Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  —JULIAN BARNES,

  Letter from London, June 11, 1990

  Adrian Mibus was becoming increasingly unhappy with the de Staël he had bought from Danny Berger. The longer he stared at it, the more he realized something was off—the brushstrokes seemed a little too stiff, and the painter’s casual elegance was absent. It had been nearly a year since he’d bought the piece and put it up in his home. Now, in the summer of 1989, he decided to get a second opinion. He took it down, wrapped it carefully, and brought it across the Channel to Paris to show to the artist’s widow.

  As heiress to the estate, Madame de Staël retained what in France is known as the droit moral, an absolute right to judge an artist’s oeuvre and declare whether or not a work is authentic. The droit moral is legally binding in France, where it often serves as the ultimate arbiter in disputed cases of forgery.

  As soon as she saw the canvas, the widow de Staël expressed her doubts. What disturbed her even more than the painting itself was the inscription on the back—the scrawled reference to a walk in the park—and the signature, “Nicholas de Staël.”

  “That’s quite wrong,” she said.

  Her husband, a Russian émigré who had settled in France, always spelled his name “Nicolas.” As for the alleged promenade through the park with “Mrs. Richardson,” Madame de Staël knew nothing about it.

  When Mibus returned to London with the painting, he tracked Professor Drewe down through Danny Berger and told him he suspected the de Staël was “wrong.” The artist’s widow was not convinced that the work was her husband’s, and a Parisian dealer named Jean-François Jaeger, one of the foremost experts on de Staël, believed it was a fake.

  Mibus asked for his £32,500 back, fully expecting Drewe to uphold the standard of any legitimate dealer—to refund a client when a work is considered suspect.

  Drewe suggested that they discuss the matter over lunch at White’s, a private members’ club near Mibus’s gallery. Mibus assumed they would have a quick, conciliatory meal and wrap up the whole unfortunate affair, but Drewe avoided the subject of the de Staël. He motioned for the waitress and ordered a three-course meal. He spoke quickly, as if he’d downed half a dozen espressos, and when the food came, he made a pass at the waitress, a thin young woman with a boyish haircut. She ignored him. Drewe was unfazed and continued chatting.

  Mibus interrupted him. What about the painting?

  Not to worry, said Drewe. The work was genuine. Opening his briefcase, he removed two large photographs of another de Staël that had also been signed “Nicholas” and slid them across the table. He explained to Mibus that de Staël was known to have used the English spelling of his name occasionally.

  Mibus heard him out. Like any other European or American dealer, he understood that while the droit moral added weight in disputes over authenticity, it was by no means the deciding factor outside France. Why should the opinion of a family member count for more than that of an expert or scholar? True, Jaeger thought the piece was a fake, but hadn’t Christie’s approved it the previous year?

  Drewe perhaps noticed the doubt flickering across Mibus’s face and hinted that de Staël had had an affair with the woman in the park, and that the widow was letting jealousy get in the way of good judgment. He told Mibus that the piece had previously belonged to John Catch, a key member of a consortium of military defense contractors that owned a large collection of artworks. Drewe himself was a member of the consortium as well as its official representative delegated to sell the group’s artworks.

  He ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk about his own career. Mibus listened politely. Drewe said that his research firm, AceTech Systems Ltd., was developing a machine gun that could fire a thousand rounds per minute. In addition, the company was working on a chemical warfare suit that could be folded up and reduced to the size of a golf ball. Drewe suggested that he was in a position to broker the sale of tanks and F-16s, and jokingly asked whether Mibus knew anyone who wanted to buy a fighter jet. When the dealer tried to steer the conversation back to the business at hand, Drewe dug another channel.

  “He was good at making one lose one’s train of thought,” Mibus recalled.

  As lunch drew to a close, Drewe pulled from his briefcase a high-resolution transparency of a Picasso titled Trois Femmes à la Fontaine, a $2.7 million oil on canvas that a private collector in New York was willing to sell for just $1.8 million, according to Drewe. The work was represented exclusively through his consortium, and Mibus could get a jump on the competition. Given three days’ notice, Drewe could arrange for a private viewing in New York.

