Was the downfall of an art fraudster like Inigo Philbrick inevitable?

Philbrick’s misdeeds are often used as evidence of a deeper rot in the art market, proof that the buying and selling of paintings and sculpture has become fully detached from reality and entered into a fever dream of dumb money and crime.

By September 2019, Loretta Würtenberger and Daniel Tümpel had realised something had gone very wrong.

The German husband and wife had given the American art dealer Inigo Philbrick millions of dollars through their company Fine Art Partners, with the understanding that Philbrick would purchase artworks, sell them at a profit and share the proceeds. They’d certainly given him the money, and the art had definitely been bought and sold, but recently their profits – actually, any money at all—had failed to materialise. The couple lawyered up.

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They soon discovered Philbrick had lied to them: He’d sold them shares in a painting, then sold many more shares of the same work to other people, totalling well over 100% of the art’s value. It was part of a pattern of behaviour that led US Attorney Damian Williams to later describe Philbrick as “a serial swindler who took advantage of the lack of transparency in the art market to defraud art collectors, investors, and lenders of more than $86 million to finance his art business and his lifestyle.”

As news got out in the fall of 2019, other collector-investors began to realise that they, too, had been defrauded in various ways by Philbrick, who was then in his early 30s. One investor had teamed up with Philbrick to buy an $18.4 million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which in fact had cost the dealer only about $12.5 million. Similar allegations began to trickle in, but by that point, Philbrick had fled the country and gone into hiding.

Philbrick’s misdeeds are often used as evidence of a deeper rot in the art market, proof that the buying and selling of paintings and sculpture has become fully detached from reality and entered into a fever dream of dumb money and crime. That’s certainly an angle proffered by Philbrick’s former friend and employee Orlando Whitfield, whose book All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art (Aug. 6, Pantheon) is derived from their roughly 15-year friendship, along with a vast trove of emails that Philbrick forwarded with the apparent belief that Whitfield would write a sympathetic article in his defence.

Whitfield credits the market’s “ethically grey trading practices” and “the potentially massive returns that can be made for doing next to nothing” for its boom and, within that context, asserts that Philbrick “had always worked at the edges of the acceptable.” Aside from outright fraud, Whitfield says, Philbrick also committed “deeds which havered on the line between unethical and plain old illegal.”

The illegal stuff is incontrovertible. After fleeing to the South Pacific in late 2019, then being arrested and returned to the US in June 2020, Philbrick pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2021 and was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2022. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $86 million. (Philbrick was released from prison earlier this year.)

A typical evening sale at Christie’s in New York. Image: Bloomberg

But Whitfield, whose book already has an HBO series in the works, can never quite make up his mind. Was Philbrick a bad apple in a rotten bunch? Or was he a lone, coldhearted trickster, ruthlessly deceiving his many innocent victims?

The corner of the art market in which Philbrick operated might offer a clue. It’s laughably small—so limited that an artwork might have three possible buyers in the entire world. For a while, Philbrick bluffed, cheated and lied to this limited pool of collectors, overcharging them and falsifying documents as he leveraged himself to the hilt, Whitfield shows. But then the market began to slow and his world got even smaller, and Philbrick was left without options. Think of it as a high-stakes, low-impact game of musical chairs: When the music stopped, Philbrick was standing without a seat.

This is exemplified by a painting by Rudolf Stingel that arguably became Philbrick’s downfall. He’d gotten Würtenberger and Tümpel, the German investors, to go in with him on its purchase; but Whitfield writes that he’d also persuaded other collectors to unwittingly do the same thing for total amounts that exceeded its worth. Philbrick then brought the Stingel to auction and got two collectors to bid it up to a price that would allow him to pay off all his shareholders.

But the Stingel market was cooling quickly. On the night of the sale, one of the bidders backed out, and the painting sold for far too little, leaving Philbrick “looking for an emergency exit from his newly untenable position,” writes Whitfield. There was no way out. Eventually more fraud was uncovered, and law enforcement got involved. That single bidder who backed out, in other words, seemingly meant the difference to Philbrick between a life in the jet set and years behind bars.

When the book begins, in 2006, Whitfield and Philbrick are both at Goldsmiths, University of London studying art history. Whitfield’s entrée into the art world came from his father, a longtime auctioneer at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and other auction houses. Philbrick’s also came from his father, the longtime director of the small, albeit prestigious, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in tony Ridgefield, Connecticut.

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Whitfield explains how Philbrick got a leg up via Jay Jopling, the owner of the esteemed White Cube gallery. Jopling had a difficult body of work by the artist Anselm Kiefer that he needed to sell. The billionaire Andy Hall was willing to buy them, with the stipulation, Whitfield says, that the works were exhibited in a public museum. Philbrick’s father, Whitfield continues, was happy to put them on display at the Aldrich Contemporary, and shortly thereafter, Philbrick was offered an internship at Jopling’s gallery.

Nepotism got Philbrick into the art world, but he climbed to the top himself. After gaining Jopling’s trust, Philbrick was soon running a smaller offshoot gallery with backing from Jopling. In short order, Whitfield claims, Philbrick—still in his early 20s—went from earning £35 000 ($44 800) a year to £35 000 per month.

“I am aware of the serious allegations made against Mr. Inigo Philbrick,” Jopling wrote in a statement included in the book. “It has hurt and saddened me to learn that Mr. Philbrick, whom I respected and whose early career I supported, has not only betrayed my trust but, it appears, that of many others.” Jopling continued that he was “shocked to discover the allegations of serious wrongdoing by Mr. Philbrick in U.S. media reports in October 2019.”

Like many post-university friendships, over the years Philbrick and Whitfield’s friendship began to fade. Complicating their cooling relationship was that Philbrick, once he’d struck out on his own, hired Whitfield to work in his gallery; the two remained in contact, then, but at an increasing remove.

As a result, the latter half of Whitfield’s book is mostly gleaned from retrospective conversations he and Philbrick had after Philbrick’s world had collapsed and he’d taken refuge on the island nation of Vanuatu. It’s supplemented by the reams of correspondence Philbrick emailed to Whitfield under the presumption that it exonerated him.

After poring through these documents, Whitfield writes that “they paint a picture of a world in which some of his actions—now widely decried—are common practice, even encouraged.” (He doesn’t follow up with any examples.) And yet Whitfield returns, with increasing certainty, to the conclusion that Philbrick was in fact “no more than a scammer, the wunderkind art dealer revealed as a liar and a cheat, a confidence man.”

Of course, Whitfield is unable to make the final, logical leap: The art market he’s written about is an insular no-man’s-land dominated by spectacular wealth, dubious value and maddening opacity. It’s a world, in other words, that’s designed to turn all its players into confidence men, whether they like it or not.

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