Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [37]
He was tidy and methodical, lining up ledgers, catalogs, scribbled notes he’d found on the backs of documents—whatever best suited his purposes—to turn out brand-new provenances. He cut, pasted, and photocopied until he had produced impeccable new documents. When he couldn’t find an appropriate letter or receipt, he forged one using one of his old typewriters, then pasted in a signature he’d culled from his ICA letters from dealers and collectors. He was quickly becoming a master collagist.
On his next visit to the Tate research room, he took a seat in the back. It was a narrow space, not an ideal setup from a security standpoint, because the invigilator’s view was often blocked by the researcher sitting in front. Now and then Drewe looked up from his work to scan the room, which was often left unattended for a few minutes while the invigilator went into the stacks to pull out a book or a document. At an opportune moment, Drewe flipped through his notepad and pulled out a sheet of heavy black paper, the kind used in old-fashioned photograph albums. He inserted the page, with its two binder holes, into one of the Hanover albums, which now contained a photograph of Giacometti’s Standing Nude, 1954, an awkward figure with its feet hidden by a table in the foreground.
Drewe returned the album to the front desk, thanked the invigilator, and left.
For five or six hours a day, Myatt immersed himself completely in his work. Over the months since the reception, the Sugnall farmhouse had become a factory.
Finally Myatt could paint in broad daylight. The old panic that had returned after the Tate reception and driven him to consign Spring Woodland to the flames was a thing of the past again. Because Drewe was manufacturing solid provenances for his paintings, he could relax. He no longer worried about producing the “perfect” forgery, because he realized that when the documentation was good enough, dealers were willing to overlook aesthetic flaws. If the provenance could be verified at the Tate, the V&A, or the British Council archives, all the better.
He was now forging works primarily in the style of Braque, Chagall, Nicholson, and Dubuffet, and each morning he would sit up in bed and say to himself, “Today is a Chagall day” or “Today is Braque day.” Each artist’s style presented its own technical challenge, but Myatt was painting with a clarity he’d rarely enjoyed since his music career collapsed, wrapping up Chagalls in five days and Nicholsons in a matter of hours.
With his share of the profits, and for the first time in a decade, he could finally afford the small luxuries of life. Instead of the few hundred pounds a painting he got from Drewe when they started out, he was now earning a substantial commission. Drewe was selling the paintings as fast as Myatt could produce them, and there were new shoes for the kids, trips to the cinema, and the occasional nanny.
Ironically, even though he was up to no good, he felt less like the town pariah and more like a respected member of the community. His family wasn’t starving, and life was good. With his extra money, he began to donate to charity again. He even convinced a hesitant Drewe to set up an art program for students and fund the revival of mystery plays—medieval dramas based on stories from the Bible—at the Lichfield Cathedral. It would be great publicity for Norseland, he told Drewe. The professor agreed to add his donation to Myatt’s next commission.
With Drewe as his “dealer” and principal cheerleader, Myatt felt like an artist again, “a man of importance.” He felt the same intensity, the same joy in painting he had experienced as a young artist. More important, he was making a living at it, and that