Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - “I WANT A NICE MATISSE”
Chapter 2 - CANVAS GREED
Chapter 3 - ART FOR SALE
Chapter 4 - CROSSING THE LINE
Chapter 5 - MIBUS WANTS HIS MONEY BACK
Chapter 6 - SELF-MADE MAN
Chapter 7 - WRECKERS OF CIVILIZATION
Chapter 8 - AT THE EASEL
Chapter 9 - THE FINE ART OF PROVENANCE
Chapter 10 - FULL SPEED AHEAD
Chapter 11 - AFTER GIACOMETTI
Chapter 12 - A SINISTER MESSAGE
Chapter 13 - THE BOOKWORM
Chapter 14 - THE PAPER TRAIL
Chapter 15 - FALLING OFF A LOG
Chapter 16 - THE BOW TIE
Chapter 17 - INTO THE WHIRLWIND
Chapter 18 - STANDING NUDE
Chapter 19 - THE POND MAN
Chapter 20 - MYATT’S BLUE PERIOD
Chapter 21 - THE CHAMELEON
Chapter 22 - A LOADED BRIEFCASE
Chapter 23 - THE AUSCHWITZ CONCERT
Chapter 24 - EXTREME PRUDENCE
Chapter 25 - WE’RE NOT ALONE
Chapter 26 - A SLOW BURN . . .
Chapter 27 - THE ART SQUAD
Chapter 28 - THE MACARONI CAPER
Chapter 29 - NICKED
Chapter 30 - ALADDIN’S CAVE
Chapter 31 - THE FOX
Chapter 32 - DREWE DESCENDING
Chapter 33 - SOUTH
Chapter 34 - THE TRIAL
EPILOGUE
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ALSO BY LANEY SALISBURY
The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men
In a Race Against an Epidemic
(coauthor Gay Salisbury)
THE PENGUIN PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,
(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,
England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin
Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,
Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books
India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd,
24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, 2009
All rights reserved
Excerpt from House of Cards by David Mamet. Copyright © 1985, 1987 by David Mamet.
Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Salisbury, Laney.
Provenance: how a con man and a forger rewrote the history of modern art / Laney Salisbury
and Aly Sujo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-10500-9
1. Myatt, John, 1945- 2. Art forgers—England—Biography. 3. Drewe, John, 1948-
4. Impostors and imposture—England—Biography. I. Sujo, Aly. II. Title.
ND1662.M93S26 2009
364.16’3—dc22
[B]
2009003552
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
http://us.penguingroup.com
FOR ALY SUJO, WITH LOVE.
AUG. 26, 1949-OCT. 4, 2008
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
THE GENESIS OF A SCAM
John Drewe
professor, physicist, man of many guises, and the brilliant mastermind of one of the great art frauds of the twentieth century.
Batsheva Goudsmid
Drewe’s common-law wife; once loyal, she is eventually the key to his downfall.
John Myatt
impoverished painter and single father who sees Drewe as his savior.
THE GUARDIANS OF THE ARCHIVES
Bill McAlister
head of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; cannot believe his good fortune when Professor John Drewe shows up with an interest in funding the upkeep of the ICA’s rich archive.
Sarah Fox-Pitt
formidable doyenne of archive acquisition at the Tate Gallery whom Drewe reels in with lunches at Claridge’s and promises of historical documents.
THE ART DEALERS
Adrian Mibus
respected Australian gallery owner who falls for Drewe’s smoke and mirrors and buys several of Myatt’s fakes.
David Stern
Notting Hill dealer who unwittingly helps Drewe’s scam reach across the Atlantic to New York.
Armand Bartos Jr.
debonair New York dealer who still insists the “Giacometti” he bought is the best he’s ever seen.
Dominic Taglialatella
New York dealer who is taken in by one of the more expensive “Giacomettis.”
Rene Gimpel
fourth-generation art dealer nagged by misgivings about a “Ben Nicholson” until his restoration expert, Jane Zagel, confirms his worst fears.
