a satire of the contemporary-art scene, your editor would tell you to dial it down a bit. Too on the nose, they’d tell you. Too writerly. Too ornate.
But it’s all true, even when it’s built on a pack of lies. Inigo Philbrick: the globe-trotting, high-flying, billionaire-baiting, magnum-spilling, quick-thinking, Zegna-wearing, fugazi-shilling, Ponzi-scheming prodigy. The brazen wunderkind dealer who fleeced the art establishment to the tune of some $70 million. The great disappearing Inigo, whose current whereabouts are rumored to be a remote Pacific island. Or maybe Thailand. Or the Bahamas. Or South America. Or South Africa, actually. Or Cuba. Or Australia. Or Miami. They seek him here, they seek him there—that damned elusive Inigo!
Résumé-Building
His prodigy pedigree was nearly flawless. There was the patrician East Coast family that could trace its roots back to New England’s founding fathers; the education at Goldsmiths, University of London (alma mater of the Young British Artists and the petri dish of Cool Britannia); the internship at White Cube, and the tutelage under its owner, super-gallerist Jay Jopling. Even the voice was impressive: a baritone, mid-Atlantic drawl with an old-money gravitas. The Boston Brahmin by way of Dover Street. Like a young George Plimpton with an auction paddle. When I asked people who met him for their impressions of the man, the adjective that kept popping up was “smooth.” One friend simply wrote, “Good perfumes.”
Inigo Philbrick was born in Redding, Connecticut, in 1987. His father, Harry Philbrick, ran the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and was later the head of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum and founded Philadelphia Contemporary. According to Kenny Schachter—an art journalist and former friend of the dealer who was stung in one of Philbrick’s alleged frauds—the senior Philbrick’s résumé lent Inigo “a foundation of knowledge but not a load of dough, so he’s informed and hungry.” Well bred, but not sheltered. Sophisticated, but never spoiled. “The young dealer … has kept a low profile as a secondary trader well known among the cognoscenti for being shrewd and having a mind of his own,” Schachter wrote on Artnet News in December 2018. This was, he concluded, “a rarity in the market.”
At just 23, Philbrick was promoted to head of secondary market sales at White Cube, a new but prestigious position that belied his relative inexperience. “He struck me as a smart, ambitious young man with a good eye for art and an impressive commercial sense,” Jopling wrote in response to my request for comment.
Soon, Philbrick had secured financial backing from Jopling to set up Modern Collections, a gallery on Mayfair’s Mount Street that dealt in contemporary artists. When it opened, in 2011, the space became the cause of some disquiet. Industry grandees felt that this new wave of secondary dealers was driving up prices unsustainably, with little regard for the long-term careers of the artists they represented. A piece titled “Too Much Too Young,” in an October edition of The Art Newspaper that year, argued that Philbrick’s sales were symptomatic of a dangerous trend. Filiep Libeert, a notable Belgian collector, was quoted as saying: “Everyone is talking about how this has happened and how it can continue.” Libeert told the newspaper that works that were selling for $20,000 six or seven years ago were now priced at over $800,000 on the secondary market. Dealer Sadie Coles simply described the venture as “confusing.”
Nevertheless, the operation was an apparent success, and the confident young gallerist soon graduated to the auction houses. At one evening sale at Christie’s in New York in November 2011, Philbrick out-muscled the competition to take home a flotilla of pricey works, including a piece by Andreas Gursky for $4.33 million, a record for the artist and a record for a photograph bought at auction. Philbrick was still just 24, but he was mixing with the big boys.
The Makings of a Ponzi Scheme
The success continued apace. Philbrick’s strategy of betting hard on a select crop of rising artists was paying off. “He ran in the right circles, had access to artworks and people with money, and was producing good returns—which is obviously attractive to investors and collectors alike,” said Judd Grossman, a lawyer representing several of the claimants against Philbrick. “Everyone sort of knew he was big into flipping things and pushing prices up,” said one London gallerist.
The young dealer was making good money, fast, and he was always quick to pay his partners. By 2017, Philbrick’s Companies House filings boasted a turnover of $125 million, up from $66 million a year before. He was often seen at C London, a restaurant on Davies Street, footing the bill for expensive claret and long lunches, or “hobnobbing with the rich and the famous,” as Grossman puts it. He cut around in private jets and bought his suits from Zegna in Milan. One Mayfair restaurateur remembers being surprised, after a particularly lavish meal last year, that such a young man had such a deep wallet. As one collector puts it: “Surprising is one word. Downright fishy might be another.”
The wheels soon began to wobble. The bets that had made Philbrick such a hot hand now came back to burn him. The dealer appears to have been highly leveraged against a small selection of rising artists, chiefly Wade Guyton and Rudolf Stingel, whom Philbrick had backed so heavily that he became known as the King of Stingel. Stingel’s work was rising precipitously in value throughout 2016 and 2017. But in 2018, investor interest plateaued, stalled, and then dipped. As ARTnews put it in December last year: “A torpid Stingel market was a threat to Philbrick’s business strategy, as it began to shut off the supply of new money.”....MUCH MORE
One Mayfair restaurateur remembers being surprised, after a particularly hearty meal last year, that such a young man had such a deep wallet.“It all crashed when he could not sustain the cash flow and returns on investment,” said a London gallerist. “So he sold paintings that he didn’t own, faked valuations, and screwed his investors over.” Grossman calls it “intentional and creative deception, forging documents and telling outright lies with regard to authenticity and provenance.”
Some of Philbrick’s alleged schemes were straightforwardly deceitful—closer to brazen theft than Machiavellian con artistry. “One of my clients, having met Inigo a couple of times, was not looking to sell anything from his private collection,” Grossman explains. “But Inigo persisted and convinced him to consign the artwork—and we haven’t seen the artwork and we haven’t seen the money.”...
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