In his youth, Villierme's father studied under successful members of a school of painters known as the Bay Area figurists, led by David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. To put bread on the table for a growing family, however, Henry Villierme put his art career on a back burner in the early 1970s and moved to Southern California, to take a job in a bank.
"His love is painting," says Paul Villierme, 27, the third of Henry's four children. "Family is more important, though. With artists that gets blurred sometimes."
Villierme fils thought that the gallery deal with Harcourts might put his dad on the artistic map as an heir to his figurist instructors. And at first, the arrangement seemed to work wonders. During the 1995 summer show, four of Henry Villierme's paintings sold, garnering the 68-year-old painter $13,000, after the gallery took its traditional 50 percent cut of the selling price.
In the spring of 1996, checks stopped arriving in Henry Villierme's mailbox, but Paul thought nothing of the interruption; he just called the gallery's curator, Kim Eagle-Smith, to suggest that Harcourts' inventory of his father's work be swapped for other creations, to jump-start sales. But, Paul recalls, "Mr. Eagle-Smith said, 'We don't need anything new right now.' "
A few weeks later, Paul started calling again but was picked off by a rotating guard of receptionists, each of whom offered various versions of: "Mr. Eagle-Smith is unavailable." On June 4 of last year, however, Villierme was finally told the truth: Kim Eagle-Smith had been dismissed.
The son of the artist paid a visit to Harcourts Gallery the next day. He did not find the thriving, well-appointed, upscale art dealership to which he had consigned his father's work two years earlier.
Instead, Villierme was met by a paper sign tacked to the door, announcing that Harcourts was closed for inventory. Staffers stepped out only long enough to say they were legally bound not to discuss the gallery's circumstances. Villierme had seen and heard enough.
In a focused panic, he raised a boot. With a swift kick, the lock on the front door to Harcourts was reduced to a loose assembly of mechanical trash.
"Luckily," he says, "I wore my Doc Martens that day."
Once inside, Villierme scanned the gallery's white walls and carpeted floors; dozens of paintings and sculptures were in various stages of packaging for shipping or storage.
"I'm just here to get my father's paintings," he told surprised gallery employees, and, indeed, one of his father's works, Red Striped Awning, was hanging on a wall. But the 10 or so other paintings Villierme expected to find on display were nowhere to be seen.
In an attempt to calm Villierme that had precisely the opposite effect, one gallery worker explained that the artworks were being packed because "a real estate agent is coming soon to show the space." Using the possibility of an escalating scene as leverage, Villierme demanded to be shown the accounting file relating to his father's work. Villierme was stunned. Even though his father had received no payments for months, Harcourts had done a brisk business in art by Villierme pere.
One record said: "Santa Ynez Landscape." Sold. $4,000.
Another: "Daydream on Terrace." Sold. $8,500.
"Bike Path." Sold. $2,500. And on, and on.
Villierme dropped the file. He walked over to Red Striped Awning and pulled the framed canvas from the wall. Just then, the phone rang. The receiver was passed to Villierme.
"What are you doing, Paul?" asked Fred E. Banks, owner of Harcourts Gallery. "You are trespassing. I am calling the police."
When Villierme began to ask about his father's work, Banks interrupted, said he couldn't comment, and quickly added: "But don't even think about taking that painting."
Villierme didn't think. He just grabbed the work and ran. As he hailed a cab with Red Striped Awning under his arm, what had once been one of San Francisco's toniest art galleries briefly resembled the scene of a brazen art heist. In fact, there had been a heist, and it was brazen indeed, but Villierme was hardly the wrongdoer.
Harcourts Gallery and Fred Banks were fixtures in the San Francisco fine art scene for nearly 30 years. Banks opened the gallery's doors a couple of blocks off Union Square, at 535 Powell St., in 1967. Patrons with money and, perhaps, taste could hop from Fisherman's Wharf-bound cable cars or step out of one of S.F.'s top department stores to shop at Harcourts.
