“I’ve been waiting for you,” Myatt said.
Searle thought he looked almost relieved to see them.
Myatt’s son came down to see what all the noise was about, and Myatt spoke to him gently. “They’re just doing a survey of the house, dear,” he said. Then he took Searle aside and asked him for a favor.
“The school bus will be here in an hour. Would you mind waiting until the children have left? Carry on with what you’re doing, but I’d rather not speak to you until they’re on the bus.”
Searle shot a look to his partner, Bob Rizzo, a detective constable on the Art Squad.
“We’re mob-handed [too much muscle] on this one,” Rizzo whispered out of earshot, believing that Myatt was not likely to give them any trouble.
Searle agreed and dismissed the other officers. “Go back to Stafford and have a decent breakfast,” he told them.
When Myatt’s daughter came down, everyone went into the kitchen. Myatt made breakfast for the children and tea for the detectives. Searle noticed a sketch of one of the kids on the refrigerator door. It was covered with memos and phone numbers.
“That’s a beautiful drawing,” he said. “Did you do it?”
Myatt nodded.
The man was more than capable of churning out high-quality forgeries, Searle thought. What a waste of talent.
When the school bus arrived, Myatt took the children out and waved good-bye to them. Then he went inside, cadged a cigarette, and watched as the detectives went to work tagging and bagging stacks of drawings, notebooks, and expensive art books. Certain pages had been turned down in the books, and Searle suspected those were the works whose style Drewe had asked Myatt to forge. One rare volume was on Sutherland’s work for the Coventry Cathedral tapestry, and Searle recalled the sketches he’d seen in Goudsmid’s bags. When he opened a book on Giacometti, a piece of paper fell out. On it, someone had been practicing the artist’s signature.
There were dozens of artworks around the house, including a Giacometti of a man and a tree in a grand arbor and several Russian-style ink sketches. In a briefcase Searle found a marginally exculpatory letter that Myatt had written to Drewe saying he wanted out.
“What else have you got?” he asked Myatt.
“You didn’t check the attic,” Myatt answered.
The detectives continued their search, and by the time they were done they had collected some fifty books, sketches, and letters.
Searle asked Myatt if he wanted to call a solicitor. Myatt declined. When Searle told him that he was suspected of conspiring to forge works of art, Myatt shrugged.
“Well, that’s it then.”
They put him in the back of a squad car and drove him ten miles to the Stafford station house, where Searle and Rizzo sat him down and asked him how he had met Drewe. Myatt told them about the ad in Private Eye.
“I’m not in touch with Professor Drewe anymore,” he said. “He’s dangerous and volatile.”
Myatt kept referring to Drewe as “professor,” and Searle assured him that he was not. Drewe’s education was limited to an undistinguished stint in grammar school.
Myatt was surprised. He had always assumed that there was at least a kernel of truth in Drewe’s account of himself as a physicist.
Searle said he wanted Myatt back tomorrow but for now the interview was over.
Riding home in the police car, Myatt wished he could float off like the angel in Corot’s Hagar in the Wilderness. As he waited for the children to return in the school bus, his heart was pumping and he felt sick to his stomach. That evening he didn’t say a word to them about what had happened. His world had just been turned upside down, and he thought he had nowhere to go. Then he remembered an old family friend who was a retired policeman. They’d sung in the church choir together and were friendly. Myatt rang him up, told him everything, and asked for his advice.
There was nothing to do but cooperate, the old cop said. Drewe would never admit his guilt, and would blame Myatt for everything. “My advice to you is not to dig yourself into a hole.”
Myatt was relieved. Conceivably he could have tried to concoct an elaborate fabrication, but that probably wasn’t going to work. When he returned to the station a few days later, he was more than ready to talk.
Myatt told Searle everything he knew about the operation, including his use of house paint, a confession that shocked the detective but was later corroborated by a forensic analysis identifying a resin not available at the time the paintings supposedly had been made. Myatt said that most of the money he’d earned from Drewe in commissions had been spent—among other things, on covering half of Drewe’s £20,000 donation to the Tate—but that he would turn over the £18,000 he had left.
After the initial interviews Myatt began a series of regular trips to the city to meet Searle at the Belgravia Police Station, which had jurisdiction over the part of town where the best galleries were located. The walls outside the basement interview room had been freshly painted, and dozens of Myatt’s forgeries, wrapped in heavy polyethylene, were lined up in the corridors, all tracked down by police through the help of auction houses and dealers. It seemed to Myatt that although the police had already confiscated scores of pieces, they’d missed the best stuff. The really good work was still out there in penthouses and villas. Drewe had often boasted that he’d placed premium Myatts with collectors in New York and Paris, in Tokyo, Italy, and Bahrain.
As Searle brought a succession of Myatt’s works into the interview room, he spoke slowly and precisely, for the record.
“Now we are unwrapping exhibit number BsG 192. Did you paint this?”
