The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [32]
More important, Myatt’s success sheds light on Van Meegeren’s, because the strangest feature of Myatt’s career was that his successes turned out to have scarcely anything to do with his skill as a painter. Buyers want to believe they have found something extraordinary; the forger’s task is to find ways to bolster that belief. Myatt did this (more accurately, his partner did this) by creating unquestionable credentials for each fake. Those perfect pedigrees imbued the paintings with virtues they did not truly possess, much as a fortune or a title can transform a troll into a heartthrob. “Some of my Giacomettis,” Myatt says, “are just embarrassingly bad. You flip through a Christie’s catalog or a Sotheby’s catalog, and there they are, but you just cringe.” Those paintings sold for prices as high as $250,000.
Early in his forging career, Myatt goes on, “I had to teach myself, and in the process of teaching myself, I did some really appallingly bad paintings, all of which we put on the market. Because I didn’t know that they were appallingly bad until about two or three years later, and then I thought”—here Myatt moans in mortification—“‘Oh no, everything about that’s wrong, it’s all wrong.’ But you find yourself in the unbelievable situation where other people are saying, ‘Oh, isn’t it wonderful! ’ It was like being in a Monty Python film.”
Myatt came to forgery almost inadvertently. It was 1986. He was teaching art in a local school and, with a wife and two babies, just getting by. Then his wife walked out. Left to care for a one-year-old and a three-year-old, Myatt had to cut down on his teaching. Bills piled up. “The bank was sending rude letters.”
Tied to the house and unable to sell paintings under his own name, Myatt had a bright idea. Years before, in his days as a musician in London, his boss had once come back from lunch raving about the big shot he’d just met. The man had bought himself two paintings by Raoul Dufy, and had paid £80,000 for each. Can you imagine having money like that? Can you imagine owning paintings like that? Myatt, an art school graduate, jumped in.
“I’ll paint one for you,” he said.
In the end, Myatt painted two “Dufys.” His boss paid £250 apiece, at the time roughly $500 a picture, and hung them in the office. “Mind you, this was 1970-something, and that was a lot of money,” Myatt recalls. “Those two pictures fooled a lot of people. They weren’t any good, but they fooled just about everybody who came through the door.”
That had been a prank, not a scam. But five or six years later and in trouble, Myatt thought back on that easy payday. He took out an ad in Private Eye, a satirical magazine, offering “Genuine Fakes: Nineteenth and twentieth century paintings from £250.” The paintings mimicked the style of well-known artists, but everything was out in the open—Myatt signed his own name on the back and stamped the paintings “Genuine Fake.”
“It wasn’t bad money,” Myatt says. “If I did one a week, it paid the bills. And I didn’t have to leave the house, which was a major thing for me because of the children.” People ordered a Matisse or a Dufy. Sometimes they ordered instant ancestors—they brought in a photograph of their husband or their wife and asked Myatt for a portrait in the style of Reynolds or Gainsborough.
Most customers came and went. Only a handful bought more than one painting. One man, a physicist named John Drewe, returned again and again. He bought Dutch seascapes and a Dutch portrait or two, and then moved on to Matisse and Picasso and Chagall. “He just kept coming back,” Myatt recalls. “By this time my prices had crept up to about £300 at a time. In the end Drewe ran out of ideas, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s been interesting,’ and he said to me, ‘What would you like to do?’”
Flattered, Myatt set to work on a Georges Braque. Soon he’d completed a small Cubist painting about the size of a placemat. Drewe seemed pleased.