Provenance

by Laney Salisbury

  10

  FULL SPEED AHEAD

  John Drewe is the most amazing man,” said Sarah Fox-Pitt. “Did you know his father invented the atom bomb?”

  Jennifer Booth thought it best to stifle her laughter. Fox-Pitt had been moved up to the Acquisitions Department after more than a decade as head of the Tate archives, and she was Booth’s senior, but she was much too impressed by Drewe, in Booth’s opinion. Booth had recently become the new head of the archives, and the more she learned about the professor, the warier she became of him. She knew he had donated a pair of Bissières to the Tate, and that the conservators had almost immediately become suspicious of them. Before they could ask him for a certificate of authenticity from the artist’s estate, he had withdrawn them. In their stead, he had donated £20,000 to the archives, and Fox-Pitt had just told her that he’d promised half a million more.

  After Fox-Pitt left her office, Booth looked up Drewe’s application to visit the archives and discovered that he had been in a few times since his donation but had never filled out a formal application. The prerequisite apparently had been waived.

  Curious, she thought.

  Several days later, Drewe came in again, checked his coat and bag at security, and walked into the research room with his legal pad and a pencil. Booth was on duty at the invigilator’s desk, where all visitors were screened, and she asked him to fill out an application and provide a summary of the research he was planning to do. It was standard procedure, she said. The Tate’s research room could only accommodate six people at a time, and it was generally restricted to scholars and postgraduate students who were vetted carefully.

  On the application form Drewe said he was chairman of Norseland Industries and research director for a laboratory that developed marine systems. He was investigating the “collaboration between Hanover Gallery, London, and the ICA, particularly 1951-7” and might occasionally bring in two other researchers to help him.

  Booth decided not to ask him for references. It seemed inappropriate at this juncture, now that his check had been banked. She assumed that the notoriously vigilant Fox-Pitt had checked him out thoroughly before giving him her enthusiastic endorsement, and she didn’t want to jeopardize any future donation.

  Drewe was very polite when he asked Booth if she wouldn’t mind bringing out one of the Hanover’s photograph albums, a pictorial record of the works that had passed through the gallery during its twenty-five years of operation. One of its most important artists was Giacometti.

  Drewe sat at the dining room table in his house cutting and pasting. He had taken a photograph of Myatt’s Footless Woman and titled it Standing Nude, 1954. He kept his titles as generic as possible, as many of the modern masters had done in the forties and fifties. From his stash of documents, he chose an old gallery receipt recording the sale of a genuine Giacometti nude, then fashioned a new one on 1950s-era paper, indicating that the work had been sold to its current owner, a private collector named Peter Harris, in 1957. To reinforce the illusion, he forged additional pieces of provenance and added the names of other collectors and acquaintances, both imaginary and real, to the gallery ledger pages. As the coup de grâce, he took original 1950s gallery exhibition catalogs—sparsely illustrated black-and-white booklets, for the most part—scanned them into a computer, and inserted photographs of the Footless Woman and other Myatt forgeries.

  He was tidy and methodical, lining up ledgers, catalogs, scribbled notes he’d found on the backs of documents—whatever best suited his purposes—to turn out brand-new provenances. He cut, pasted, and photocopied until he had produced impeccable new documents. When he couldn’t find an appropriate letter or receipt, he forged one using one of his old typewriters, then pasted in a signature he’d culled from his ICA letters from dealers and collectors. He was quickly becoming a master collagist.

  On his next visit to the Tate research room, he took a seat in the back. It was a narrow space, not an ideal setup from a security standpoint, because the invigilator’s view was often blocked by the researcher sitting in front. Now and then Drewe looked up from his work to scan the room, which was often left unattended for a few minutes while the invigilator went into the stacks to pull out a book or a document. At an opportune moment, Drewe flipped through his notepad and pulled out a sheet of heavy black paper, the kind used in old-fashioned photograph albums. He inserted the page, with its two binder holes, into one of the Hanover albums, which now contained a photograph of Giacometti’s Standing Nude, 1954, an awkward figure with its feet hidden by a table in the foreground.

