Provenance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - “I WANT A NICE MATISSE”

  Chapter 2 - CANVAS GREED

  Chapter 3 - ART FOR SALE

  Chapter 4 - CROSSING THE LINE

  Chapter 5 - MIBUS WANTS HIS MONEY BACK

  Chapter 6 - SELF-MADE MAN

  Chapter 7 - WRECKERS OF CIVILIZATION

  Chapter 8 - AT THE EASEL

  Chapter 9 - THE FINE ART OF PROVENANCE

  Chapter 10 - FULL SPEED AHEAD

  Chapter 11 - AFTER GIACOMETTI

  Chapter 12 - A SINISTER MESSAGE

  Chapter 13 - THE BOOKWORM

  Chapter 14 - THE PAPER TRAIL

  Chapter 15 - FALLING OFF A LOG

  Chapter 16 - THE BOW TIE

  Chapter 17 - INTO THE WHIRLWIND

  Chapter 18 - STANDING NUDE

  Chapter 19 - THE POND MAN

  Chapter 20 - MYATT’S BLUE PERIOD

  Chapter 21 - THE CHAMELEON

  Chapter 22 - A LOADED BRIEFCASE

  Chapter 23 - THE AUSCHWITZ CONCERT

  Chapter 24 - EXTREME PRUDENCE

  Chapter 25 - WE’RE NOT ALONE

  Chapter 26 - A SLOW BURN . . .

  Chapter 27 - THE ART SQUAD

  Chapter 28 - THE MACARONI CAPER

  Chapter 29 - NICKED

  Chapter 30 - ALADDIN’S CAVE

  Chapter 31 - THE FOX

  Chapter 32 - DREWE DESCENDING

  Chapter 33 - SOUTH

  Chapter 34 - THE TRIAL

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Acknowledgements

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ALSO BY LANEY SALISBURY

  The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men

  In a Race Against an Epidemic

  (coauthor Gay Salisbury)

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, 2009

  All rights reserved

  Excerpt from House of Cards by David Mamet. Copyright © 1985, 1987 by David Mamet.

  Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Salisbury, Laney.

  Provenance: how a con man and a forger rewrote the history of modern art / Laney Salisbury

  and Aly Sujo.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10500-9

  1. Myatt, John, 1945- 2. Art forgers—England—Biography. 3. Drewe, John, 1948-

  4. Impostors and imposture—England—Biography. I. Sujo, Aly. II. Title.

  ND1662.M93S26 2009

  364.16’3—dc22

  [B]

  2009003552

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  FOR ALY SUJO, WITH LOVE.

  AUG. 26, 1949-OCT. 4, 2008

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE GENESIS OF A SCAM

  John Drewe

  professor, physicist, man of many guises, and the brilliant mastermind of one of the great art frauds of the twentieth century.

  Batsheva Goudsmid

  Drewe’s common-law wife; once loyal, she is eventually the key to his downfall.

  John Myatt

  impoverished painter and single father who sees Drewe as his savior.

  THE GUARDIANS OF THE ARCHIVES

  Bill McAlister

  head of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; cannot believe his good fortune when Professor John Drewe shows up with an interest in funding the upkeep of the ICA’s rich archive.

  Sarah Fox-Pitt

  formidable doyenne of archive acquisition at the Tate Gallery whom Drewe reels in with lunches at Claridge’s and promises of historical documents.

  THE ART DEALERS

  Adrian Mibus

  respected Australian gallery owner who falls for Drewe’s smoke and mirrors and buys several of Myatt’s fakes.

  David Stern

  Notting Hill dealer who unwittingly helps Drewe’s scam reach across the Atlantic to New York.

  Armand Bartos Jr.

  debonair New York dealer who still insists the “Giacometti” he bought is the best he’s ever seen.

  Dominic Taglialatella

  New York dealer who is taken in by one of the more expensive “Giacomettis.”

  Rene Gimpel

  fourth-generation art dealer nagged by misgivings about a “Ben Nicholson” until his restoration expert, Jane Zagel, confirms his worst fears.

  Peter Nahum

  London dealer; among the first to alert Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad that he’s been hoodwinked by a rogue.

  THE UNWITTING PROVIDERS OF PROVENANCE

  John Sperr

  elderly antiquarian bookstore owner whose shop becomes a source of material and inspiration for Drewe’s elaborate provenance.

