Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [31]
Regular house paint, on the other hand, came in large, affordable cans. Within five miles of his home he could find any color he wanted, from Tuscan Gold to Aegean Green. It wasn’t the most elegant medium, but after some experimentation he discovered that adding a little lubricant jelly to the paint helped make the brushstrokes “move” across the canvas, just as if they’d been done with oils. The jelly made the paint more viscous, and with the right mix it held to the canvas with greater definition and produced a richer color. A little varnish sprayed on the work added depth and luminosity.
Apart from Myatt’s general preference for the modernists, paint was the principal reason for his reluctance to go back too far in time with his forgeries. Any attempt to duplicate sixteenth- or seventeenth-century works would have required more effort than he was prepared to expend. He would have had to scour herbal shops for the base ingredients of the old masters’ pigments: beechwood soot to make bister; a certain South American insect to make carmine red. He would have had to grind lapis lazuli for the beautiful pure blue—now replaced by the synthetic French ultramarine blue—for which patrons had once paid extra if the artist would include it in their portraits. It would have been fun to find these ancient sources, but Myatt didn’t have the financial or emotional resources to do it. He told Drewe about his choice of materials.
“Don’t worry,” Drewe assured him. “No one’s going to ask for a paint sample.” Even if they did, he said, a chip of new paint could be interpreted as a sign of recent restoration rather than proof of forgery. It was well-known that restorers dealing with a badly damaged work often repainted part of the canvas in an attempt to re-create the artist’s intention.
Besides, Drewe said, he had come up with a new approach to age Myatt’s works: by impregnating the paint with turpentine and linseed oil, then placing the canvas in a pressurized container to force the oil into the paint’s nuclear structure. Under analysis, he told Myatt, the house paint would show up as oil paint.
Myatt had nearly run through the £12,500 from the Gleizes and was in no position to argue with Drewe. If the professor could create a facsimile of fifty-year-old paint in his lab, all the better, but in the end it wasn’t about materials. It was about attitude. If he approached a painting with the right energy, he usually came up with something decent.
Myatt hung up. That night, after the children were asleep he returned to the canvas and painted a table in the foreground, cutting the figure off at the knees. The standing nude had become the Footless Woman.
When the paint was dry he took the canvas down to London in his old Land Rover and met Drewe in the parking lot outside the Spaniard’s Inn, a four-hundred-year-old pub in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He expected Drewe to take one look at it and turn it down, but the professor seemed pleased enough.
“Great work, John,” he said. “We’ll sell it, no problem at all.”
Myatt thought the nude was crap, truncated and off-kilter, but he was touched by Drewe’s kindness. They shook hands, and Myatt drove off into the night.
9
THE FINE ART OF PROVENANCE
On a cloudy morning late in March 1990, Myatt stood at his easel ironing out the compositional kinks in his latest piece, a pair of abstract Bissière panels that looked like a flock of birds on a vine. With a clean brush, he softened the paintings’ odd tonal glow. Before they were fully dry, he placed them carefully in the backseat of the Rover and set off for Drewe’s house.
As he drove south to London he had a feeling of relief and well-being. Over the past few months the enterprise had become a relative