  Drewe returned the album to the front desk, thanked the invigilator, and left.

  For five or six hours a day, Myatt immersed himself completely in his work. Over the months since the reception, the Sugnall farmhouse had become a factory.

  Finally Myatt could paint in broad daylight. The old panic that had returned after the Tate reception and driven him to consign Spring Woodland to the flames was a thing of the past again. Because Drewe was manufacturing solid provenances for his paintings, he could relax. He no longer worried about producing the “perfect” forgery, because he realized that when the documentation was good enough, dealers were willing to overlook aesthetic flaws. If the provenance could be verified at the Tate, the V&A, or the British Council archives, all the better.

  He was now forging works primarily in the style of Braque, Chagall, Nicholson, and Dubuffet, and each morning he would sit up in bed and say to himself, “Today is a Chagall day” or “Today is Braque day.” Each artist’s style presented its own technical challenge, but Myatt was painting with a clarity he’d rarely enjoyed since his music career collapsed, wrapping up Chagalls in five days and Nicholsons in a matter of hours.

  With his share of the profits, and for the first time in a decade, he could finally afford the small luxuries of life. Instead of the few hundred pounds a painting he got from Drewe when they started out, he was now earning a substantial commission. Drewe was selling the paintings as fast as Myatt could produce them, and there were new shoes for the kids, trips to the cinema, and the occasional nanny.

  Ironically, even though he was up to no good, he felt less like the town pariah and more like a respected member of the community. His family wasn’t starving, and life was good. With his extra money, he began to donate to charity again. He even convinced a hesitant Drewe to set up an art program for students and fund the revival of mystery plays—medieval dramas based on stories from the Bible—at the Lichfield Cathedral. It would be great publicity for Norseland, he told Drewe. The professor agreed to add his donation to Myatt’s next commission.

  With Drewe as his “dealer” and principal cheerleader, Myatt felt like an artist again, “a man of importance.” He felt the same intensity, the same joy in painting he had experienced as a young artist. More important, he was making a living at it, and that made all the difference.

  To match his phony provenances, Drewe was now showing Myatt what to fake. He sent art books, pieces of canvas of the appropriate size and age, and endpapers from old volumes. There was never a note or a return address. Myatt felt a thrill each time a package arrived from Drewe, as if he were James Bond receiving instructions from M.

  One afternoon in October 1991 he drove down to Golders Green with his latest work, a Le Corbusier of a voluptuous nude standing with her hands clasped behind her head.

  “That’s a lovely restoration,” said Drewe, who had taken to using the term to describe Myatt’s forgeries. Today it seemed particularly apt, because Myatt had painted the Le Corbusier over what had once been a nice old canvas of a river landscape. His father had bought the piece at a yard sale in the 1940s, but it had languished in the attic ever since. The canvas was from Le Corbusier’s time, so Myatt scraped off the river view and replaced it with his own composition. It was a common forger’s trick.

  Drewe invited Myatt to dine at the Spaniard’s Inn, the Hampstead pub where they’d met when Myatt delivered the Footless Woman. There was busine
ss to attend to, Drewe said. After they sat down he handed Myatt an envelope containing several thousand pounds in cash.

  Myatt had never once questioned him about what had sold or how much money had come in. He trusted Drewe and was grateful to him. Their relationship had become a full partnership, with Myatt suggesting which galleries Drewe should approach and helping him decide which fakes best complemented the provenances he had so thoughtfully taken off the ICA’s hands. For his part, the professor encouraged Myatt to keep a record of their transactions. “Put your business plans in writing and mail them to me,” he said. It would be years before Myatt fully understood why Drewe was so keen to leave a paper trail.

  Drewe finished his drink and pulled out a Sotheby’s catalog for the first part of a two-part auction of impressionist and modern works scheduled for early December 1991. Inside was a full-color reproduction of Myatt’s hard-fought Giacometti. The Footless Woman was now titled Standing Nude, 1954, and was listed next to three other Giacomettis scheduled for auction later that year. Despite the awkward table hiding the botched feet, the piece was valued at £180,000 to £250,000.

