The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [34]
WHILE MYATT DID his best to make sure that his paintings looked more or less right from the front, Drewe took charge of the back and all the paperwork that went with it. First, he needed a backstage pass. At the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, Drewe contributed two paintings—forgeries by Myatt—to a fundraising auction. In gratitude, the institute welcomed him into its archives. At the Tate Gallery, Drewe made a donation of roughly $40,000 earmarked to helping the Tate revamp its records. He was rewarded with full access to the museum’s research files. The National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum proved even easier to crack. All they required was a letter vouching for Drewe. Like a schoolboy forging a note from his mother, Drewe wrote his own letter: “John Drewe is a man of integrity,” it asserted.
With unlimited access to precisely those records that a conscientious gallery or collector would consult before going ahead with a major purchase, Drewe set to work manipulating history. In one brazen but typical ploy at the National Art Library, he razored apart a catalog from a 1955 show at a London gallery that had since gone out of business. Then he created new pages with photographs of Myatt forgeries, added captions in the proper typeface, inserted the false pages among the real ones, reassembled the catalog, and set it back on the shelves.
The scheme, which focused not on the paintings themselves but on the documentation that proved the paintings’ bona fides, was ingenious. Why bother going through surgery to change your fingerprints if you can change the fingerprint records in the FBI files?
Drewe thrived on the gamesmanship. At one point he hired himself out as a consultant to a New York dealer, Armand Bartos, who wanted to know if a Giacometti he had bought was authentic. Bartos had paid $250,000 for the painting, which was in fact a Myatt, not a Giacometti. Drewe met Bartos in London and dazzled him with impeccable paperwork, all of it his own creation. Bartos flew back to New York satisfied. Drewe billed him seven hundred dollars.*
In the end, the Myatt/Drewe forgery scam fell apart because Drewe ran out on his wife. She filled the trunk of her car with three or four trash bags stuffed with photos of forged paintings, phony letters from art galleries, and doctored bills of sale, and roared off to the police station. Then she stormed inside, dragged two dubious detectives to her car, and presented them with a ready-made case.
ABOUT 80 OF Myatt’s fakes have been found. Presumably the other 120 are still in collections around the world, and their owners take great pride in them.
But even in the good years, Myatt lived in fear. “I expected every day to get arrested,” he recalls. “Finally, it happened. It was six in the morning—they come so early because they want to make sure you’re at home—and ten policemen came hammering on the door. I knew as soon as I saw them. ‘Well, that’s it then,’ I said.”
Curiously, though, and despite his fears, Myatt had been astonishingly casual with his forgeries. The most rudimentary scientific test could have undone him in a minute. “I wasn’t even using oil paint,” Myatt says. “It was just ordinary house paint, the kind you paint on the walls. I don’t like the smell of oil paint; it gives me a headache. I told Drewe all this, but he was busy showing the pictures to all the experts and saying, ‘What do you think of this?’ And in many cases, they were saying, ‘Oh, that’s wonderful.’ I just didn’t see the point of going back to oil paint, which takes forever to dry and would have filled the whole house with the smell, which the children wouldn’t have liked, either.”
At least in the glory days of his career, with his Bakelite experiments, Van Meegeren had gone to enormous trouble to make sure that his paintings could pass the technical tests they were most likely to face. Myatt never bothered. He did carry