Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [103]
Searle looked at his cheat sheet: Stoakes’s name showed up in several provenances. So did the O.S.M. stamp.
The auction was scheduled for the following day. Searle grabbed a roll of bubble wrap and headed down to Christie’s. After a brief discussion with the head of the Contemporary Art department, he seized the quartet of “Sutherlands.”
They were impressive additions to his collection, intentionally untidy and more like works in progress. Searle found them attractive and interesting. Myatt had paid close attention to Sutherland’s method, particularly the way he thickened and thinned the line with his brush. Searle noticed that the O.S.M. stamp had been pressed onto one of the watercolors themselves, rather than on the reverse. This seemed like a dead giveaway. Drewe had gone to the trouble of paying a forger, faking a catalog, and aging the works, but then he had carelessly disfigured them.
Was it a taunt?
Tom Keating had thumbed his nose at the experts by painting subliminal scribbles on his canvases, but he’d always claimed that he wanted to get caught, and that his forgeries were an act of revenge, a blow against an unscrupulous fraternity of art dealers.
It occurred to Searle that beneath Drewe’s cosmopolitan veneer he was a philistine with little feeling for the arts. He saw paintings as commodities to be traded for the best possible price. He passed himself off as a refined and cultured Englishman, but his actions defined him as a man entirely without values.
Drewe had recognized a niche opportunity in the art market. Given the number of works that passed through the auction houses each year—an estimated $5 billion worth—he had guessed correctly that the experts couldn’t possibly vet each of the tens of thousands of works in the lower price ranges. He had concentrated on midrange pieces, works that would bring in a steady income without drawing undue attention.
Searle looked at his notes from Christie’s and found the name of the dealer who had consigned the Sutherlands. He got into a cab and headed for Adrian Mibus’s gallery.
The dealer was more than happy to tell him the whole story of his relationship with Drewe. He mentioned the fake Bissières he’d bought, the de Staël, and the works Drewe had subsequently offered him a 50 percent share in. He told Searle that he’d finally accepted Drewe’s proposition because he got tired of watching these very same works sell at auction. He’d taken the four Sutherlands after Christie’s auctioned a similar group of Sutherlands successfully, and he believed they were genuine.
When the detective asked if Mibus had anything to back up his story, the dealer pulled out some documents Drewe had drawn up outlining the ownership history and the sales transactions. Then he showed Searle several other works he had accepted from Drewe in order to recoup his heavy losses. These included a Giacometti, a Ben Nicholson, and a Mark Gertler. Mibus also handed over a painting titled Composition 1958, purportedly by Bissière, which had been returned to him with the signature wiped off after the French dealer he’d sold it to recognized it as a fake. This last piece Searle recognized as one of the fakes Booth had shown him in the Hanover albums at the Tate—the one that wasn’t in the daybook. It would make for good evidence.
Searle went back to the Yard. On the way he reflected that Drewe always seemed to manage to turn events in his favor. It was like a fixed game of