  Myatt noted that the other Giacomettis in the catalog were not his, and very likely authentic. It all felt a little unreal: Officially, his work had now been deemed as good as the master’s, and his talent was finally getting its due.

  “People were leaping up and down buying my works,” he recalled. “I was secretly pleased that my little babies were out there.”

  The nude still nagged him, especially the egregious amputation of her legs below the knee. He promised himself that his next Giacometti would be closer to the real thing. That night, back at home, he dove into his art books and began flipping through the pages for inspiration.

  A few days later Myatt had a very good new Giacometti. He’d worked hard and stayed focused and come close to capturing the master’s essence. Nevertheless, he stopped before he was quite done. It was best to leave a work unfinished and a few problems unresolved. There was no such thing as a perfect painting. Perfection gave you away every time.

  Myatt left the canvas on the easel and went to bed. In the morning he made himself a strong cup of coffee and took it into the living room. He glanced at the new standing nude and felt a rush of pleasure and relief.

  “Not bad,” he thought.

  On a scale of one to ten, he had produced only a handful of sevens and perhaps a single eight. This nude, without a doubt, was a ten—his finest achievement. Ironically, it would also be his undoing.

  Paul Redfern, a burly freelance writer with a full woodsman’s beard, sat on his stool at the Lamb, a Bloomsbury bar, waiting for his friend Peter Harris, who was going to introduce him to a Professor Drewe, head of a company called Norseland Industries.

  When Drewe and Harris arrived, and they were all settled with their drinks, the professor told the writer that Norseland wanted a prospectus on the cultural activities it was sponsoring, which included theater events, an arts center, and an exchange program between Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology and an art school in Leningrad. Redfern listened as Drewe told him about Norseland’s £20,000 donation to the Tate archives and its intention to raise a further £500,000. Drewe wanted the prospectus sent to the auction houses so that they could see the full extent of the company’s commitment to the arts. Norseland was about to place three works on the block to help fund its programs, and Drewe was hoping that the auction houses would lower their standard commission.

  Would Redfern be interested in representing Norseland? In exchange for writing the prospectus and setting up appointments with the auctioneers, he would receive a commission on whatever sold.

  Redfern agreed and went to work. He made contact with Christie’s and Sotheby’s and invited their representatives to see the three works at Norseland’s office in the upscale neighborhood around Bedford Square, where Drewe had rented a small, well-appointed space with a nice view, hired a secretary, supplied vases of fresh flowers, and hung half a dozen paintings on the walls.

  Redfern walked the auctioneers through the office and gave them copies of transparencies and some of the provenance documents Drewe had assembled.

  A few weeks later the Sotheby’s catalog for Part 2 of its December 1991 auction included two Nicholson still lifes, dated 1946 and 1955, and a Le Corbusier entitled Femme Nue. All three were being offered “on behalf of the Lichfield Mystery Plays.” All three sold.

  Meanwhile, Danny Berger was also doing very well for himself. He had made several sales abroad through a runner and art consultant named Stuart Berkeley, who had clients in Canada, New York, and Japan. When Berger gave the ponytailed runner a photograph of a Giacometti titled Portrait of a Woman, depicting the upper torso and face of the artist’s wife, Annette, Berkeley quickly reported a nibble from a private New York dealer named Sheila Maskell.

  Maskell had shown a photograph of the Giacometti to Dominic Taglialatella, a dealer with Avanti Galleries on Madison Avenue. She told him the painting was owned by a John Catch, who was selling it through a group of “very substantial” Londoners. The price was $325,000. Taglialatella had a very good client in Sweden who would probably be interested, and a few days later he and Maskell were on a plane to London to see the work.

