Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [36]
Drewe was as good as his word. Within days the Tate received a check for £20,000 to help catalog the archives, along with a promise of £500,000 more to come. With this gift Drewe established himself as a respected donor, a citizen above suspicion to whom the doors of the Tate’s archives would always be open. While the two Bissière fakes never found their way into the artist’s canon—Myatt took them home, built a bonfire in his backyard, and burned them—dozens of Myatt’s forgeries would. The history of art and the cherished integrity of one of the world’s great museums were about to be irreparably compromised.
10
FULL SPEED AHEAD
John Drewe is the most amazing man,” said Sarah Fox-Pitt. “Did you know his father invented the atom bomb?”
Jennifer Booth thought it best to stifle her laughter. Fox-Pitt had been moved up to the Acquisitions Department after more than a decade as head of the Tate archives, and she was Booth’s senior, but she was much too impressed by Drewe, in Booth’s opinion. Booth had recently become the new head of the archives, and the more she learned about the professor, the warier she became of him. She knew he had donated a pair of Bissières to the Tate, and that the conservators had almost immediately become suspicious of them. Before they could ask him for a certificate of authenticity from the artist’s estate, he had withdrawn them. In their stead, he had donated £20,000 to the archives, and Fox-Pitt had just told her that he’d promised half a million more.
After Fox-Pitt left her office, Booth looked up Drewe’s application to visit the archives and discovered that he had been in a few times since his donation but had never filled out a formal application. The prerequisite apparently had been waived.
Curious, she thought.
Several days later, Drewe came in again, checked his coat and bag at security, and walked into the research room with his legal pad and a pencil. Booth was on duty at the invigilator’s desk, where all visitors were screened, and she asked him to fill out an application and provide a summary of the research he was planning to do. It was standard procedure, she said. The Tate’s research room could only accommodate six people at a time, and it was generally restricted to scholars and postgraduate students who were vetted carefully.
On the application form Drewe said he was chairman of Norseland Industries and research director for a laboratory that developed marine systems. He was investigating the “collaboration between Hanover Gallery, London, and the ICA, particularly 1951-7” and might occasionally bring in two other researchers to help him.
Booth decided not to ask him for references. It seemed inappropriate at this juncture, now that his check had been banked. She assumed that the notoriously vigilant Fox-Pitt had checked him out thoroughly before giving him her enthusiastic endorsement, and she didn’t want to jeopardize any future donation.
Drewe was very polite when he asked Booth if she wouldn’t mind bringing out one of the Hanover’s photograph albums, a pictorial record of the works that had passed through the gallery during its twenty-five years of operation. One of its most important artists was Giacometti.
Drewe sat at the dining room table in his house cutting and pasting. He had taken a photograph of Myatt’s Footless Woman and titled it Standing Nude, 1954. He kept his titles as generic as possible, as many of the modern masters had done in the forties and fifties. From his stash of documents, he chose an old gallery receipt recording the sale of a genuine Giacometti nude, then fashioned a new one on 1950s-era paper, indicating that the work had been sold to its current owner, a private collector named Peter Harris, in 1957. To reinforce the illusion, he forged additional