Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [32]
It was becoming clear to Myatt that dealers routinely bought second-rate works not because of some hidden or mysterious aesthetic quality but simply because of the signature on the canvas.
Every artist could have an occasional bad day, he thought, even masters like Giacometti. Myatt had seen several poorly executed originals during his research, evidence that artists weren’t always firing on all cylinders. And yet those works had sold in the tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds. Myatt felt that many of his own copies were as good as, if not better than, the genuine article. There was something unjust in the fact that bad Giacomettis and Bissières were always infinitely more desirable than his perfectly adequate fakes. Although he had painted a number of Giacomettis, Bissières, Chagalls, and Le Corbusiers that he knew were abysmally bad, Drewe had nevertheless sold them at bargain-basement prices. Whatever respect and trust Myatt had felt toward the art world had evaporated. Even the most prestigious dealers could be swayed by a bargain or a dubious certificate of authenticity. He wondered how many fakes he’d seen in galleries and catalogs and museums over his lifetime. He couldn’t trust his own eyes anymore.
In the first year of the scam he’d had qualms about compromising his moral code. After all, he was a practicing Catholic, a charitable man, and a father. Now, after a track record of successful sales, he was fairly comfortable in his role as a criminal forger. What he was doing didn’t really constitute a crime. If a collector believed one of his pieces was an authentic Braque, why spoil the thrill? And from a broader perspective, surely what he and Drewe were engaged in was small potatoes in the history of fakery.
When Myatt walked into Drewe’s home with the new Bissières, the professor was standing in front of his dining room table, which was covered with piles of documents. Drewe seemed as gleeful as if he had just won the lottery. Sweeping his hand over the table, he told Myatt that his lunches with the ICA director had paid off.
“Take a good look,” he said.
Myatt read in bursts. It was an astonishing collection: handwritten letters from Picasso and Giacometti; old invitations to lunch with Buckminster Fuller; some of Ben Nicholson’s lecture notes; a letter to Nicholson from the architect Sir John Summerson, whose books Myatt had studied in art school.
Drewe beamed as Myatt picked up one letter after another, then a group of sketches by the French artist Jean Dubuffet and some exhibition catalogs from the late 1940s and the 1950s. There were stacks of gallery ledger pages listing artists with links to the ICA, along with blank ledger pages and gallery stationery of all kinds. There was a steamy note from Dubuffet to a female assistant at the ICA, which Myatt held delicately in his hand, wondering what effect it had had on its recipient.
Priceless, he thought. An intimate history of London’s modern art scene, the kind of stuff you left to your grandchildren. He was amazed by the size of the haul, and he could see more documents poking out of Drewe’s briefcase. Clearly, the professor had become a frequent visitor to the ICA archives.
How did someone walk out of a major British institution, five hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, with its entire history in hand?
Myatt wasn’t sure whether he was appalled by the lack of care or terrified. The full significance of Drewe’s scheme was becoming clear to him. For nearly two years now he had been forging works by the same group of modern artists whose histories Drewe had just extracted from the ICA. With the correspondence between Nicholson’s collectors and the ICA, with the letters and receipts from Erica Brausen (Giacometti’s daring dealer), and all the rest of it, Drewe would have enough