Peter Nahum
London dealer; among the first to alert Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad that he’s been hoodwinked by a rogue.
THE UNWITTING PROVIDERS OF PROVENANCE
John Sperr
elderly antiquarian bookstore owner whose shop becomes a source of material and inspiration for Drewe’s elaborate provenance.
Father Paul Addison
head of a Roman Catholic religious order in England whose goodwill Drewe abuses to claim provenance of works from centuries-old priories.
Alan Bowness
former head of the Tate Gallery and son-in-law of the painter Ben Nicholson who innocently authenticates several fake Nicholsons.
Jane Drew
renowned British architect with close ties to Le Corbusier whom Drewe befriends, lending him a different kind of “provenance”: personal cachet.
Terry Carroll
physicist sufficiently impressed by the “professor” that he never questions Drewe’s professional provenance as a physicist until close to the end.
Daniel Stoakes
down-on-his luck childhood friend who agrees to pose as owner of a few works, only later to bemoan, “I was like a ripe plum ready to be picked from the tree.”
Peter Harris
larger-than-life personality with an early morning paper route and a penchant for war
tales who Drewe fictitiously transforms into a fabled arms dealer and art collector.
THE SALES FORCE
Danny Berger
neighbor recruited by Drewe to expand his operation who successfully sells “modern masters” out of his garage.
Clive Belman
unemployed former jewelry salesman and actor who joins Drewe’s operation unaware that the product line he is hawking is the equivalent of costume jewelry.
Stuart Berkeley
a London-based runner who takes the operation worldwide.
Sheila Maskell
independent and reputable New York-based art runner who sends Armand Bartos the Giacometti Standing Nude that will eventually help break the case.
THE SKEPTICS
Mary Lisa Palmer
indefatigable director of the Giacometti Association whose persistent detective work puts her in conflict with the auction houses and galleries.
Jennifer Booth
Tate archivist who refuses to be swayed by Drewe’s benefactor status.
THE SLEUTHOUNDS
Richard Higgs
London detective who cannot pin a case of arson on John Drewe but knows a scam artist when he sees one.
Miki Volpe
scrappy detective from the Yard’s Organised Crime Unit who has never heard the word “provenance” but knows how to build a case, brush stroke by brush stroke.
Jonathan Searle
Scotland Yard detective with a Cambridge pedigree in art history who proves as skilled at spotting fakes as in tracking down thugs.
It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.
—DAVID MAMET
House of Games
PROLOGUE
One sunny April afternoon in 1990 two Englishmen strode up the steps of London’s Tate Gallery, passed beneath the imposing statues atop the pediment—Britannia, the lion, and the unicorn—and made their way through the grand portico into one of the world’s great museums. Both men had recently been welcomed into the narrow circle of curators, historians, and benefactors who gave the Tate its cachet, and today they were the special guests at a reception in their honor, to be held in one of the museum’s private conference rooms high above the galleries.
The more distinguished of the two was Professor John Drewe, a nuclear physicist with a pencil-thin mustache and gray-blue eyes. Drewe was often seen riding through London in a chauffeured Bentley and lunching at the most exclusive restaurants with members of the art world’s aristocracy. It was said that he had amassed an extensive personal art collection, and that he lived extremely well.
Today, as always, the professor held his head high. Everything about him, from his bearing to his clothes, suggested not just a gentleman of style and substance, but someone who expected deference in all his dealings.
The other honored guest was John Myatt, a different sort altogether. A struggling painter and onetime pop musician with a peasant face straight out of Bruegel, he looked as though he would have been happier trudging through the moorlands of Staffordshire than standing awkwardly in the Tate’s lobby in his charity-shop suit. Myatt, in attendance as Drewe’s personal art historian, took his every cue from the professor, whom he considered not only a business partner but a mentor as well.
A senior Tate staff member in a dark-blue Savile Row suit welcomed them and ushered them to the conference room upstairs. It was a large and impressive space, with polished wood floors, white walls, and bay windows looking out on the Thames. Around a solid oak table sat several of the Tate’s curators and senior staffers, including Nicholas Serota, the museum director, a slim, soft-spoken aesthete with rimless glasses, and Sarah Fox-Pitt, the formidable head of the Tate archives.
