Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [69]
But now he felt a wave of shame—an unfamiliar emotion that had never been part of his repertoire. He paid for the coffee, got into his beat-up old Rover, and drove north.
At home, the children were asleep and a blank canvas was staring at him from the easel. He went to bed and woke the next morning with something akin to a hangover, which he recognized as leftover self-disgust from his night in the doldrums on King Street.
With little enthusiasm he began work on a new Braque. Using various shades of burnt sienna and dark brown, he painted recklessly and without inspiration. By the following day he’d accomplished nothing. In frustration, he dipped his brush into a can of bright red emulsion and slapped it onto the canvas. The red stood out for miles, a little dash of angry Myatt. The piece was dreadful, but he didn’t care. He deserved a kick in the arse. He deserved to get caught. At the same time, he was terrified of getting caught, and he still felt some loyalty to Drewe. He had no idea how to get out of the game.
When he dropped off the Braque at their next meeting, he begged Drewe to rethink the operation. He suggested that they take a ninemonthbreather from the conveyor belt and do things a little differently. Rather than cranking out paintings, he would focus on a single work, a small still life, say, or a Cézanne landscape. He had always worked from secondhand material, and now he wanted to get his hands on an original. He wanted Drewe to bring something genuine into the studio so that he could sit with it and take it in. Then, if the gods were on his side, he would go to work and produce something top-of-the-line, something absolutely right for a change. He would re-create the work faithfully. He would dust off his old art books and find the perfect age-appropriate brushes and paints. Drewe’s job would be to concoct the perfect provenance, a leakproof, rock-solid archival masterpiece.
One last glorious sale and they could both retire.
“Let’s do it properly or not at all,” he told Drewe.
The professor was unmoved. They were on a roll. The ship was on course. Why spoil things?
Myatt confided his fears of ending up in prison.
“Don’t worry,” said Drewe. “If you put a fake work through auction, it’s the auctioneer who takes the blame. Sotheby’s or Christie’s would have to reimburse the buyer. No one gets hurt. We’re free and clear.”
Rubbish, thought Myatt. They would never be safe.
It occurred to him that Drewe was addicted to the con, that every sale was like a junkie’s rush to him. The money wasn’t the object, it was the scam itself. Drewe had begun to believe in his imaginary status as a collector and to speak about the paintings as if they were authentic. Like every bad drug run, this would all come to a dreadful end. The market simply could not absorb the number of fakes they were producing. If they continued as usual, they would almost certainly get pinched.
When Myatt suggested again that they slow things down, Drewe replied that he was under intense pressure from dealers and collectors to come up with more work. Some of Myatt’s paintings had been returned to him, and a few clients were asking for their money back. This was no time to turn tail. If anything, they had to expand the business, not wrap it up. He proposed to add Russian and American artists to their roster, and urged Myatt to come up with one or two good Bar-nett Newmans and a few Frank Stellas from his 1960s period. These were certainly within Myatt’s range, and would be highly marketable.
There was an irritation and impatience in Drewe’s voice that Myatt hadn’t heard for years. In the early Golders Green days, Drewe had had tantrums now and then, but they were short-lived and usually provoked by a losing hand at bridge. Now the bad moods lasted for days. As Drewe obsessed over every bad transaction and cursed the dealers who had