  The transparency had the intended effect: The work looked good to Mibus. It was in fact the genuine article, most likely in the hands of a real collector. Mibus told Drewe he was interested, and for now the de Staël was forgotten. Drewe had bought himself some time.

  Meanwhile, he was having similar problems on another front: His runner, Danny Berger, was running into trouble selling Myatt’s work in London.

  Things had been going well until recently. Through a business contact, Berger had unloaded two Le Corbusiers and a pair of Bissières to an expatriate Fijian financial consultant and property developer who had made a tidy profit by flipping one of the Le Corbusiers at auction. Since then, however, Berger’s luck seemed to have dried up. Gallery owners were beginning to ask for more detailed provenances, documents proving the works’ authenticity beyond any doubt. Berger’s resources were limited to titles of ownership from John Catch of Norseland Industries, from John Drewe, and from Drewe’s mother, and these no longer satisfied the dealers.

  While the source of Drewe’s inventory must have seemed vague even to Berger, he had not thought to ask more probing questions about provenance. He knew little about the traditions of the art world. For him, a painting was just another commodity. The art market was a realm outside his own, and he considered himself a salesman, not a historian. Although there were always gaps in the history of the works he was handling, Drewe had explained that collectors often preferred to remain anonymous and liked to keep their names out of the auction catalogs, which were notorious hunting grounds for burglars looking for a good haul.

  But now Berger was telling Drewe that he needed a comprehensive history for each of the pieces he was trying to move. Could Drewe get him the names of previous owners? Were there sales receipts or exhibition catalogs detailing where the works had been shown?

  Drewe promised to check with his art historian.

  With Myatt at his side, Drewe stepped into one of the more prestigious galleries that dominate London’s fashionable Cork Street. He had made an appointment to see a Bissière and wanted his art consultant to look over the piece and its provenance. When the dealer showed them the work, Myatt and Drewe agreed that it would fit nicely with the professor’s growing collection of twentieth-century modern masters. When the dealer’s back was turned, Drewe examined the painting for gallery labels or dedications that might provide clues to its history. Myatt and Drewe had been to several galleries earlier and discovered that dealers tended to be discreet about where a painting came from. It was good business, a way of keeping their clients from cutting them out of the deal by going directly to the source.

  It hadn’t taken Drewe long to realize that Myatt’s fakes were sorely lacking in provenance. To overcome that handicap, he would have to learn how to create paperwork so impressive that any doubts about Myatt’s work would evaporate. He would need to produce a chain of documents that signaled a painting’s clear trajectory from artist’s studio to museum, from auction house to collector—receipts, invoices, letters, exhibition catalogs. If he could chronicle the involvement of a well-known collector or gallery along the way, all the better. A painting’s cachet was not based solely on the quality of the canvas but also on its lineage. The more prestigious or infamous the previous owner, the better. A piece of art with a juicy history was always worth an extra ten grand.

  “Buying a painting that was
once owned by a well-known person means, in a way, standing in their shoes, walking in their footsteps, possessing a small part of their myth,” Werner Muensterberger wrote in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion. “The idea is that the value of the objects they buy will rub off on them. The objective is to convince themselves that they are ‘someone’ or alternatively they cultivate a secret garden which may bring to light a different self.” Muensterberger could just as easily have been writing about Drewe, a classic con man who presented himself as an empty slate upon which his mark could etch out a fantasy or wish.

  Drewe walked out of the gallery, trailed by Myatt. He had seen enough. There were dozens of counterfeit histories he could attach to each of Myatt’s works. The possibilities were endless.

  For the past several weeks, Mibus’s conversations with Drewe had revolved around two subjects. One was the promised viewing of the Picasso in New York; the other was the de Staël, whose authenticity Drewe was now certain he could prove through newly acquired documents.

