Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [102]
Hoaxes tend to beget hoaxes. De Hory became a celebrity and was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving, who was later jailed for writing a wholly imaginary “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes. The de Hory story went on to become the basis for Orson Welles’s 1975 pseudodocumentary F for Fake. Welles, of course, had famously terrified the nation in 1938 with a fake radio newscast about a Martian attack on New Jersey.
The art restorer Tom Keating became a national figure in Britain and briefly hosted his own television series after confessing in 1976 to forging more than two thousand works in the style of a hundred artists. Keating, who had begun his career as an angry young painter, was determined to honor artists who had died in poverty after being exploited by unscrupulous dealers. His goal was to undermine the system. He planted clues in his forgeries for the “experts” to find. He would sprinkle dust from a vacuum cleaner and flick spoonfuls of Nescafé in the air to simulate foxing, the greenish gray or brown mildew stains that appear on old paper. Sometimes he hid the words “This is a fake” or “Ever been had?” in lead white beneath a painting. Knowing that a personal touch excited dealers, he would scribble inscriptions on the back of his work.
“Why is it that the dealers always seem to set so much store by this kind of thing, when the paper I did it on was probably made in England in 1940 or 1950, is a mystery to me,” Keating wrote in his autobiography, The Fake’s Progress. “I suppose the short answer is that it takes a brave man to destroy a fake, particularly if he is in the business of buying and selling pictures.” After his death, one of Keating’s original works sold for £274,000.
Detective Sergeant Searle believed that forgers like Keating and Myatt were “a healthy component to the art system,” because they forced dealers and historians to look more closely at the works they chose to sanction—and sell—as art. Counterfeiters were necessary irritants, he thought, like political radicals. He himself had participated in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Grosvenor Square in the sixties, but had subsequently spent a good deal of time going after elements of the extreme left. He now believed that those “rowdies” had made their own valuable contribution to the political discourse.
“They made the politicians think about what they were doing,” he said. “The same thing in art. I don’t personally think a few forgeries are a bad thing. . . . Myatt’s crime didn’t bother me, but Drewe’s crime did.”
The professor had gone one step further than the garden-variety forger. He had penetrated the libraries and archives and had revised art history, corrupting the prism through which future generations would view, analyze, and learn from the country’s cultural past.
“He’s tampering with heritage,” Searle said.
After his conversation with Booth and his epiphany at the Tate, Searle spent the next several weeks shuttling between the Yard and the archives, following Drewe’s path with the aid of the requisition slips the professor had filled out. He asked the auction houses to keep an eye out for Drewe and his many aliases, and provided a list of the painters he believed were being forged. Over the past decade, he assured the auctioneers, at least two dozen works bearing Drewe’s unmistakable stamp had passed through their hands. Whenever such works were brought to his attention, Searle seized them and had Myatt identify them.
One late fall day, as he was going through his files, a colleague from the Organised Crime Unit poked his head in and announced that he’d come across something interesting at Christie’s. “There’s a bunch of crap in the showroom,” he said, tossing a catalog onto Searle’s desk. “I’m sure it’s yours.”
Searle flipped through the pages of “Post-War Contemporary British Art” and came across four gouaches by Graham Sutherland, one of his favorite