  On Drewe’s instructions, Berger had rented a small warehouse opposite the Golders Green tube station, a slightly more impressive showcase than Berger’s garage. Here Drewe had hung Portrait of a Woman, along with a handful of other works that looked as if they had been undisturbed for years. Now, as Maskell, Berkeley, and Berger looked on, Taglialatella eyed the portrait and blew some dust off the canvas. They all stood to gain thousands of pounds in commissions, and when Taglialatella agreed to the price, everyone shook hands.

  As Taglialatella flew to Sweden to deliver the painting to his client, the wire transfer went into Maskell’s account without a hitch, and the following day Berkeley and Berger got their cut. Each was unaware they had just handled a fake, and the lion’s share of the money went to Drewe via Norseland.

  The scam had taken on a life of its own.

  11

  AFTER GIACOMETTI

  On a narrow cobblestone alley in the Latin Quarter of Paris, in one of three sixteenth-century courtyards known collectively as the Cour de Rohan, Mary Lisa Palmer managed the affairs of the Giacometti Association from an office on the top floor of an old three-story building. To the American eye the secluded Cour was so quintessentially Parisian that it was used as a backdrop for Vincente Minnelli’s Hollywood musical Gigi. In the twenties, the photographer Eugène Atget snapped a series of iconic pictures of the courtyard with an enormous wooden bellows camera. The writer Georges Bataille threw parties here for Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, and the artists Balthus (a good friend of Giacometti’s) and David Hockney set up their easels in the Cour.

  Nothing had changed much in the intervening years. Sprigs of rosemary still fought their way up through the cobblestones to the light, and wild grapevines climbed the brick facades. What attracted Palmer most about the courtyard was its solitude. Palmer, the longtime director of the association and personal assistant to Giacometti’s widow, Annette, appreciated the short distance that separated her from the bustle and flow of the city. Here she could focus on Alberto Giacometti’s legacy and defend it from the vultures and forgers that had hovered since his death.

  On this November morning Palmer was leafing through the latest Sotheby’s catalog when she spotted something unusual. The auction house routinely sent her its glossy publications with the understanding that if she or Annette came across a dubious Giacometti, Sotheby’s would hear about it.

  The new catalog heralded an upcoming auction of impressionist and modern pieces featuring four works by the Swiss artist: a sculpture of a woman, a bust of the artist’s brother Diego, a portrait of one of Giacometti’s mistresses, and a fourth piece, lot number 48, a painting entitled Standing Nude.

  The painting caught Palmer’s eye. It was a phony
.

  Underneath the photograph of Standing Nude was a thumbnail sketch of the provenance: It had purportedly been painted in 1954 and bought by Peter Watson, a cofounder of the ICA. Watson, in turn, had sold it to the Hanover Gallery, which had then sold it to the Obelisk Gallery. Finally, in 1957, it had been bought by Peter Harris, a private collector. The piece was estimated at £180,000 to £250,000.

  The provenance seemed impressive enough. The Hanover had been a prestigious gallery until it closed down, and Watson had been a wealthy collector and benefactor until he mysteriously drowned in his bathtub in 1956. It was rumored that he was murdered by a rich American lover, Norman Fowler, who was also found dead in a bathtub, some fourteen years later.

  Despite the Standing Nude’s persuasive documentation, Palmer remained skeptical. When she showed the catalog to Annette Giacometti, with whom she had worked for nearly two decades, Annette was struck by the odd-looking table in the foreground, which sliced the nude’s lower legs off and shattered the composition. Whoever painted the picture, she thought, had probably bungled the feet, then tried to cover up the mess with a piece of furniture.

  Palmer called Sotheby’s, told them she had problems with the piece, and asked for copies of the provenance documents. Several days later she received a package from the auction house that included a receipt from the Hanover Gallery and another from the lesser known Obelisk Gallery, which had supposedly sold the work to Peter Harris for £150.

  Palmer wasn’t sure what to make of it all, but her instinct told her that the piece was wrong, and her experience had taught her that instinct was her greatest ally. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s former director Thomas Hoving, a notable fake-buster, would have agreed. He once described “that vague tug at the brain telling you that something is not quite right,” a feeling often ignored by art dealers, collectors, and curators, particularly when it failed to harmonize with a deal.