But it was the art boom of the 1980s that lifted Banks into the heights of the city's art world. Amid the merger-and-acquisitions, savings-and-loan mania of the Reagan years, when paper fortunes and putative millionaires multiplied like fruit flies, art became an investment vehicle with cachet, a stylish commodity that seemed to match the high-flying times. The spectacular run-up in art prices during the 1980s enriched and emboldened dealers worldwide, particularly those holding impressionist and post-impressionist works. Banks' gallery reaped its share of the boom; his clients included pillars of S.F.'s professional circles, and when he'd throw a party at a swank San Francisco restaurant it got noticed in the society pages.
Harcourts' business relationships stretched around the globe. In 1989, for instance, the gallery paid 28,000 Swiss francs (then $20,000) to the Petit Palais Musee, of Geneva, Switzerland, for a single work by Nicolas Tarkhoff. Correspondence surrounding the transaction suggests the gallery was a real player in international art markets, mentioning the prospects of collaborating on an exhibition of the work of a painter of mutual interest to Harcourts and the Swiss, and musing about embarrassment that a visit to Harcourts by New Yorker James Berry-Hill of highbrow Berry-Hill Galleries had gone unnoticed.
While Harcourts continued to make its deals, the 1989 recession, the savings-and-loan meltdown, and the collapse of the junk-bond market that had fueled the merger craze of previous years combined to end the art boom. And as these macroeconomic forces began to squeeze the art market, and as art prices that had risen so regularly suddenly stabilized or fell, Fred Banks made a spectacularly lousy business decision. He moved Harcourts into an exorbitantly priced new location on Bush Street, creating a 10,000-square-foot gallery that was equidistant from his old Union Square site and the Montgomery Street investment bankers whose excesses had helped fuel the white-hot art market of the early and mid-'80s.
Kim Eagle-Smith, the curator who left Harcourts last summer, now characterizes Banks as an "autocrat" who overspent in good times and was utterly unprepared when the art market's bubble burst.
"This guy has very few skills. He was not an art academic. He was not a salesperson," Eagle-Smith says. "He was an art impresario."
Now the San Francisco District Attorney's Office is trying to determine whether Banks -- or any of his associates -- was also a thief.
Dr. Paul A. Ebert is a surgeon and art collector who lives outside Chicago. In early 1995, Ebert hired a Bay Area lawyer to recover a painting he had consigned years earlier to Harcourts. "I had kind of forgotten about it, but saw something similar in a gallery that was commanding a pretty high price," Ebert says.
The consignment agreement between Ebert and Harcourts was similar to the one Paul Villierme had signed. Under such an agreement, an art gallery holds an artwork in trust while trying to sell it. When the work does sell, the proceeds are split with the owner, usually on a 50-50 basis.
It turned out Harcourts had not kept its end of the bargain with Ebert. It had long ago sold his Theodore Butler painting for $35,000, without informing the doctor. And once the doctor discovered the unreported sale, Harcourts began playing for time.
Jo Rogers, Banks' wife and his gallery bookkeeper, wrote Ebert's lawyer on March 22, 1995: "Had hoped to send a check with this letter, but find we are still waiting for payments that were promised to us last month." The letter also offered other reasons the payment had been delayed: She'd been "bedridden" for three weeks, and the gallery was in the process of moving to a new address near the modern art museum.
These explanations could not change what Harcourts Gallery had done: Legally speaking, it had sold Ebert's Theodore Butler painting "out of trust." It's the kind of behavior that can land an art dealer in civil court, facing a breach-of-contract lawsuit. If the selling out of trust was done willfully, it goes by another name: grand theft. The potential criminal penalty gets heavier as the number of victims and dollar amount grow.
There are plenty of Harcourts Gallery victims, and they are out plenty of money.
While Harcourts was trying to mollify Dr. Ebert -- and as it was signing with Paul Villierme to market the works of his father, Henry -- the gallery was also receiving inquiries from Gary and Sally Batz, a Kansas City, Mo., couple. The Batzes wanted to know the fate of several works they'd consigned to the gallery, including three etchings by surrealist and 20th-century master Joan Miro that had been listed for sale at $32,700.
