All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield

Reviewed by Harriet

This is the second book about fraud I’ve reviewed this year, the first being Joseph Hone’s impressive The Book Forger. Obviously, as you can tell from the titles, Hone writes about a case of literary fraud as opposed to Whitfield’s artistic one. But despite the common denominator, these are two very different kinds of books. While Hone delved into the bookselling world of the late 19th and early twentieth centuries, Whitfield is pretty much bang up to date, dealing with the case of Inigo Phillbrick, who I maybe should have heard of but hadn’t until I read this. Wikipedia describes him as ‘American former art dealer and convicted fraud’.

Philbrick is young, glamorous and stylish, as is his former girlfriend, now wife, Victoria Baker-Harber, who became famous in the UK for appearing in the TV reality show Made In Chelsea. Add to that his charm and his in-depth knowledge of the contemporary art world, and it’s unsurprising that he was trusted by his clients, many of whom he cheated and defrauded to the tune of $86.7 million. His story is told here by his old schoolfriend and one-time business partner Orlando Whitfield who, after years of trying to think the best of his supposedly close friend is understandably disillusioned in the end.

It all starts very well. Fresh out of university, Phillbrick and Whitfield start an art dealership called I & O Fine Art. Their early ventures are not always successful – the Banksy that they spot on a door in Shoreditch slips though their fingers, but they do manage to acquire and sell some important works. But Phillbrick wants to move to higher things, opening a spin-off from the White Cube gallery, named Modern Collections. By now Whitfield is no longer a partner, but an employee, watching in increased amazement as his boss goes from buying paintings at a lowish price and selling them for a higher one to buying a damaged and unsaleable painting from an insurance company and carrying out his own restoration in the back room with the most basic of tools, making about $2.5 million in the process.

More acts of skullduggery continue. There are the invoices he forges to show backers that their actually non-existent money will be coming soon. And the fact that, as he admits at his trial,  ‘I may have done illegal things in trying to resolve my untenable situation with jointly owned artworks between multiple parties’  – which refers to the time he sold shares in a Rudolf Stingel painting to so many people that they added up to 220%. The $86 million he admitted to in the end was made up of unpaid debts, double dealing and forgery.

The subtitle of this book describes it as ‘a story of friendship’, and watching Whitfield gradually having to admit to himself that his much loved and admired friend is a crook is part of the fascination and also the tragedy. Whitfield’s mental health and substance abuse escalate so much that he ends up in rehab. During this time, Phillbrick did not answer any of his calls or emails. This is something he may have regretted when, once in prison, he sent Whitfield a massive pile of paperwork, expecting his ‘old friend’ to write an article exonerating him. Instead, this book was the result.

Naturally, being Phillbrick, the seven year prison sentence he received was reduced to two years, and he’s now out and hoping to start dealing in art again. Knowing his luck and charisma, he may well succeed. But one thing becomes clear from this account – in an unregulated market like the world of contemporary art, you can get away with anything. Prices can be inflated, insider dealing is common, buyers can be hand-picked. And, as Whitfield puts it, ‘trading artworks is always trading futures in the hopes that fashion will dictate their continuing rise in value; necessity, that keystone of economic forces, does not apply’. 

At his trial, Phillbrick was asked by the judge why he had done all this. “For money, Your Honour.” “That simple?” “That simple.”

Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny New Books.

Orlando Whitfield, All that Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art (Profile Books, 2024). 978-1788169950, 336pp., hardback.

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