  At their next meeting, again at White’s, Drewe ordered an expensive bottle of wine and lunch for both of them, then proceeded to spend a good half hour criticizing the French expert Jaeger’s artistic eye. He said that Jaeger was a stubborn man, but that even he would be persuaded by this new evidence. He showed Mibus several letters from other well-known experts in France, all of whom appeared willing to authenticate the de Staël—which was only natural, since Drewe had written the letters himself.

  As usual, he hogged the conversation. Mibus listened quietly as the professor bragged about his access to classified information about a secret city beneath London, a six-level subterranean fortress built by the government for wartime use as an emergency control center in case of a nuclear attack or a major disaster. He described a “ghost station” near Tottenham Court Road that had not been used since the 1930s but had recently been refitted as a government laboratory. He said he knew of a secret tunnel that had been built behind the Institute of Contemporary Arts for the express purpose of providing an exit route for the royal family in the event that they needed to flee Buckingham Palace and the city.

  Mibus ran out of patience, excused himself, and took a taxi back to the gallery. There he learned about yet another problem with one of Drewe’s paintings, a Bissière he had bought from Catch’s consortium and then sold to a French client. The Frenchman had returned the piece after he tried unsuccessfully to sell it through an auction house. Bissière’s son had seen it at a preshow viewing and denounced it as a fake. The younger Bissière had the droit moral and had stripped the work of its signature.

  Mibus promptly refunded the client and called Drewe, who eventually agreed to refund the £7,500 Mibus had paid him.

  Still unresolved was the dispute over the de Staël painting. Mibus asked for and received a formal letter from the artist’s widow officially nullifying the work. He sent this to Drewe and demanded his money back.

  Drewe offered him an alternative: He would supply Mibus with a “generous” consignment of pieces by Giacometti, Tàpies, Oskar Schlemmer, Mark Gertler, and Dubuffet, and Mibus could keep 50 percent of the proceeds from whatever he sold.

  Mibus wasn’t interested. He wanted a full refund for the de Staël, and then he wanted nothing more to do with Drewe.

  Drewe wouldn’t budge. He refused to give Mibus his refund. He was polite but firm. He didn’t need to keep Mibus happy, because by now he had begun the process of forging documents for each of Myatt’s works.

  6

  SELF-MADE MAN

  The idea of concocting the intricate history of a work of art from whole cloth was no great leap for Drewe, who had been inventing and reinventing himself since he was a child. By the time he was a nervous thirteen-year-old thread of a boy in short trousers and cap, he had mastered the art of dissembling. He boasted that he was a descendant of the earl of York though he had in fact grown up in a lower-middle-class home in southeast England, the stepson of a coal merchant. He was quiet and circumspect, with anxious eyes behind thin spectacles. He had a scar running from his chin to his neck, and this was a sore point: He told the other boys that he’d been accidentally scalded by boiling water. (Later, he would claim that he had been wounded in battle.) He was clearly an intellectual, above the norm. He had few friends, and it seemed he liked it that way. He was never bullied. Even in those tender years, from thirteen to fifteen, he was withdrawn. There was a controlled grief about him that made the other children keep their distance.

  In the summer, he and his only real friend, Hugh Roderick Stoakes, would play long games of whist, an early version of bridge. Drewe (still John Cockett at the time) would deliver speeches to an imaginary audience and tell Stoakes that the two of them were fated to be “heroes for the future.” They rarely talked about girls or football or pop music. They preferred to listen to the funeral march from the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, imagining the mourners’ silhouettes against a darkening sky. They traded horror paperbacks, and Drewe kept his collection next to his advanced chemistry and physics tomes and his copies of Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. His room was clean and neat, with reams of paper stacked next to a typewriter on which he composed complex mathematical equations and theories.

  Even as a boy, Drewe was drawn to the rigors of science. He loved the precision and control and discipline of scientific endeavor. His math skills were sophisticated, and he could assimilate information quickly and accurately. By his early teens he was reading up on quantum mechanics and cold fusion. He plumbed the philosophy of science and pored over Vogel’s Textbook of Practical Organic Chemistry, a university-level text. Stoakes suspected that his friend was uncomfortable with purely conceptual matters, but he could see that Drewe was able to devour buckets of hard facts, and was quick to pick up the gist of an argument. He had a pigeonhole mind, an uncanny ability to locate and isolate relevant data from massive amounts of information.

