Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [125]
Drewe’s brain would have been a gift to any forensic pathologist. Volpe and Searle often marveled at the sheer volume of myth and confetti he’d managed to scatter behind him. For a long time, whenever they felt overwhelmed by the long evidentiary trail, they would repeat the mantra “Keep it simple,” which served as a reminder that his massive constructs were but a series of sordid criminal transgressions, cons within cons. He had left behind him a trail so long and twisted that no one would ever be able to chart every curve and cul-de-sac. It was all a charade, wasn’t it? Charlatan’s debris, random bursts of lightning intended to guide the victim’s eye away from the hand.
Years after the case the detectives would come across bits of data that still didn’t compute, and they would file these away, along with the other irritants and intangibles that had lodged in their memories. They would express both annoyance and admiration, for Drewe had been able to juggle a dozen outrageous constructs at the same time, all the while staying several steps ahead of them. He had damaged the reputations of a good number of upstanding citizens (many of whom should have known better), and he had left dozens of victims in his wake, some of whom would try, and fail, to make sense of it all. The case of one possible victim—the young Hungarian woman who perished in the boardinghouse fire—remains open. Unless there is new evidence, it is unlikely that it will ever be “closed,” especially to the satisfaction of police detective Higgs.
Questions also remained about a possible second forger. Myatt repeatedly told police he had nothing to do with Rene Gimpel’s 1938 “Nicholson” watercolor and at least three other paintings. How many forgers and fakes were still in the wind?
A decade after Drewe’s trial, the Art and Antiques Squad was reduced in size once more. Faced with the prospect of being shut down entirely, a new squad leader came up with a new idea—to recruit curators and art historians who would serve as “special constables” and have the power to make arrests. The Yard promised that officers from this newly formed division, dubbed Art Beat, would be ready to patrol London’s art scene by 2007.
The new squad leader did not give up. He carried on with his plan by recruiting volunteer Art Beat constables from the V&A and the British Museum and giving them four weeks’ training in police procedure. He had special uniforms made up and put the new constables to work patrolling the antiques markets in Bermondsey and the gallery areas of Kensington Church Street, Bond Street, and Camden Passage.
Art crime continued to rise. The Art Loss Register, a comprehensive international database, reported that art forgery was costing the market some £200 million annually in the United Kingdom alone, the world’s second-largest art market. Hundreds of collectors remained oblivious to the fact that their “masterpieces” were worthless fakes. The ALR had retrieved several thousand forgeries, but because British police were forbidden to destroy them, unlike their counterparts in France and Belgium, known fakes often reentered the market.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Squad put together an exhibition on art forgery. The show featured Drewe and Myatt’s tools and products, including forged paintings, typewriters, and phony rubber stamps. Drewe’s equipment was bequeathed to Scotland Yard’s infamous Crime Museum, where it was awarded a spot not far from Jack the Ripper’s display and the hangman’s noose.
Mary Lisa Palmer, the director of the Giacometti Association, spent the years after Drewe’s trial in bitter legal skirmishes with French officials to have Annette Giacometti