Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  Besides, Drewe said, he had come up with a new approach to age Myatt’s works: by impregnating the paint with turpentine and linseed oil, then placing the canvas in a pressurized container to force the oil into the paint’s nuclear structure. Under analysis, he told Myatt, the house paint would show up as oil paint.

  Myatt had nearly run through the £12,500 from the Gleizes and was in no position to argue with Drewe. If the professor could create a facsimile of fifty-year-old paint in his lab, all the better, but in the end it wasn’t about materials. It was about attitude. If he approached a painting with the right energy, he usually came up with something decent.

  Myatt hung up. That night, after the children were asleep he returned to the canvas and painted a table in the foreground, cutting the figure off at the knees. The standing nude had become the Footless Woman.

  When the paint was dry he took the canvas down to London in his old Land Rover and met Drewe in the parking lot outside the Spaniard’s Inn, a four-hundred-year-old pub in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He expected Drewe to take one look at it and turn it down, but the professor seemed pleased enough.

  “Great work, John,” he said. “We’ll sell it, no problem at all.”

  Myatt thought the nude was crap, truncated and off-kilter, but he was touched by Drewe’s kindness. They shook hands, and Myatt drove off into the night.

  9

  THE FINE ART OF PROVENANCE

  On a cloudy morning late in March 1990, Myatt stood at his easel ironing out the compositional kinks in his latest piece, a pair of abstract Bissière panels that looked like a flock of birds on a vine. With a clean brush, he softened the paintings’ odd tonal glow. Before they were fully dry, he placed them carefully in the backseat of the Rover and set off for Drewe’s house.

  As he drove south to London he had a feeling of relief and well-being. Over the past few months the enterprise had become a relative breeze. Drewe’s confidence was contagious, and Myatt was now convinced that their chances of getting caught were slim. Even though Drewe had not yet sold the disastrous Footless Woman, he had accepted each subsequent painting with enthusiasm and reported it sold.

  It was becoming clear to Myatt that dealers routinely bought second-rate works not because of some hidden or mysterious aesthetic quality but simply because of the signature on the canvas.

  Every artist could have an occasional bad day, he thought, even masters like Giacometti. Myatt had seen several poorly executed originals during his research, evidence that artists weren’t always firing on all cylinders. And yet those works had sold in the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds. Myatt felt that many of his own copies were as good as, if not better than, the genuine article. There was something unjust in the fact that bad Giacomettis and Bissières were always infinitely more desirable than his perfectly adequate fakes. Although he had painted a number of Giacomettis, Bissières, Chagalls, and Le Corbusiers that he knew were abysmally bad, Drewe had nevertheless sold them at bargain-basement prices. Whatever respect and trust Myatt had felt toward the art world had evaporated. Even the most prestigious dealers could be swayed by a bargain or a dubious certificate of authenticity. He wondered how many fakes he’d seen in galleries and catalogs and museums over his lifetime. He couldn’t trust his own eyes anymore.

  In the first year of the scam he’d had qualms about compromising his moral code. After all, he was a practicing Catholic, a charitable man, and a father. Now, after a track record of successful sales, he was fairly comfortable in his role as a criminal forger. What he was doing didn’t really constitute a crime. If a collector believed one of his pieces was an authentic Braque, why spoil the thrill? And from a broader perspective, surely what he and Drewe were engaged in was small potatoes in the history of fakery.

  When Myatt walked into Drewe’s home with the new Bissières, the professor was standing in front of his dining room table, which was covered with piles of documents. Drewe seemed as gleeful as if he had just won the lottery. Sweeping his hand over the table, he told Myatt that his lunches with the ICA director had paid off.

  “Take a good look,” he said.

  Myatt read in bursts. It was an astonishing collection: handwritten letters from Picasso and Giacometti; old invitations to lunch with Buckminster Fuller; some of Ben Nicholson’s lecture notes; a letter to Nicholson from the architect Sir John Summerson, whose books Myatt had studied in art school.

