Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [114]
“I understand you’re interested in researching a particular Ben Nicholson painting,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Where is it?”
“I’ve got it here in my handbag,” Levy said, pulling out a small white painting. She told Volpe she had brought it in to compare it with photographs in the archive. When Volpe identified himself as a police officer and announced that he was seizing the work, Levy burst into tears.
At 7:00 A.M. the following day, Daniel Stoakes, Drewe’s childhood friend, was arrested at the nursing home in Essex where he had been working the night shift as a psychiatric nurse. The police waited an hour until his shift was over, then took him aside to say that they would be holding him on suspicion of involvement in art fraud.
“This has to do with John, doesn’t it?” Stoakes said as he was being led away.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Scotland Yard detectives accompanied by FBI agents knocked on the door of two more runners. One was Clive Belman’s nephew, Andrew Wechsler, who had come to the attention of the authorities through a London dealer to whom he had tried to sell a painting. Wechsler had been introduced to Drewe through his uncle, and he told police everything he knew. The other runner was Sheila Maskell, who had received Standing Nude, 1955 from the ponytailed Stuart Berkeley. When she told investigators the story of Armand Bartos and the ill-fated Giacometti, it was clear that she had also been duped.
Back in London, as Volpe and Searle sifted through the evidence from Drewe’s home, they realized that the heart of the scam was in his computer. They found templates for many of the fake catalogs he had used to provenance the forgeries, including Bartos’s nude and Gimpel’s 1938 Nicholson watercolor. Searle was still looking at the evidence with an eye to picking the best paintings for trial, and the evidence on the Gimpel painting was particularly strong. He had a catalog on Drewe’s computer, a report from Gimpel’s restorer, Jane Zagel, and testimony from Belman that he had received the work from Drewe. That Myatt hadn’t painted the watercolor was a plus: It strongly suggested that a second forger was involved, and that Drewe’s operation was more far-reaching than it appeared. The evidence on the Bartos nude was good too. There were catalogs, receipts, eyewitness accounts of Drewe at the V&A, and Palmer’s extensive detective work. Bartos was convincing and would make a good impression on the stand.
Volpe had discovered something else during the raid on Drewe’s home: a series of photographs showing a pair of hands tearing photographs out of the Hanover catalog in the bound volume. There were also photos of a forged version of the catalog superimposed on the same binder. Apparently Drewe had taken these highly incriminating snapshots himself. Psychiatrists believe that successful con artists take a special pride in their work, a “contemptuous delight . . . in manipulating and making fools of their victims,”36 and the detectives could only wonder whether the photographs were Drewe’s attempt to record his own accomplishments for his own future delight.
As they pored over statements from more than a thousand witnesses and reports from chemical analysts and document specialists, Searle and Volpe searched for further physical proof linking Drewe to the forged documents in the archives. Thus far most of the evidence was circumstantial. Volpe hoped the Hanover photo albums at the Tate might give him something more solid.
He contemplated the photographs of the Footless Woman and Portrait of a Woman. Nothing in Drewe’s home provided incontrovertible proof that he’d taken them. Then Volpe noticed the typed