“Okay,” Myatt responded.
He traveled to London to Searle’s house, where he met his wife and four children, ate a beautiful meal, and then took out his brushes. When the portrait was done Searle put the painting up in his dining room and proudly showed it off to his colleagues.
Soon the word was out that Myatt was back in business. He was surprised to hear from one of the prosecutors who had put him away. The man said he wanted a Myatt for himself, so Myatt pulled out his turps again, cleaned his brushes, bought a few tins of paint, and set up his easel. In the full light of day, with the windows open and Bach on the stereo, he finally felt that he was doing good, honest work, and whenever a new commission came in, he went at it with a vengeance.
By September 2002 he had set up his own legitimate business, Genuine Fakes. His first show was a roaring success: He sold all but three of sixty-five paintings, and commissions began to come in from Italy and the Philippines, from the United States and Canada. He was asked to lecture on the business of art fraud, and sat on panels next to art experts and detectives. Inevitably, someone would come up and commission a new piece.
Within a couple of years genuine Myatt fakes were hanging in ski lodges in Aspen, and in Tuscan villas. He ran the business with his new wife, Rosemary, a potter and a member of the church choir. Friends said he would have been lost without her. He must have been doing something right, he thought. He was working at what he loved and living with someone he adored. Visitors noted that he was open and articulate, loved to laugh, and often sounded like an excited boy, speaking in vivid metaphors and lyrical bullet points rather than whole sentences.
When the Giacometti Association asked him to photograph each new fake so that they would have a record of his work, he agreed. He had no plans to go back to Brixton Prison. Clients who asked for Braques and Picassos sometimes requested that he refrain from placing his indelible “Genuine Fakes” inscription on the back of the piece. He refused. Experts had warned him that a client could simply reline one of the canvases and pass it off as an original.
He often thought about the dozens of pictures he’d made for Drewe, the ones that had vanished over the years. He knew that each time they changed hands, the provenance became more solid and detection less likely. Whenever he saw his work in a museum or auction catalog, he kept it to himself. Blowing the whistle wouldn’t benefit anyone, he thought. If he were to reveal the true nature of the work, it could cost an innocent collector a lot of money. Furthermore, he had a personal interest in the continuing existence of his paintings. Once a forgery was discovered, its life was over. The painting disappeared into a kind of artistic limbo, the resting place for all fakes. By his own reckoning, some of the work he’d done for Drewe was quite good, and he didn’t want any of it destroyed. The paintings that had made their way safely into collections and museums were now part of the history of art.
When the media sought Myatt out in Staffordshire, he refined his story. The press portrayed him as a reformed antiestablishment figure, a charming farm boy who had put one over on the hoity-toity set. The story also had a moral, a shout-out to the art world to wake up and look at art for what it was, not for what it was worth. Sometimes Myatt told interviewers that Drewe’s scam was an extended piece of conceptual art, a subversive work that employed as its medium the vagaries of the art market.
Myatt and Rosemary moved to a sixteenth-century farmhouse they restored near Stafford, not far from the run-down house he had inherited from his parents. There were seven acres surrounded by rolling hills and dotted with cows and a Druid mound that the local witches visited on Halloween. Myatt set up his studio in a sunlit stone barn next to the house. He dreamed of a future in which he could retire from the business of genuine forgeries and devote himself to his own genuine Myatts. He had learned a good deal from the artists he’d copied over the years, and he could always knock out an “after,” but he wasn’t sure what his own work looked like. On the rare occasion when he summoned the nerve to face his own stuff, he froze up. He feared that he might not be up to it. Most of all, he feared failure.
In 2004, Myatt got a call from Sky TV asking whether he wanted to host a ten-part series in which he would teach aspiring artists how to paint in the style of the world’s greatest artists. The show was called Mastering the Art, and Myatt did very well by it. He stood affably on a hillside with his easel and taught the basics of forgery, many of them learned from Drewe: how to rub soil onto canvas to replicate a Braque finish, how to use coffee to age a painting a hundred years. In 2009, Sky televised him again, this time in a six-part series, on portraiture in which he paints celebrities in various styles while interviewing them.
Myatt had come a long way. He found it curious that despite all his transgressions, he had been rewarded in the end. He had joined forces with a man sometimes described as fundamentally evil, but in return he had been blessed. He was fifty-nine years old, in love, and enjoying financial success. His works were now selling for up to £50,000. He still recalled Drewe’s moments of kindness and encouragement, and often reminded himself that if he’d never stepped over the line, if he hadn’t met Drewe and gone to prison, he would never have hit pay dirt. It was all a great mystery. In the late afternoon, when he walked his property with his energetic dog Henry, he felt happier and richer than ever.
Crime did pay.
“I know I’ve been very lucky,” he told the London Sunday Times in 2007. “I f***d up but I’ve been given a second chance. And there’s nothing illegal this time. All my paintings are marked as fakes. In fact, I quite like the idea that people can look at my paintings and decide whether they like it or not without all that high-art bollocks. They haven’t got to stand in front of it and say: ‘Oh, it’s a Van Gogh, so we have to like it.’ It gives people a chance to see past all the toffey-nosed, art-critic bullshit. I mean, 40 million quid for a painting! Why can’t these people give the money to the Salvation Army or build a new wing at the local hospital?”
Myatt began receiving increasingly important commissions, particularly from the United States. He loved the Americans. One New Yorker wanted a Picasso so large that Myatt would never be able to get it out of the studio. Six feet by six feet was the limit, he told the Yank.
