Viewing page 29 of 49

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

16

assignment and a special Treasury investigator Charles Geyer, under the direction of the Supervising Customs Agent at the Port of New York, was appointed to the task.

Geyer is an intense man with round brown eyes who has since left the Treasury Department. He owns some [[strikethrough]]paintings[[/strikethrough]] art himself, including a couple of rather sentimental nineteenth-century pictures/ [[strikethrough]] some others he characcterizes as copies of "enaissance paintings;[[/strikethrough]] and a portrait of a girl which he claims is by Renoir. [[strikethrough]]In explaining why [[/strikethrough]] Annoyed that none of the big New York dealers [[strikethrough]] would [[/strikethrough]]will pay him what he considers this latter canvas [[strikethrough]] is worth, he[[/strikethrough]] should bring, he says, "A painting is only worth the nail it is hung on--see /, what I mean, if it hung in J.P. Morgan's house the dealer would pay a lot for it, but if it hangs in mine--well!"

Unprudently Geyer worked full-time for six weeks on the Goetz picture and interviewed about 80 people. The "confidential report" included a an alleged motive for certain persons doubting the picture (they had, according to the report, tried unsuccessfully to buy it for a mere 10% profit from Goetz and Lewenthal)- though the pix had been in returned f un Jun")and a step-by-step refutation of the jury's findings (for instance, the discrepancy which the jury found between brushstrokes in authentic Van Goghs and the controversial painting were explained on the grounds that the painter was always an "experimenter"; that exact reversal of the Wertheim head was because he frequently copied his own work; etc.). A big point was made of the fact that the technical researcher at the Metropolitan said