Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [30]
Sometimes he could tell right away whether a piece was ready. If not, he would wait until early the next morning, when he could look at it with a fresh eye. Tonight he worked on the nude until he was too tired to think and his vision faded. Then he leaned the canvas against the wall, covered it, and put the paints away.
In bed, Myatt tossed and turned. When it was hard to sleep, as it often was these days, he would lie there and try to drift back to his childhood. He’d been four years old when his father moved the family out of the city to Sugnall. There was always music in the farmhouse. Mom and Dad would stand at the piano, and Dad would make like an Italian tenor while his boy sang along with perfect pitch. John had taught himself piano, and they’d set him up in the parlor next to a windup gramophone to play along with Anton Karas’s zither music and Frankie Laine’s honking High Sierra yowls. It was clear to his parents, who sang Mendelssohn in the village choir society, that the boy had a good ear and a degree of artistic talent. They had no television, so when they sat him down on the floor with his crayons and pencils, he would tumble into a world of Beano comics, chocolate Smarties, and Spitfire fighter aircraft, drawing mosaics of color and spark, Gauls at the bonfire and Saxons coming up over the hill. By the age of six he could sketch a credible and expressive human figure, a skill that came as easily to him as repeating a melody after a single listen. With his colored pencils and sheets of paper, he was as good as gone.
For the teenage Myatt, 1960s Britain was a grand place to be. He left a private cathedral school for a public education, developed a strong physique, and grew a good head of hair. His talent for portraiture was such that whenever he had his sketchbook out the girls would come around to see what he was up to. He played a little guitar and favored bell-bottoms and tie-dyes. His parents put up with his scruffy appearance because he was enthusiastic and persistent about his studies. During holidays he worked construction on the M6, England’s north-south highway, and drove an ice-cream truck that played Mozart over its speakers. In his spare time he sketched whenever he could, for the pure joy of it. Then he went to art school, where joy gradually turned to defeat as his work was found wanting, despite his relentless attention to technical detail—or perhaps because of it.
Myatt rolled over for the umpteenth time and punched his pillow. He wondered what his professors would think of him now. Well, at least he was still obsessed with getting it right. He’d been lying awake half the night brooding about the Giacometti he’d promised Drewe.
In the morning, when Amy and Sam were settled in the kitchen with bowls of mashed bananas and yogurt, he walked into the living room and turned the canvas over.
The nude was a bust. He had failed to crack the code. He’d have to start from scratch again. Frustrated, he called Drewe to say he would be late with the delivery.
“I can’t get the feet right,” he told the professor.
“Don’t worry,” said Drewe. “Just hide them. Paint in a bowl of fruit or a piece of furniture. No one will know the difference.”
Drewe wanted the painting sooner rather than later because he had an interested buyer, but Myatt argued that the piece would never pass muster. As far as he knew, Giacometti had never painted a standing nude with an object in the foreground. Any dealer would know that. Worse still, the nude, like