  Drewe beamed as Myatt picked up one letter after another, then a group of sketches by the French artist Jean Dubuffet and some exhibition catalogs from the late 1940s and the 1950s. There were stacks of gallery ledger pages listing artists with links to the ICA, along with blank ledger pages and gallery stationery of all kinds. There was a steamy note from Dubuffet to a female assistant at the ICA, which Myatt held delicately in his hand, wondering what effect it had had on its recipient.

  Priceless, he thought. An intimate history of London’s modern art scene, the kind of stuff you left to your grandchildren. He was amazed by the size of the haul, and he could see more documents poking out of Drewe’s briefcase. Clearly, the professor had become a frequent visitor to the ICA archives.

  How did someone walk out of a major British institution, five hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, with its entire history in hand?

  Myatt wasn’t sure whether he was appalled by the lack of care or terrified. The full significance of Drewe’s scheme was becoming clear to him. For nearly two years now he had been forging works by the same group of modern artists whose histories Drewe had just extracted from the ICA. With the correspondence between Nicholson’s collectors and the ICA, with the letters and receipts from Erica Brausen (Giacometti’s daring dealer), and all the rest of it, Drewe would have enough material to sweep any potential buyer off his feet.

  “I’m doing the ICA a favor getting all this stuff out of there,” he told Myatt, explaining that the documents had been left to rot in boxes in an unventilated room. Now he had saved them.

  The weak afternoon light was fading. It was time for Myatt to return to Staffordshire and pick the children up from the babysitter. First he and Drewe would have to decide which of the artists to focus on next.

  Myatt wanted a break from Giacometti and Bissière, and once they had gone through the ICA material again they decided to give Ben Nicholson a shot. Myatt knew his work well, having seen dozens of his still lifes and geometrical landscapes. There was a gallery not far from his home that specialized in Nicholson, and he could study the painter’s technique there, at his leisure. He had always thought of Nicholson’s work as clear, bright, and not terribly intricate, so the job would require scant emotional involvement, unlike the Giacomettis. He could probably whip out a Nicholson in an afternoon.

  As Myatt was leaving, Drewe pulled out one of the original ICA documents, a letter from Picasso to the photographer and journalist Lee Miller, an American beauty who had been on the cover of Vogue before becoming a war photographer and chronicler of the surrealists. Drewe put the letter on the table next to a copy of a magazine cover shot of Miller and asked Myatt to draw a quick sketch of her next to Picasso’s signature. With a few bold strokes, Myatt captured Miller’s dark eyebrows and her slightly mournful gaze. He had just upped the value of the letter by several thousand pounds.

  Myatt capped his pen and walked out the door.

  Drewe was spending a lot of time at his mother’s home in Burgess Hill in Sussex. He had always been close to her, and she in turn apparently regarded him as her golden boy who could do no wrong. For the last few months he’d been using her house as his own private office, a mail drop for his various aliases and front companies.

  Today he sat down at an old manual typewriter and began to type out a letter from “John Cockett, director of Cybernetic Systems International Inc.,” to the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the letter, “Cockett” vouched for John Drewe, who had applied the week before for a reader’s ticket to the library’s special collections arc
hive, which contained the records of nearly every major British art gallery from the 1940s and 1950s, including correspondence, catalogs, and sales ledgers.

  “I have known Dr. Drewe since 1974, when he participated in a series of programs on BBC Television,” he wrote. He went on to praise Drewe as a physicist “who has undertaken some outstanding experimental research in electromagnetism.”

  Cockett claimed to have served as a character reference for Drewe once before, when Drewe asked to examine some private documents relating to Nicolas de Staël. “I understand that the correspondence is of great interest to art historians because it gives an insight into the artist’s problems during the years immediately before his suicide.” Here Drewe was displaying his expertise in the con man’s traditional diversionary tactic of changing the subject and deflecting attention from the original question.

  Finally, and most conclusively, Cockett called Drewe “a man of integrity and ability who will show the appropriate consideration when handling your valuable material.”

  Drewe posted the letter to the V&A and waited for his reader’s ticket.