Like most other museums, the Tate was a privileged community run by a small army of art experts and archivists. Since 1988 it had been led with quiet imperiousness by Serota, who had taken over at a time when new funding was a priority. Along with every other British cultural institution under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-market policies, the museum had been forced to compete for sponsors, and while it still received government grants, these hardly covered the major purchases and expansions Serota planned. He was dedicated to reinvigorating an institution that the Guardian newspaper once described as stuffy and uninspired, “a bastion of sluggishness.”
An economist as well as an art historian, Serota was not shy about forming ties with corporations, wealthy new patrons, and private collectors. To float a single Cézanne exhibition, his accountants scheduled more than forty champagne receptions. Later Serota would inaugurate the Unilever Series, the Tate’s first brand-marketing collaboration with a company, and museum patrons visiting the restrooms would find the cubicles “adorned with a discreet notice—similar to those underneath some of its most famous paintings—thanking an anonymous benefactor for donating the wherewithal to keep them in toilet rolls,” as the Guardian reported.
The director did not have much choice. The art market was booming, and the Tate and many other art institutions were being priced out of the business. To keep the museum’s goals and galleries afloat, its directors and trustees were forced to tango with any number of prospective donors.
John Drewe was the perfect dance partner. He had been cultivating his relationship with the Tate for weeks, organizing lunches at the restaurant at Claridge’s Hotel for curators and senior staffers, including Fox-Pitt. If Serota embodied a new, less class-conscious Britain (he was known to wash his staff’s teacups after meetings), Fox-Pitt was Old World. A slim and sophisticated aristocrat in her late forties, she had worked at the Tate as a curator and archivist for more than a decade and had carved out her own fiefdom. Her archives had become an important part of the museum, and she was always looking for ways to expand. She had a reputation as a fearsome gatekeeper with X-ray vision that allowed her to peer into the heart of anyone she suspected of harboring anything less than the most altruistic motives toward the Tate. One luckless acquaintance who failed to pass muster recalled how Fox-Pitt looked through him, then past him, as if she had determined with a single glance that he was useless for her purposes.
Drewe had piqued her interest from the start. He was versed in the archival arts and spoke eloquently about a cache of important letters, catalogs, and lecture notes that had passed through his hands over the years. He seemed to know a great deal about twentieth-century art records, particularly those of the avant-garde Institute of Contemporary Arts and the British Council, and he boasted about his own private archive, which he said contained letters from Picasso, lecture notes from Ben Nicholson, and a trove of material from Dubuffet and other major artists.
In the course of his conversations with Fox-Pitt, Drewe talked at length about his background in the sciences. He had an impressive lineage: His father, a noted British physicist, had worked on the development of Britain’s atomic energy program, and had split the atom in Cambridge in the early 1930s. Drewe had followed in his father’s footsteps by going to work in the nuclear industry. In midlife he had become fascinated with art and its history, and as his collection grew he began to understand the importance of archives and documentation. He had developed a collector’s gratitude for the role played by archivists in the safeguarding of art history, and he hinted to Fox-Pitt that parts of his collection, as well as some other valuable historical documents, might find their proper home at the Tate. He also hinted that he was considering a substantial monetary donation to the archives.
To the general public, museums are synonymous with the art that hangs on the walls. Few are aware that these institutions also take on the monumental task of assembling a record of an uninterrupted chain of ownership for each important work of art, from the moment of its creation to the sale of the work to its most recent owner. Exhibition catalogs help document the custodial history of the work, and receipts of sale show where and when it passed through private hands. Diaries, correspondence, and early drawings also she
d light on the works themselves. Today, it is this documentary record of ownership, as much as any professional evaluation of quality or artistic style, that confirms the authenticity of a work of art. In the world of art, the process is known as establishing provenance.
Provenance Page 1
