The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [35]
To make his paintings seem as if they had been around for a few Decades, Myatt dirtied them up a bit. Here, too, he favored the rough and ready. He would empty the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag over a painting, rub the grime around a little, and then vacuum away the excess.
Early on, Myatt had fretted more about technique. In New York once, he’d gone to an art museum and seen firsthand, for the first time, some of the Monets he’d been copying from art books. “I’d been spending ages pulling the brush hairs out of my paintings, but as you looked at the real ones in slanting light, you’d see hairs stuck in the paint.” Myatt quit hovering over his Monets.
MYATT HAS DONE well from his life of crime. He did serve four months in prison, but that’s over now (and even behind bars, Myatt found that his artistic skill served him well, as he bartered drawings of his fellow inmates for phone cards and similar valuables). The notoriety of his case has brought him more work than he can handle. Once again he is selling “genuine fakes,” but this time he shows them in London galleries, and the policemen who arrested him years ago now sip wine at the opening-night parties. Michael Douglas has bought the rights to his story.
Still, Myatt thinks occasionally of the bad old days. “We shouldn’t have done hundreds and hundreds of paintings. What we should have done was two or three big paintings, a big Cubist painting by Braque, a big painting by Giacometti, or a Cézanne. It was always my little fantasy. Drewe would never have done that. I tried to talk him into doing it, strangely enough, which shows I wasn’t as lily white as I like to pretend to be. Instead of doing a painting a week it would have been much better, from a criminal point of view, if we’d done one a year.”
But what about the experts?
Myatt pooh-poohs the risk. “Someone would have said, ‘No, these aren’t any good.’* But someone else would have said, ‘Oh yes, they are.’ And that’s what happens all the time anyway. If you came up with an authentic Cézanne, someone would say, ‘It’s a fake.’ And someone else would say, “No, it isn’t.’ You just have to hope that your expert is more important than their expert.”
Myatt mimics the plummy tones of an overconfident connoisseur. “‘We have here an undiscovered Cézanne from the important period when he had moved to Aix-en-Provence when it was dah de dah dah, and this is a seminal study from the point at which his style matured into blah blah. And here he’s considering the structure of the two-dimensional surface as well as the three-dimensional effect of the recessive colors that he’s using in the half-distance…’ Well, you can imagine it all, can’t you?
“All you’ve got to do is go down to some flea market on the Left Bank and buy a painting from 1881 or something,” Myatt continues. “Those paintings are right there. That’s your first move. Then you’ve got to scrape the old paint off. You’d have to get authentic paints. I’m not sure how you’d do it. Presumably there’s someone somewhere, some collector, who has a collection of tubes of oil paint. That’s what sensible criminals would do. There are pitfalls in the process I can’t perceive, obviously, but if I can work my way around it intellectually, I’m sure there are people out there who have done it. And are doing it now, as we speak.
“I’m revealing a side of my character I’m not particularly proud of, but this is how it should have been done,” Myatt says. He is a mild man,