  Then he got in touch with the Tate. An idea had begun to take shape, one that would turn his scheme into an art fraud on a much grander scale, and the Tate was key. If at that moment Drewe had thought about the history of the venerable museum, he would have smiled. The irony was not lost on him that the Tate sat on the site of what had once been one of Europe’s grimmest prisons, Millbank Penitentiary, a gloomy Dickensian cesspit with a three-mile-long maze of passages. The convicts had been forced to serve their sentences making shoes and mailbags in silence. If Drewe had lived in the nineteenth century, he might well have ended up there. The building was closed in 1890 and razed in 1892. A few years later an industrialist named Henry Tate, who had made his fortune in sugar cubes, funded the impressive piece of architecture that opened in 1897 to house his collection of British art, which he had donated to the government.

  Over the years the museum became home to some of the country’s best-known artworks, including Henry Turner’s luminous Golden Bough; William Blake’s portrait of Isaac Newton; canine masterpieces such as Hogarth’s Self-Portrait with Dog and Gainsborough’s Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy; and Stanley Spencer’s weird and wonderful The Resurrection, Cookham, a tableau mort showing a village of dead Englishmen squinting into the sunlight as they emerge from their graves. By the time the Tate began to add daring contemporary works by twentieth-century iconoclasts such as Duchamp and Francis Bacon, it was one of the world’s most famous art institutions.

  For the past few months Drewe had been masquerading as a rich scientist with a large collection of modern art, a front that was now well documented in Sotheby’s ICA benefit auction catalog, whose acknowledgment page thanked Drewe’s company, Norseland, for its “generous donation” of a Giacometti and a Le Corbusier. He had also begun his campaign of wining and dining the Tate’s senior staff, many of whom had been his guests at Claridge’s, where Drewe was a regular and was treated like royalty. Sometimes he came in early and sat alone, surrounded by half a dozen waiters, a sommelier, and a maître d’. From an adjacent table one might have thought he was a cultural anthropologist doing fieldwork on the aristocracy, a kind of Lévi-Strauss of the Limoges set.

  Drewe believed that by now Sarah Fox-Pitt in particular had come to see him as an ally. At every opportunity he’d appealed to her enthusiasm for augmenting the Tate archives. He’d offered himself up as a middleman who could connect the Tate with important documentary records. He’d said he had evidence as to the whereabouts of some intriguing wayward papers, and he’d shown Fox-Pitt a handwritten letter purportedly from Bill McAlister, who had since left the ICA. The letter, which Drewe had forged, described the location of a rich cache of art-related archives that had been moved to New York. Drewe proposed to retrieve them. In addition, he’d hinted at possible donations and talked compellingly about his project of putting together a computer database that would chronicle the history of contemporary British art.

  Fox-Pitt had done her part to sustain the relationship with Drewe, calling him at home and inviting him to the Tate to discuss future plans. Throughout this courtship dance, despite her vaunted powers of observation, Drewe managed to impress his way into the upper echelons at the Tate. Evidently Drewe could spot psychic vulnerability much better than Fox-Pitt could spot a poseur, and he had gradually worn down her caution. He knew just the right moment to weave a little fact into the fiction, whether it was the name of a recent acquaintance such as Jane Drew or the mention of his company in the ICA catalog. Now it was time to make his move.

  The two Bissières Myatt had dropped off the day before seemed perfect for the Tate: lively, colorful, pleasing to the eye. Drewe could easily whip up a credible provenance with the material he already had. He called the Tate and made the offer, and within days the paintings had been delivered to the museum.

  Drewe called Myatt with the good news that the gatekeepers of the temple on the Thames were arranging a reception in their honor. He said he’d made a substantial donation to the Tate and that director Nicholas Serota and other top staffers would be in attendance. He emphasized the importance of the reception, which would give him the credibility he needed to gain access to the museum’s research room. He wanted his personal art historian there to cover him in case a Tate official asked a difficult question.

  “Put your best suit on,” he said. “This is going to be the start of a lovely relationship.”

