Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [129]
Myatt and Rosemary moved to a sixteenth-century farmhouse they restored near Stafford, not far from the run-down house he had inherited from his parents. There were seven acres surrounded by rolling hills and dotted with cows and a Druid mound that the local witches visited on Halloween. Myatt set up his studio in a sunlit stone barn next to the house. He dreamed of a future in which he could retire from the business of genuine forgeries and devote himself to his own genuine Myatts. He had learned a good deal from the artists he’d copied over the years, and he could always knock out an “after,” but he wasn’t sure what his own work looked like. On the rare occasion when he summoned the nerve to face his own stuff, he froze up. He feared that he might not be up to it. Most of all, he feared failure.
In 2004, Myatt got a call from Sky TV asking whether he wanted to host a ten-part series in which he would teach aspiring artists how to paint in the style of the world’s greatest artists. The show was called Mastering the Art, and Myatt did very well by it. He stood affably on a hillside with his easel and taught the basics of forgery, many of them learned from Drewe: how to rub soil onto canvas to replicate a Braque finish, how to use coffee to age a painting a hundred years. In 2009, Sky televised him again, this time in a six-part series, on portraiture in which he paints celebrities in various styles while interviewing them.
Myatt had come a long way. He found it curious that despite all his transgressions, he had been rewarded in the end. He had joined forces with a man sometimes described as fundamentally evil, but in return he had been blessed. He was fifty-nine years old, in love, and enjoying financial success. His works were now selling for up to £50,000. He still recalled Drewe’s moments of kindness and encouragement, and often reminded himself that if he’d never stepped over the line, if he hadn’t met Drewe and gone to prison, he would never have hit pay dirt. It was all a great mystery. In the late afternoon, when he walked his property with his energetic dog Henry, he felt happier and richer than ever.
Crime did pay.
“I know I’ve been very lucky,” he told the London Sunday Times in 2007. “I f***d up but I’ve been given a second chance. And there’s nothing illegal this time. All my paintings are marked as fakes. In fact, I quite like the idea that people can look at my paintings and decide whether they like it or not without all that high-art bollocks. They haven’t got to stand in front of it and say: ‘Oh, it’s a Van Gogh, so we have to like it.’ It gives people a chance to see past all the toffey-nosed, art-critic bullshit. I mean, 40 million quid for a painting! Why can’t these people give the money to the Salvation Army or build a new wing at the local hospital?”
Myatt began receiving increasingly important commissions, particularly from the United States. He loved the Americans. One New Yorker wanted a Picasso so large that Myatt would never be able to get it out of the studio. Six feet by six feet was the limit, he told the Yank.
“That’s okay, John,” said the American breezily. “You make it as big as I want it and you’ll find a way.”
John and Rosemary visit New York often and like to stop in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Myatt had received several commissions to paint knockoffs of Monet’s Morning on the Seine, an image so popular that Walmart had marketed a lithograph version for $174.37. He spent hours in front of the original. He felt as if he were back in London in the old days, walking through the museums and basking in the light of the Turners and the Gainsboroughs and the Constables. He liked to get as close to the Monet as he could without attracting the guard.
One day, with his nose just inches away from the canvas, he noticed several hairs from Monet’s brush stuck on the surface of the painting. Myatt had