When Sally Batz arrived at the gallery in November 1995, she discovered that her Miros been sold months, perhaps years, earlier -- without her knowledge. She learned that the gallery could not pay her before the first of the year -- if then. And, according to court papers filed on Batz's behalf, she unearthed even more disturbing information during her visit: Hanging on display at Harcourts Gallery were a trio of etchings, also by Miro, that had been stolen from her years earlier by a St. Louis art agent.
Although Paul Villierme couldn't have known it at the time, when he kicked in the front door to Harcourts Gallery in June 1996, he was thrusting himself into the middle of the collapse of an elaborate Ponzi scheme.
Court records reveal a list of dozens of art collectors whose works Harcourts had sold out of trust. The victims include amateurs, galleries, and museums; they hail from all corners of the continental United States, and as far away as Melbourne, Australia. And the losses are enormous.
Harcourts, for example, had neglected to inform the Rachel Adler Gallery of New York that $137,000 of consigned art had been sold. Similarly, the Lenoir & Associates gallery of San Antonio did not learn until after Harcourts filed bankruptcy July 3 of last year that $65,000 of its art had been purchased.
But there were victims who lost money and their own creations -- artists who had consigned their work directly to Harcourts. Some were fairly well-known: Roland Petersen, another California figurist whose works were a mainstay at Harcourts, lost $92,000. Less established artists from the Bay Area were not spared: Jonathan Barbieri ($7,500), Bruce Beasley ($1,700), and Nancy Genn ($8,300) all took significant hits.
And Henry Villierme, the artist with a son who cared, has filed a claim against Harcourts for $26,000.
"I do not believe Fred Banks is a crook," says Kim Eagle-Smith, the Harcourts curator who inked Villierme to an art consignment agreement. "Nobody set out to defraud anybody. It was a combination of bad management, marketing, and ultimately talent drain."
Eagle-Smith, however, has been feeling the heat himself since Harcourts filed bankruptcy in July and the gallery's victims started pouring out of the woodwork. When sculptor and collector John Battenberg sued for breach of contract over The Rose, a hand-colored etching by Wayne Thiebaud priced at $35,000, Eagle-Smith was a named defendant.
And nobody beyond Eagle-Smith is jumping to Fred Banks' defense -- least of all Banks himself. In fact Eagle-Smith and Banks' lawyer both say the last time they knew Banks' location, he was staying in La Paz, Mexico, and he has shoved on since, without leaving a forwarding address.
A call to James Healy, the former director of Harcourts, drew a denial that he knew works were being sold out of trust. And he added an angry footnote: "They took my pension. They stole from me. And that's all I have to say." Banks' brother, Stephen, who also worked at the gallery, said his lawyer had advised him to decline comment. That lawyer, Melvin Honowitz, says an undisclosed number of paintings in which gallery employee pension benefits were invested have, indeed, become the subject of intense legal wrangling.
Fred Banks' only public statements about the collapse of Harcourts have come in testimony during bankruptcy proceedings for the gallery. The bankruptcy liquidation case listed $2.2 million in debts to unsecured creditors of the gallery, including 113 artists, collectors, galleries, and museums.
Testifying under oath at a meeting of gallery creditors in August, Banks sounded like a broken man, fielding questions from lawyers and others in a halting monotone. He blamed the gallery's demise on the post-boom downturn in prices and left the impression he'd somehow been below deck while Harcourts sailed for the shoals of financial disaster.
"I laid low for a few years," Banks told the attorney representing the bankruptcy trustee appointed to oversee the case, Ed Towers. "I was treated for depression."
According to Banks, he suffered an accident in November 1993 and was "severely injured." Eagle-Smith recalled that Banks fell from a ladder and was treated in a hospital overnight for a slight concussion.
"That was the starting point for me attending the gallery less and less," Banks testified. He went on to say he relinquished control of the gallery to his wife and bookkeeper, Jo Rogers: "Information was forwarded to me. Passed by me. I was sort of dependent on her -- for financial advice and for her intercessions."
