Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [67]
“What an arrogant bastard,” thought Higgs. “He acts like he’s doing us a favor. He expects us to tip our caps.”
Higgs was determined not to let his personal feelings compromise his professional judgment, but it struck him that Drewe was unusually composed throughout the interview. Higgs had been around long enough to know that even the most innocent of citizens tended to be nervous when they were hauled down to the station.
The professor seemed a little too relaxed. The detective figured he was looking at the next ripple in the pond.
20
MYATT’S BLUE PERIOD
John Myatt put on his best suit and headed down King Street to Christie’s, where a crowd was spilling out of cabs and limos and into the lobby. The women were wearing their good jewelry, and Myatt could smell the powder and perfume. Feeling underdressed and fidgety among the tuxedos and Chanels, he made his way to the salesroom and took a seat toward the back. About two hundred serious collectors and dealers sat in reserved seats, holding marked catalogs and numbered paddles and waiting for the bidding to kick off. Each year the house held two major sales of contemporary art, and tonight there were Vasarelys and Oldenburgs on the block, as well as Christos and Calders, Warhols and Hockneys.
And Dubuffets, half a dozen of them, courtesy of John Myatt and his labors during many quiet hours in Staffordshire.
Today, for the first time since he’d joined forces with Drewe, he was about to witness a sale of his work. The phones were open, and a gaggle of Christie’s staffers stood beneath a row of million-pound paintings fielding last-minute starting bids. Myatt could feel the tension in the room, an air of intense acquisitive desire coupled with unlimited resources. A handful of well-dressed men with cell phones milled about on the fringes of the crowd, just as Myatt had imagined them: slicked-back hair, wives and mistresses in Dior head scarves and Gucci shades.
He had been looking forward to this for years. A sale at a major auction house would have been an achievement for any artist, and Myatt was no exception. Tonight’s event was an acknowledgment that his skills had their own peculiar value in this reptilian marketplace, and there was the added satisfaction of being in on a mammoth inside joke. He and Drewe had managed to play an extended and very profitable game of reverse blindman’s bluff.
Myatt sat patiently and waited for his Dubuffets to come up. He had based these childlike renderings of cows on a series of bovine forms created some four decades earlier by the French painter, who had coined the term art brut. A Christie’s catalog for a later auction offering a genuine Dubuffet cow would proclaim that the artist had “harnessed the actual countryside, as he has painted not with oils, but with the very stuff of nature”—a blurb that might have amused the farm boy in Myatt. He had never much fancied the originals, which Dubuffet styled after drawings made by children and the mentally ill, but he knew he could forge them without breaking a sweat. To add to the luster of the bogus cows, Drewe had put together a slick provenance package that included genuine Dubuffet documents “borrowed” from the ICA. The provenance indicated that the works had once belonged to Lawrence Alloway, a former assistant director of the ICA and senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Drewe had even managed to get the Dubuffet Foundation to authenticate them.
Myatt held his breath as the bidding began and his drawings sold, one by one, for a total of about £60,000. He had dreamed of being present at such an auction ever since the scam began. He’d imagined the tingle of adrenaline as the paddles went up, then a record sale, followed by a victorious stroll through the city streets with a wad of money in his back pocket. The orchestra would swell as he gulped the cold winter air, the elusive forger with the dangling cigarette, a cloak flung over his shoulder and a smile