Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [20]
As usual, he hogged the conversation. Mibus listened quietly as the professor bragged about his access to classified information about a secret city beneath London, a six-level subterranean fortress built by the government for wartime use as an emergency control center in case of a nuclear attack or a major disaster. He described a “ghost station” near Tottenham Court Road that had not been used since the 1930s but had recently been refitted as a government laboratory. He said he knew of a secret tunnel that had been built behind the Institute of Contemporary Arts for the express purpose of providing an exit route for the royal family in the event that they needed to flee Buckingham Palace and the city.
Mibus ran out of patience, excused himself, and took a taxi back to the gallery. There he learned about yet another problem with one of Drewe’s paintings, a Bissière he had bought from Catch’s consortium and then sold to a French client. The Frenchman had returned the piece after he tried unsuccessfully to sell it through an auction house. Bissière’s son had seen it at a preshow viewing and denounced it as a fake. The younger Bissière had the droit moral and had stripped the work of its signature.
Mibus promptly refunded the client and called Drewe, who eventually agreed to refund the £7,500 Mibus had paid him.
Still unresolved was the dispute over the de Staël painting. Mibus asked for and received a formal letter from the artist’s widow officially nullifying the work. He sent this to Drewe and demanded his money back.
Drewe offered him an alternative: He would supply Mibus with a “generous” consignment of pieces by Giacometti, Tàpies, Oskar Schlemmer, Mark Gertler, and Dubuffet, and Mibus could keep 50 percent of the proceeds from whatever he sold.
Mibus wasn’t interested. He wanted a full refund for the de Staël, and then he wanted nothing more to do with Drewe.
Drewe wouldn’t budge. He refused to give Mibus his refund. He was polite but firm. He didn’t need to keep Mibus happy, because by now he had begun the process of forging documents for each of Myatt’s works.
6
SELF-MADE MAN
The idea of concocting the intricate history of a work of art from whole cloth was no great leap for Drewe, who had been inventing and reinventing himself since he was a child. By the time he was a nervous thirteen-year-old thread of a boy in short trousers and cap, he had mastered the art of dissembling. He boasted that he was a descendant of the earl of York though he had in fact grown up in a lower-middle-class home in southeast England, the stepson of a coal merchant. He was quiet and circumspect, with anxious eyes behind thin spectacles. He had a scar running from his chin to his neck, and this was a sore point: He told the other boys that he’d been accidentally scalded by boiling water. (Later, he would claim that he had been wounded in battle.) He was clearly an intellectual, above the norm. He had few friends, and it seemed he liked it that way. He was never bullied. Even in those tender years, from thirteen to fifteen, he was withdrawn. There was a controlled grief about him that made the other children keep their distance.
In the summer, he and his only real friend, Hugh Roderick Stoakes, would play long games of whist, an early version of bridge. Drewe (still John Cockett at the time) would deliver speeches to an imaginary audience and tell Stoakes that the two of them were fated to be “heroes for the future.” They rarely talked about girls or football or pop music. They preferred to listen to the funeral march from the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica, imagining the mourners’ silhouettes against a darkening sky. They traded horror paperbacks, and Drewe kept his collection next to his advanced chemistry and physics tomes and his copies of Conrad, Kafka, and Joyce. His room was clean and neat,