The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [31]
Above the kitchen table hangs an instantly recognizable Van Gogh, a quiet study of the green and yellow fields and whitewashed farm houses near Arles. Every surface is cluttered with art. Paintings sit in a pile on a chair, they stand in stacks in a corner of the living room, they hang only a few inches apart on every wall. Mondrian, Cézanne, Modigliani, Braque, Chagall. A Monet jostles a Matisse, and a Giacometti painting of a striding man bumps elbows with a pink-cheeked Renoir.
A sketchpad sits open on the table—Myatt has been working this morning—next to a coffee-table book on Picasso turned to a section of line drawings. The book shows Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s mistress, and so does one page after another in the sketchpad. Some of Myatt’s “Picassos” are better than others, just as some of a pianist’s practice runs up and down the keys would be better than others.
Myatt picks up a pencil. “I use the thickest one I can get,” he says. “It’s so soft it almost disappears in one go. It’s a 6-or 7-B.” He stands at the table, flips to a blank page in the sketchbook, and starts in. “It’s all about the speed and confidence of the line. This line comes right the way across”—Myatt has drawn Gilot’s jawline in a single, sweeping arc—“and speeds its way down here.”
The forger surveys his handiwork. “To Ed,” he writes on the drawing, and then he adds a signature, “Picasso, 1940.” The scrawled signature looks identical to the ones in the Picasso book.
To an amateur’s eye, Myatt’s paintings (and my new “Picasso” drawing) look startlingly, unsettlingly authentic. The only giveaways are circumstantial. No one but a billionaire could afford such a collection, and this does not look like a billionaire’s home. And even an art lover with enormous wealth favors one style over another. Would any genuine collector have such eclectic taste?
None of Myatt’s paintings or drawings is a literal copy, although each is distinctly “in the style of” one famous artist or another. “Here’s a Monet Haystack,” Myatt says, as he flips through a stack of paintings. “Another Monet. Another. He did about twenty-eight of them altogether, so I just did three more.”
The challenge for a forger is suppressing his own natural style, a task the art historian E. H. Gombrich likens to speaking a foreign language without an accent. Van Gogh was a great admirer of Millet, for example, and he made faithful copies of several of Millet’s works. This was study and homage, not forgery, but the swirling brushstrokes that shout “Van Gogh” are unmissable.
Myatt has a knack for taking on the mannerisms of other artists and hiding his own. In the 1970s he worked as a studio musician, playing keyboard in what ever style that day’s sessions happened to call for. Myatt was good—he wrote a pop song called “Silly Games” that made it to number one on the British charts—but his main skill was in quickly sizing up how to fit in without standing out.
Collection of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi
Millet, First Steps
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George N. and Helen M. Richard, 1964 (64.165.2) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Van Gogh’s version
TWO FEATURES OF Myatt’s story make it especially instructive. First, he is far more thoughtful and open about forgery than Van Meegeren, who spent his life in a sulk, embittered by the conviction that he was a neglected genius. Other forgers who have told their stories, like Eric Hebborn and Elmyr de Hory, tend toward the manic and the histrionic. Myatt has little of the performer about him. He gives every appearance of being an ordinary man who found himself in extraordinary circumstances. (Myatt directs the choir at his church. The policeman who arrested him is now a close friend and