“That’s okay, John,” said the American breezily. “You make it as big as I want it and you’ll find a way.”
John and Rosemary visit New York often and like to stop in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Myatt had received several commissions to paint knockoffs of Monet’s Morning on the Seine, an image so popular that Walmart had marketed a lithograph version for $174.37. He spent hours in front of the original. He felt as if he were back in London in the old days, walking through the museums and basking in the light of the Turners and the Gainsboroughs and the Constables. He liked to get as close to the Monet as he could without attracting the guard.
One day, with his nose just inches away from the canvas, he noticed several hairs from Monet’s brush stuck on the surface of the painting. Myatt had always made sure that his own work was hair-free, but this Monet follicle seemed to reach out to him. The message was clear: There really was no such thing as a perfect painting. Myatt swore that the next time he found a hair stuck to his canvas, he’d leave well enough alone.
AUTHORS’ NOTE
When we first decided to chronicle John Drewe’s nine-year-long “performance piece”—as it was dubbed by one of his associates—we realized that we would have to rely to some degree on the testimony of convicted criminals and an experienced fabricator. Therefore, we also gathered much of our information from dozens of interviews with the runners, dealers, archivists, researchers, art experts, and police officers who found themselves embroiled in the case. As with any investigation, documents also played a large role in our research. We reviewed thousands of pages of police evidence, testimony, and court transcripts. As part of the narrative, we have included passages of dialogue that are not necessarily direct quotations from interviews with us but a
re recollections of others who were present. The reader should not infer that all the speakers were our direct sources.
The forger John Myatt offered an extraordinary degree of cooperation and spent months with us discussing his decade-long personal and professional relationship with Drewe. We found Myatt to be open, and his memory of events consistent throughout our interviews with him.
We also spoke with John Drewe by telephone. A decade after his conviction, he continues to claim both his innocence and the complicity of the British government—“those lying, conniving bastards”—in the convoluted scheme. “At the end of the day,” he told us, “what we have is a story of many millions of pounds of deceit and murder . . . a political game of cat and mouse. . . . Is it provable? Absolutely.”
Attempts to meet Drewe in person in London, where he promised to show us “stunning” documentation, were met with increasingly convoluted excuses.
We did have the advantage of access to a rich lode of material describing his actions and words throughout his career as the mastermind of the forgery scam. He was a compulsive writer and loved corresponding with members of the art world’s aristocracy, either under his own name or under one of his many aliases. He wrote often to London newspapers, and several of his letters on various topics were printed in the London Times.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There was an understandable reluctance by some to supply information about John Drewe. Thus, we truly appreciate those who did come forward and entrust us with their experiences and time. Drewe’s path through the art world was labyrinthine, with illogical turns and sudden dead ends, and finding our way through it not only took longer than we expected but required many follow-up calls and e-mails over the years. This book would not have been possible without their help, and we are grateful for the many and repeated reality checks.
We are particularly grateful to John Myatt, who greeted every scheduled and nonscheduled interview with enthusiasm, warmth, and openness. His continued cooperation, and the help of his wife, Rosemary, was instrumental to the project.
We also appreciate the help from runners Clive Belman, Paul Redfern, and Andrew Wechsler, who provided detailed accounts of their foreshortened art marketing careers. Each is a natural storyteller.
The art dealers Armand Bartos, Rene Gimpel, Adrian Mibus, and Peter Nahum were essential to our understanding the many characters and provenances Drewe created to sell forgeries. Their passion for art is palpable and infectious, and we appreciate the access they gave us.
Jennifer Booth, former Tate Gallery archivist, was also a tremendous resource, whose discussion of archives and review of parts of the manuscript were invaluable. We also thank Sir Alan Bowness, former director of the Tate Gallery, and Mary Lisa Palmer, director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Association. Palmer spent several days with us poring over the association’s files on the Giacometti forgeries linked to Drewe. She is meticulous, knowledgeable, easy to talk to, and patient. We are also indebted to the association’s assistant director, François Chaussende, and association member Jean-Yves Mock.
This book could not have been written, of course, without the help of the detectives, Dick Ellis, Richard Higgs, Charley Hill, Jonathan Searle, and Miki Volpe. Detectives Searle and Volpe, who were quick to acknowledge the work of the many other detectives and officers assigned to the case but not mentioned in the book, were gracious, generous, and wonderful hosts.
We owe debts to many others. The brief mention by no means reflects our gratitude. We thank Fathers Paul Addison and Bernard Barlow; Jonathan Broido; Terry Carroll; former ICA director Bill McAllister; ICA historian Lyn Cole; investigative reporter David Pallister; John Sperr; and Jane Zagel.
The American sportswriter Walter “Red” Smith once said there is “nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” We thank our family members and friends who made the job less painful. Thanks to our parents, who babysat our daughter while we researched abroad, and to our friends at our writers’ group, whose endless support, encouragement, and comments always kept us on track. The staff at The Penguin Press was incredibly dedicated, and we thank in particular our editor, Jane Fleming, for her insight and confidence. Joy Johannessen read the penultimate draft of the manuscript and gave us outstanding editorial advice.
Above all, we thank Susan Rabiner, our literary agent, friend, and mentor, for her steadfast support throughout this endeavor.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SELECTED ARTICLES AND TRANSCRIPTS
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