Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [97]
There was nothing to do but cooperate, the old cop said. Drewe would never admit his guilt, and would blame Myatt for everything. “My advice to you is not to dig yourself into a hole.”
Myatt was relieved. Conceivably he could have tried to concoct an elaborate fabrication, but that probably wasn’t going to work. When he returned to the station a few days later, he was more than ready to talk.
Myatt told Searle everything he knew about the operation, including his use of house paint, a confession that shocked the detective but was later corroborated by a forensic analysis identifying a resin not available at the time the paintings supposedly had been made. Myatt said that most of the money he’d earned from Drewe in commissions had been spent—among other things, on covering half of Drewe’s £20,000 donation to the Tate—but that he would turn over the £18,000 he had left.
After the initial interviews Myatt began a series of regular trips to the city to meet Searle at the Belgravia Police Station, which had jurisdiction over the part of town where the best galleries were located. The walls outside the basement interview room had been freshly painted, and dozens of Myatt’s forgeries, wrapped in heavy polyethylene, were lined up in the corridors, all tracked down by police through the help of auction houses and dealers. It seemed to Myatt that although the police had already confiscated scores of pieces, they’d missed the best stuff. The really good work was still out there in penthouses and villas. Drewe had often boasted that he’d placed premium Myatts with collectors in New York and Paris, in Tokyo, Italy, and Bahrain.
As Searle brought a succession of Myatt’s works into the interview room, he spoke slowly and precisely, for the record.
“Now we are unwrapping exhibit number BsG 192. Did you paint this?”
“I did.”
“And do you recognize this painting over here?”
“I do.”
And so on down memory lane, to the next canvas and the next, as Myatt recalled when and where he’d painted each one, occasionally noting how beautifully Drewe had framed them. The professor had never been artistically inclined, but he had an eye for presentation.
The Belgravia officers referred to the collection as “the Black Museum.” They would come down to the subterranean gallery with raised eyebrows and scoff at the obscene prices that the “Sutherlands,” “Dubuffets,” and “Braques” might have fetched if they hadn’t been pulled in. They nicknamed the Dubuffets “the BSE cows,” after bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease.
Searle took on the roles of inquisitor, aesthetic gendarme, therapist, and moral arbiter. He was convinced that Myatt was no career criminal and that he’d stumbled off the path despite his better self. Before long the two men developed a rapport and began exchanging notes on the quality of the forgeries.
“You were certainly having a good day when you did this one,” Searle said, when he came across a particularly good fake. If a work was shoddy or below par, he didn’t hesitate to needle Myatt: “Don’t tell me you painted this one.”
In the basement of the station house, Searle came to see that Myatt was technically brilliant and an excellent draftsman. He was also a skilled forger able to fake a brushstroke or a line without losing the vivacity of the original. He understood the importance of loose ends and the power of an unfinished work. Amateur forgers and restorers, in their quest for a perfect canvas invulnerable to criticism, tended to overwork a painting and lose the feel of the artist. Myatt, by contrast, seemed to work without a net and liked