  Myatt cringed. Surely he would stumble. Never in a million years would he be able to field queries from the Tate’s exalted experts. His botched answers would expose him for what he had allowed himself to become—a fake.

  Drewe explained his plan: Once inside the archives he would alter the records and seed them with his own alternate history, a “reconstructed” chronicle that would include the names of real and invented collectors and would revolve around the works he had commissioned from Myatt.

  The painter was dubious and apprehensive. How could Drewe possibly get away with it? How would he get past security?

  “Don’t worry, John,” said Drewe. “Archives are on the lookout for people taking material out, not for people putting it in.”

  Myatt needn’t have feared being cross-examined at the reception. No one in the room was aware of his discomfort. He sipped his tea in silence, and looked at the people seated around the grand oak table. Myatt had nothing to offer them. He was sitting among some of the most influential members of the art world, sophisticated and intelligent, and they had enough to talk about with Drewe, who seemed as excited about the potentials of this partnership with the Tate as they did. All eyes were on Drewe—until the moment when the two conservators came in with the Bissière panels. Myatt nearly spilled his tea.

  Had he known that Drewe intended to donate these two pieces, he would at least have used authentic French paint from the 1950s. Technically they were quite good, he thought, but he had done them on fiber-board, an artificial wood made of sawdust, with the usual everyday house paint. The two panels of Spring Woodland, purportedly painted some forty years earlier, looked fresh, bright, and brand new. Myatt knew that any respectable art institution, and certainly the Tate, would inspect them closely before officially taking them into its collection. He gripped his chair, imagining that he could detect the faint smell of the varnish Drewe had sprayed on them. He looked over at the professor. Drewe seemed oblivious.

  Once the reception was over the paintings were carried down to the conservation department. Myatt was sure that if the conservators so much as touched the canvas with a fine brush, the paint would give way and the game would be up.

  As the Tate brass escorted Drewe and Myatt downstairs to the gallery, one of the curators pointed at a wall. “This is where we’ll hang these two wonderful pieces,” he said.

  Placing a work at the Tate was a remarkable achievement for any artist—forger or not—but Myatt could see only one possible end to what had trans
pired. He had survived many low points in his past, but none quite as devastating as this one was shaping up to be. Surely he would land in prison.

  Outside, Myatt dropped his usual deference toward Drewe and exploded. “There’s no way they’re going to look at those panels and think they’re oils from the fifties. You’ve got to get them back!”

  Drewe protested that if he asked for the paintings back, he would suffer a terrible loss of credibility. All the effort he’d put into cultivating the confidence of the Tate’s senior staff would be for naught. By this time Drewe knew quite a bit about the authentication of artworks and should have recognized that Myatt’s fears were well-grounded, but his arrogance and his faith in his phony provenances may have led him to believe that the Tate would never even question whether the Bissières were genuine.

  In any case, he understood that he had to appease Myatt, who seemed close to coming apart. His investment in Myatt was greater than his investment in the Tate, so he assured his partner that he would get the paintings back. In exchange, though, they would have to make a sizable monetary gift of £20,000 to the Tate. Drewe managed to convince Myatt to pay half of it.

  The following day Drewe returned to the Tate to withdraw Spring Woodland. There was a problem with the provenance, he said, questions having to do with the previous owners. The details were vague, but the long and the short of it was that he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with the museum through even the slightest suggestion of impropriety. In place of the Bissière panels, he was prepared to offer a sizable cash donation to the Tate’s archives.

  Drewe was as good as his word. Within days the Tate received a check for £20,000 to help catalog the archives, along with a promise of £500,000 more to come. With this gift Drewe established himself as a respected donor, a citizen above suspicion to whom the doors of the Tate’s archives would always be open. While the two Bissière fakes never found their way into the artist’s canon—Myatt took them home, built a bonfire in his backyard, and burned them—dozens of Myatt’s forgeries would. The history of art and the cherished integrity of one of the world’s great museums were about to be irreparably compromised.