Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [105]
Once the scores of faxes and photographs and documents had been placed in plastic bags and labeled, the detectives tried to narrow down the number of paintings they would use as evidence. Those that unequivocally linked Drewe to the forged provenances were set aside as court exhibits.
Searle was still unsure which of the dozens of people who had cropped up in the investigation were unwitting collaborators and which had taken an active role. He believed the art dealers had been duped, but some of Drewe’s runners may have been in on the scam. Some of the dealers and collectors named in the provenance documents may have been involved too, but Searle suspected that many were figments of Drewe’s imagination.
The detectives began by interviewing the experts who had given their opinions on works associated with Drewe. The Tate’s former director Alan Bowness and one of its curators, Jeremy Lewison, had both failed to recognize certain Nicholson fakes, but they had done so unwittingly and seemed willing to cooperate.
Each detective had his own way of dealing with a suspect or potential witness. Volpe could be rather aggressive and tended to lean on witnesses he suspected of being accomplices. In the interrogation room he was fully charged and often brusque. He took no one at face value, including Searle’s star witness. Even though Myatt had been singing like a canary, Volpe frisked him in the interrogation room before interviewing him. Searle thought this was unnecessary, a ritual act of humiliation. Volpe maintained that a criminal was a criminal and there was no gray area in between. He wanted to put Myatt on edge, to let him know that he shouldn’t take anything for granted. Still, the two detectives complemented each other. Volpe could get to the heart of a case and knew what elements were required to win a conviction. Searle knew art and was the team’s de facto curator.
Because the art world could arouse as much resentment as reverence, Searle decided to home in on the paintings that would not only make the best evidence but would appeal to a middlebrow jury. He began to steer away from the more abstract pieces, the ones that might prompt jurors to sneer and mutter, “I could have painted that myself!” To keep the jury from seeing Drewe as merely a mischievous prankster, a canvas pimpernel who had brought down the hoi-polloi and taken the aristocracy for a ride, Searle wanted to put “nice, pretty pictures” on the courtroom walls, works a juror could easily digest, understand, and admire. For that reason he weeded out the Dubuffet fakes Myatt had painted. Jurors might not have much sympathy for a collector who had paid several thousand pounds for a childish rendering of a cow—a diseased cow, at that.
There was also the issue of the director of the Dubuffet Foundation, who had authenticated eighteen of Myatt’s fakes. It had taken Searle and Volpe several hours to convince her that she was wrong. When she finally acknowledged her blunder, she burst into tears. It was far too dangerous to put her on the stand. Drewe would testify that he did not know the works were fake, and his lawyer would pick the witness apart: If the director of the Dubuffet Foundation couldn’t tell the difference between a fake and an authentic work, how could Drewe possibly know?
Searle needed credible witnesses, preferably victims who had never stood to profit from the con and were thus above suspicion. He and Volpe decided to focus on the Order of the Servants of Mary, which had provided provenances for a number of Sutherland Crucifixion scenes. Before making arrangements for several of the friars to come down to Scotland Yard, Searle interviewed Mibus and Peter Nahum, who had agreed to testify in court that they had received their Crucifixion