  In their late teens Drewe would pour tea for his friend from a Georgian pot when he visited, and they would chat for hours about physics, ballistics, and weaponry. He showed Stoakes a yellowing document that illustrated how to build a homemade nuclear bomb, and they discussed Einstein’s unified field theory. He was quiet and reticent until they talked science, and then he would go on for hours. Hard science provided a necessary jolt, he said, a rush of sheer intellectual joy. It was his calling. He was determined to be a pioneer, to crash through boundaries. He gave Stoakes a paper he had written that appeared to break clear of the fundamental laws of physics. Stoakes thought it read like science fiction.

  The boys enjoyed an extended adolescence. Sometimes Drewe pretended to listen, but Stoakes could tell he was somewhere else. Occasionally he would short-circuit. Stoakes remembered these moments with absolute clarity, because Drewe’s temper tantrums could be terrifying, like thunderclaps. The softness would vanish as though it had never been there, his face would contort, and he would speak in staccato bursts through gritted teeth.

  Drewe did reasonably well at school and got through his ordinary level exams, the earlier and less rigorous of two standardized tests in secondary school subjects, but he seemed to have little patience for his teachers, who seemed increasingly resistant to his obvious talent. His family expected him to become a lawyer or a professor, but he was determined to make his own way in the world. He’d had his fill of academia and wanted to run his own ship without middlemen or explanations. When he turned seventeen, he took an internship at the Atomic Energy Authority, a clerical position that he must have felt was beneath him. His boss was one John Catch, and he had an enormous impact on Drewe. Catch would remember him as a “very clever” young man who had an impressive knowledge of advanced physics, even though tests showed he hardly understood the basics. Catch encouraged him to take college-prep classes through the AEA’s part-time study program, but Drewe dropped out, claiming that he already knew the material.

  Finally, at the age of nineteen, he resigned from the AEA, changed his name, and
disappeared without a trace. When he resurfaced some fifteen years later, he had mysteriously acquired a PhD and claimed he was a well-paid nuclear physicist who did consulting work on high-level technology. At various times, he also claimed to have been a professor, a historian specializing in the Nazi era, a consultant for the Ministry of Defence, an army lieutenant, a weapons expert, and in his off-hours, an expert hang glider.

  Drewe’s life during those fifteen years remains a mystery. Although Stoakes did see Drewe a few times during that period, he had for the most part fallen out of touch with his friend—which didn’t seem to affect Drewe much. Drewe would make use of Stoakes’s name regularly in his con.

  There is no official record of Drewe until shortly before he and Goudsmid set up house in Golders Green, where he soon found a ready audience for his tales at one of his favorite pubs, the Catch-22. Located across the street from the Golders Green police precinct headquarters, the pub was named after the quintessential antiwar novel, but it had become a second home to an assortment of military types, a watering hole for army buffs, uniform aficionados, private bodyguards, veterans of the Special Forces, and off-duty detectives. The Catch was run by an easygoing ex-paramilitary man. Regimental ties hung from the wall behind the bar, along with various battle emblems and group photos of soldiers. In the muddy Guinness light, with Queen and Elvis on the jukebox, the regulars traded war stories and argued about rugby, cars, and politics.

  One spring evening not long after his visit to the gallery with Myatt to inspect the Bissière, Drewe stepped out of his house in his blue overcoat, briefcase in hand, and turned onto Finchley Road, past Danny Berger’s garage, on his way to the Catch. He looked like any other well-dressed businessman heading for a pint after work. In fact, he was still at work. He was always at work, always on the lookout for a new “legend,” a cover he could use for his game, a thread he could weave into one of his stories. It was part of the con man’s job, and Drewe was a patient sort. If tonight he came across someone whose name or story he could sew into the quilt, all the better.