Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [9]
Stepping into the train compartment, Myatt saw an old man reading the Times next to the scattered remains of a bag of crisps. He sat down and discreetly checked the contents of Drewe’s envelope. It was a nice haul.
Most of Myatt’s early clients had been partial to Gainsborough, Constable, or Reynolds, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century traditionalists from the Royal Academy, but Myatt had always been more interested in the work of twentieth-century Frenchmen. Given the opportunity to expand his repertoire, he decided to experiment. Drewe did not want direct copies, but “pastiches,” works that could pass as paintings a particular artist might have done. Myatt went combing through his art history books.
Over the next several months, he produced works in the style of the Cubist Georges Braque, of Roger Bissière, whose tapestrylike compositions were prized in the 1950s, and of Nicolas de Staël, a Frenchman of Russian origin who painted abstract landscapes in blocklike slabs of color. Whenever he could afford a babysitter to watch Amy and Sam, he would set up his easel in the living room and go to work. Painting in the style of another artist required a certain amount of historical research and psychological insight, as well as a flawless ability to reproduce the brushwork and compositional preferences of the original in a loose and interpretative way. This was far more interesting to Myatt than knocking off straight copies.
Every month or so, he would take the train to London with a new canvas and meet Drewe at the Euston station bar or at Lindy’s restaurant across from the Golders Green tube station. Drewe would hand over the money, and they would have a beer or a cup of tea.
Once, Drewe drove up to Myatt’s farmhouse in his blue Bristol—a handmade, limited-edition jewel of a car—and Myatt took him to the Sugnall pub. It felt like a royal visit. Drewe waxed on about extrasensory perception, quantum physics, mathematics and its relationship to the artistic process. It all sounded a little high-flown to Myatt’s ears, but Drewe seemed as interested in learning from Myatt as he was in pontificating. Myatt felt appreciated when Drewe asked him about the ins and outs of the art establishment, about the technical differences between the moderns and the old masters, about how to tell the talented from the poseurs of the art world. The five years Myatt had spent in art school in the 1960s, and the fact that he had paid his dues on the local exhibition circuit, qualified him to be Drewe’s teacher, and when he offered Drewe a crash course, the professor proved himself a quick study.
If Myatt secretly wondered whether Drewe was mining him for information in order to sell fakes, he buried the thought. Whenever he spent time with Drewe, he came away reinvigorated, as if the man’s charm had rubbed off on him. It was encouraging to know that someone of such importance valued his friendship. Besides, Drewe’s curiosity about the art market wasn’t unusual, given the fact that everyone was talking about the unprecedented boom and the spiraling prices. Traditional collectors who had once been guided by aesthetics alone had begun to compete against a new breed of wealthy international collectors and young moneyed professionals who were driving up prices. These newcomers were excited by the prospect of substantial returns and saw art as another investment, if one with an added benefit: An art portfolio bestowed an aura of sophistication and culture that no stock holding could provide.
Andy Warhol had seen through the eager new collector’s real purpose in acquiring well-branded art, suggesting in 1977 that instead of spending $200,000 on a painting, a smart collector would be well-advised to take the money, “tie it up and hang it on the wall. . . . Then, when someone visits you, the first thing they see is the money on the wall.”2
In the new marketplace, money managers nudged their clients to invest in art. British Rail’s pension fund, for example, committed about £40 million to buying fine art. Its portfolio