“I did.”
“And do you recognize this painting over here?”
“I do.”
And so on down memory lane, to the next canvas and the next, as Myatt recalled when and where he’d painted each one, occasionally noting how beautifully Drewe had framed them. The professor had never been artistically inclined, but he had an eye for presentation.
The Belgravia officers referred to the collection as “the Black Museum.” They would come down to the subterranean gallery with raised eyebrows and scoff at the obscene prices that the “Sutherlands,” “Dubuffets,” and “Braques” might have fetched if they hadn’t been pulled in. They nicknamed the Dubuffets “the BSE cows,” after bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease.
Searle took on the roles of inquisitor, aesthetic gendarme, therapist, and moral arbiter. He was convinced that Myatt was no career criminal and that he’d stumbled off the path despite his better self. Before long the two men developed a rapport and began exchanging notes on the quality of the forgeries.
“You were certainly having a good day when you did this one,” Searle said, when he came across a particularly good fake. If a work was shoddy or below par, he didn’t hesitate to needle Myatt: “Don’t tell me you painted this one.”
In the basement of the station house, Searle came to see that Myatt was technically brilliant and an excellent draftsman. He was also a skilled forger able to fake a brushstroke or a line without losing the vivacity of the original. He understood the importance of loose ends and the power of an unfinished work. Amateur forgers and restorers, in their quest for a perfect canvas invulnerable to criticism, tended to overwork a painting and lose the feel of the artist. Myatt, by contrast, seemed to work without a net and liked to leave his paintings wide open.
There were times when Searle brought in a really good piece and it took Myatt a minute or two to recognize it. Some pieces were obvious duds; others were better than he remembered them. Searle worked him so hard that by the end of the day Myatt felt as if he were back on the M6 with his shovel and pick.
30
ALADDIN’S CAVE
Searle’s office had become a repository of letters, memos, receipts, and catalogs piled one on top of another. One particular clue showed up on document after document and appeared to be a leitmotif for Drewe’s operation: “For Private Research Only/T
ate Gallery Archive.” To Searle this official stamp was proof that the documents had been stolen from the Tate archives. He called Jennifer Booth to tell her he was bringing over the suspect material.
When he arrived, she immediately took issue with his thesis. “I think your approach is wrong. You have to shift your focus. Drewe isn’t taking archives out. He’s putting them in.”
Booth said the documents were forged. She told Searle about the discrepancies she’d discovered in the records and showed him the Hanover photo albums, which documented the gallery’s acquisitions over the years. These had never been allowed out of the main reading room. Searle opened one of the albums and found beneath each photograph a neatly typed label and reference number. He recognized the paper and format from the documents in Goudsmid’s bags. Many of the paintings were familiar too, particularly two Bissières, Composition 1949 and Composition 1958. Photographs of these pieces, along with handwritten memos that referred to them, were also in Goudsmid’s bags.
Booth opened the Hanover sales ledgers to the two Bissières; the provenances were identical to the ones in the photo albums. She brought out the Hanover daybook and opened it to the date of the supposed sale of Composition 1958. There was no mention of the piece. She moved her finger down the page to the place where Composition 1949 would have been logged. There was an entry, but it was for a work entitled La Fenêtre.
“The books don’t match,” she said.
Searle suddenly realized that the dozens of cryptic handwritten notes he had found in Goudsmid’s bags were memos Drewe had written to himself, a kind of aide-mémoire. He hurried back to the Yard and checked his Bissière section.
“Re-write Bissieres,” one of these scribbled memos read. “Investigate sale of G133/3 La Fenêtre—it should be reference G133/8 in Sales Ledger List.”
For all intents and purposes, Drewe had become an accomplished archivist. For nearly ten years he had spent countless hours studying the dullest aspects of the art business. He had researched archival methods until he could identify and exploit gaps in the firewall designed to protect the art market’s records and reputation. He had gone to infinite trouble to place his fakes next to established masterpieces so as to make them appear to be a part of art history.
Myatt was right about Drewe: The money was a side benefit. Drewe craved admiration and got it by passing himself off as a professor and physicist. When this proved insufficient, he managed to insert himself and his false creations into the heart of the art world. In doing so he was about to make a name for himself as one of the twentieth century’s greatest fakers of art.
