The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [33]
Their next conversation differed from all its predecessors. “I reframed the painting,” Drewe said.
“Fine.”
“I brought it to Christie’s, and they valued it at twenty-five thousand pounds”—around $40,000.
Myatt blanched. “They thought it was genuine?”
“If I sold it, would you like twelve and a half thousand pounds, in cash? Or would you prefer to keep the three hundred pounds?”
LOOKING BACK TODAY, twenty years afterward, Myatt smiles ruefully. “I could have said no. I could have said, ‘Of course not, that’s a terrible crime.’ But I didn’t. Twelve and a half thousand pounds was a year’s pay. I said, ‘I’d love it, that’s fantastic, let’s do it.’ Later I rationalized the whole procedure by saying, ‘It’s good for the children.’ Well, that’s what started us off, and we went on from there for another seven or eight years.”
Over the years, Myatt produced at least two hundred paintings. He painted at home from art books that Drewe sent to him, with bookmarks indicating the styles to mimic. “It was easy money,” he recalls. “I’d put the children to bed about eight o’clock, read them a bedtime story, and then come downstairs and clear the table, and I’d do a pastiche, maybe Giacometti or Georges Braque.”
Drewe, far more glib and outgoing than Myatt, did the selling. At their peak, Myatt’s prices rose to several hundred thousand dollars. In a bathroom in Myatt’s house today, framed sales receipts hang on one wall. For a work by Ben Nicholson, the modern British painter, £100,000, roughly $150,000. Another frame, another receipt, another Nicholson. This one, £200,000.
Those are big numbers, but nothing in comparison with art world records. Drewe and Myatt thrived in an era of anything-goes art prices. In 1990, at an auction at Christie’s, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million. Great paintings, a New York Times writer remarked in awe after a flurry of such sales, had reached the price of Boeing 757s. But Drewe, the strategist of the team, steered clear of the top of the market. He was a businessman, and his business plan revolved around high volume and steady, middle-level returns. Why risk everything on a single lottery ticket, even if the prize was a tens-of-millions-of-dollars bonanza?
Myatt was good at his job, but Drewe was brilliant. His key insight was that so long as the paperwork that accompanied a painting was too good to question, the painting itself merely had to be plausible. When visitors stroll through an art museum, many of them look at the label next to a painting before they consider the painting itself. In similar fashion, many collectors seem to care more about a painting’s provenance—its pedigree—than its appearance.
John Drewe flung that door open and raced through. While Myatt concentrated on forging paintings, Drewe turned to forging the documentation that proved that a painting was authentic. (Drewe had a long history as a con man. Even his claim to be a physicist, which had so impressed Myatt, was bogus.) The paperwork was so important, in fact, that Myatt and Drewe decided which artists to forge based on how easy it would be to create a convincing history for their paintings. “Anybody can paint a Picasso or a Matisse,” Myatt remarks, “but they worked in France, and creating a paper trail for those paintings is very hard. It means you’ve got to go to France and all that nonsense. So John Drewe suggested we find British artists, or artists who exhibited here in En gland, and then it would be that much easier to create a false history for the paintings.”
In Britain, the laws regulating museums work to a forger’s benefit. “All the museums are funded with public money,” Myatt explains, “so if you phone up and say, ‘I notice you’re not exhibiting such and such a painting, can I come and see it?’ they’ll say, ‘Yes, when can you come down? Next week sometime? See you on Tuesday.’ Which they have to, legally.
“Now, from a forger’s point of view, that’s brilliant,” Myatt goes on, “because you can not only look at the front but also the back, and that’s worth everything to someone who’s