From the standpoint of the artists, collectors, other creditors, and their lawyers, however, the crux of the matter -- the reason they were questioning Banks -- never was addressed: Where did the money go?
And the person who might be most able to answer that question was nowhere to be found.
Shortly before Harcourts Gallery filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy papers, Jo Rogers filed for divorce in Marin County. Two weeks before the bankruptcy creditors' meeting, she served her husband of 10 years with divorce papers, fired her divorce lawyer from the case, and left town.
Jo Rogers has not been seen since.
Aron Oliner, an attorney for bankruptcy trustee Ed Towers, has run a series of database searches, looking for property transfers that might suggest Rogers and Banks, either together or separately, were concealing assets from gallery creditors.
Oliner says he found nothing.
"My read is this was just a business going to hell," Oliner says. "A more responsible proprietor would have shut his doors in 1992."
Eagle-Smith believes Banks is destitute, citing the art impresario's efforts to sell a last possession, a motorcycle, as he was leaving for Mexico. "My understanding is that all he has is his $1,000-a-month Social Security check," he says.
But if Banks' final days in the United States suggest innocence to some people, others have a more jaundiced view of his last act at Harcourts.
San Francisco attorney M.J. Bogatin, who represents Paul and Henry Villierme, walked into Harcourts Gallery unannounced last August, just two days after Fred Banks had given his dispirited testimony in the firm's bankruptcy case. Bogatin says he wanted to pick up the financial records Paul Villierme had seen momentarily after kicking in the gallery's door a few months earlier.
"It kind of sounded like a party," Bogatin says, his voice still reflecting disbelief. Instead of the "broken" Fred Banks who had testified 48 hours earlier, Bogatin says, he found Fred and his brother, Stephen, in a festive mood.
"Fred Banks was bounding around. Full of energy. A different man. It was very cavalier. I would have thought they'd be in a deep funk. When I spoke to them, there were a dozen interruptions," Bogatin says. "There was a sense of celebration."
Afterward, says Bogatin, "we were at a loss over what to do."
A few days later, Bogatin's phone rang. A member of California Lawyers for the Arts had managed to interest the San Francisco District Attorney's Office in the Harcourts situation.
The chief of the DA's special prosecutions section, Debra Hayes, invited Bogatin and for a visit. Though she won't discuss details, Hayes says she assigned a prosecutor and a white-collar investigator to the case after Bogatin explained the vulnerability of struggling artists and the unlikelihood they'd obtain justice in bankruptcy court.
When Bogatin and Hayes parted ways, the Villiermes' attorney was sure the prosecutor's office would kick into gear. Instead, inactivity reigned. Banks left the country. His wife remained out of sight, while their divorce stayed suspiciously idle. And the bankruptcy trustee prepared to close shop on the Harcourts case.
Then, last month, the DA's investigation suddenly spurted to life. The renewed interest was sparked -- at least in part -- by a notice the office received from Richard Humphries, a San Francisco art dealer who was in state prison on an arson conviction. Banks had accused Humphries of theft of some art from Harcourts, and the prisoner had sent an official demand that the district attorney either charge him or dismiss Banks' complaint.
In February, Assistant District Attorney Harry Dorfman sent letters to creditors listed in Harcourts' bankruptcy files, asking them to call with information. Eagle-Smith, the former curator, was interviewed by a district attorney's investigator. Stephen Banks was scheduled for an investigative interview.
Despite the absent people, missing money, and official heat, Banks' associates say they still don't understand all the fuss.
"It's not sensational, [n]or was it premeditated," says Eagle-Smith.
"It's not newsworthy, and it should be put to rest," says Stephen Banks.
But Rachel Adler, owner of the Rachel Adler Gallery, a New York City gallery seeking a $137,000 payment from Harcourts, has a less simplistic read.
"I have always suspected something," she says. "This is one of those cases in which, if someone dies, you'll want to open that coffin, just to make sure.