As Searle well knew, the art of forgery is as old as civilization. Priests in ancient Babylonia, in order to continue receiving their privileges and revenues, are believed to have faked a cuneiform script to make their temple appear older than it was. “This is not a lie,” one of the forger-priests wrote on the stone tablet. “It is indeed the truth. . . . He who will damage this document let Enki [the god of water] fill up his canals with slime.”26
The motivations behind forgery are as varied as the types of forgeries that have been perpetrated over the centuries, but the most common fuel has always been greed. When demand exceeds supply, the forger is never far behind. In ancient Rome, when classical Greek sculpture became a status symbol and the supply of genuine pieces was exhausted, Roman craftsmen quickly filled the void. Today, experts believe that 90 percent of “original” Greek statuary was made by Romans. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries clandestine workshops operating across Europe produced paintings in the style of such masters as Michelangelo, Titian, and Ribera, and to this day these forgeries continue to surface. Some may never be properly identified. Forgery was so widespread that some of the masters became forgers themselves. The young Michelangelo painted a work in the style of his master Domenico Ghirlandaio and passed it off as an original after doctoring the panel with smoke to make it look older. He subsequently sculpted a sleeping cupid and sold it off as an antiquity. In the nineteenthcentury, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot knowingly signed copies made by others in his name. It is a long-standing French joke that of the twenty-five hundred paintings Corot produced in his lifetime, eight thousand can be found in America.27
Searle had seen enough fakes to know that it wasn’t always the technical faux pas that gave forgers away. Just as often they left behind an unmistakable cultural footprint. A Madonna of the Veil purportedly by the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli was “discovered” in the 1920s and sold without provenance for $25,000. A celebrated find at the time, the piece was declared fake more than fifteen years later, after an art historian noticed that the Madonna looked more like a 1920s film star than a Renaissance beauty. Experts who examined the “Silent-Movie Madonna” found, among other inconsistencies, that the figure’s robe had been painted with a blue pigment not developed until the eighteenth century.28 At a more prosaic level, holes on the surface that looked like they had been caused by an infestation of woodworms had in fact been drilled in.
The cultural critic Walter Benjamin asserted that fakes lack the special aura an original artwork invariably carries, that the work’s essence, its personal contact with a particular time and space, can never be replicated. Those who believe in the eventual triumph of good over evil posit that most fakes are eventually exposed. Others are more skeptical. History supports the second group.
The art market is a potential minefield. With so many fakes being produced, even the most experienced dealer can make a mistake. Art historian Bernard Berenson, who consulted for major U.S. museums and collectors and established the market for “old masters,” once warned that the best of experts could be fooled. “Let him not imagine that a practical acquaintance with last year’s forgeries will prevent him falling victim to this year’s crop,” he wrote. Berenson cautioned dealers and experts not to be swayed by provenance, which he said could be forged more easily than the work itself. His words, predating Drewe’s scam by some eighty years, now seem prophetic: “[There is nothing] to prevent a picture being painted or a marble carved to correspond to a description in a perfectly authentic document. Nothing but a fine sense of quality and a practiced judgment can avail against the forger’s skill.”29
It is impossible to calculate the exact number of forgeries circulating at any given time, but the guardians of high art have estimated that anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the works on the market are either fakes or genuinely old works that have been doctored to fit a more valuable style or artist. Thomas Hoving said that in his eighteen years at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he examined some fifty thousand works, “forty percent were either phonies or so hypocritically restored or misattributed that they were just the same as forgeries.” Italy’s Art Carabinieri, whose job it is to police the country’s cultural heritage, claimed to have seized more than sixty thousand fakes during the 1990s. And yet, despite a growing awareness of the prevalence of forgeries and an array of sophisticated technology using infrared and ultraviolet light, the most rigorous scholars and prestigious institutions can still be taken in.
The twentieth century witnessed a blossoming of inventive forgery. Han Van Meegeren was a failed artist who decided to prove his worth by painting works in the style of great artists of the past, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, he produced some ten paintings that were accepted as genuine Vermeers and “great discoveries.” Van Meegeren earned millions for his forgeries, many of which had religious themes, and fooled the leading experts, museum directors, and collectors of the day. He used badger-hair brushes so that not a single modern bristle would ever be found embedded in the paint of his forgeries. He ground his pigments in oil of lilac and made a unique resin mixture that gave the paint an enamel-like surface, and he baked the canvas in the oven for two hours to harden the paint. Van Meegeren’s most notorious work was Christ at Emmaus, which the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredi
us acclaimed as Vermeer’s greatest achievement.
“It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio!” Bredius wrote. “And what a picture! . . . we have here a—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, . . . quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.”30
No one can say how long these forgeries would have remained in museums and prominent collections if one of the works hadn’t ended up in the possession of Nazi Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. After the war the work was traced back to its dealer, van Meegeren, and he was charged with collaboration for selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy. He confessed to serial forgery, a much less serious offense, but no one would believe him. To prove it he painted a brand new fake in prison while awaiting trial. After the work was examined by a scientific commission, van Meegeren’s confession was accepted.
“Yesterday, this picture was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he wrote before serving a one-year sentence. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”
It may be said that the art world holds no fury like the expert duped. While it seems clear that van Meegeren’s success owed much to his talent, his brushwork and compositions are now criticized for their coarseness and shapelessness. Philosopher Denis Dutton has noted that a face in one of van Meegeren’s “masterpieces” resembles Greta Garbo’s.
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