  Father Paul Addison

  head of a Roman Catholic religious order in England whose goodwill Drewe abuses to claim provenance of works from centuries-old priories.

  Alan Bowness

  former head of the Tate Gallery and son-in-law of the painter Ben Nicholson who innocently authenticates several fake Nicholsons.

  Jane Drew

  renowned British architect with close ties to Le Corbusier whom Drewe befriends, lending him a different kind of “provenance”: personal cachet.

  Terry Carroll

  physicist sufficiently impressed by the “professor” that he never questions Drewe’s professional provenance as a physicist until close to the end.

  Daniel Stoakes

  down-on-his luck childhood friend who agrees to pose as owner of a few works, only later to bemoan, “I was like a ripe plum ready to be picked from the tree.”

  Peter Harris

  larger-than-life personality with an early morning paper route and a penchant for war
tales who Drewe fictitiously transforms into a fabled arms dealer and art collector.

  THE SALES FORCE

  Danny Berger

  neighbor recruited by Drewe to expand his operation who successfully sells “modern masters” out of his garage.

  Clive Belman

  unemployed former jewelry salesman and actor who joins Drewe’s operation unaware that the product line he is hawking is the equivalent of costume jewelry.

  Stuart Berkeley

  a London-based runner who takes the operation worldwide.

  Sheila Maskell

  independent and reputable New York-based art runner who sends Armand Bartos the Giacometti Standing Nude that will eventually help break the case.

  THE SKEPTICS

  Mary Lisa Palmer

  indefatigable director of the Giacometti Association whose persistent detective work puts her in conflict with the auction houses and galleries.

  Jennifer Booth

  Tate archivist who refuses to be swayed by Drewe’s benefactor status.

  THE SLEUTHOUNDS

  Richard Higgs

  London detective who cannot pin a case of arson on John Drewe but knows a scam artist when he sees one.

  Miki Volpe

  scrappy detective from the Yard’s Organised Crime Unit who has never heard the word “provenance” but knows how to build a case, brush stroke by brush stroke.

  Jonathan Searle

  Scotland Yard detective with a Cambridge pedigree in art history who proves as skilled at spotting fakes as in tracking down thugs.

  It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.

  —DAVID MAMET

  House of Games

  PROLOGUE

  One sunny April afternoon in 1990 two Englishmen strode up the steps of London’s Tate Gallery, passed beneath the imposing statues atop the pediment—Britannia, the lion, and the unicorn—and made their way through the grand portico into one of the world’s great museums. Both men had recently been welcomed into the narrow circle of curators, historians, and benefactors who gave the Tate its cachet, and today they were the special guests at a reception in their honor, to be held in one of the museum’s private conference rooms high above the galleries.

  The more distinguished of the two was Professor John Drewe, a nuclear physicist with a pencil-thin mustache and gray-blue eyes. Drewe was often seen riding through London in a chauffeured Bentley and lunching at the most exclusive restaurants with members of the art world’s aristocracy. It was said that he had amassed an extensive personal art collection, and that he lived extremely well.

  Today, as always, the professor held his head high. Everything about him, from his bearing to his clothes, suggested not just a gentleman of style and substance, but someone who expected deference in all his dealings.

  The other honored guest was John Myatt, a different sort altogether. A struggling painter and onetime pop musician with a peasant face straight out of Bruegel, he looked as though he would have been happier trudging through the moorlands of Staffordshire than standing awkwardly in the Tate’s lobby in his charity-shop suit. Myatt, in attendance as Drewe’s personal art historian, took his every cue from the professor, whom he considered not only a business partner but a mentor as well.

  A senior Tate staff member in a dark-blue Savile Row suit welcomed them and ushered them to the conference room upstairs. It was a large and impressive space, with polished wood floors, white walls, and bay windows looking out on the Thames. Around a solid oak table sat several of the Tate’s curators and senior staffers, including Nicholas Serota, the museum director, a slim, soft-spoken aesthete with rimless glasses, and Sarah Fox-Pitt, the formidable head of the Tate archives.

  Like most other museums, the Tate was a privileged community run by a small army of art experts and archivists. Since 1988 it had been led with quiet imperiousness by Serota, who had taken over at a time when new funding was a priority. Along with every other British cultural institution under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s free-market policies, the museum had been forced to compete for sponsors, and while it still received government grants, these hardly covered the major purchases and expansions Serota planned. He was dedicated to reinvigorating an institution that the Guardian newspaper once described as stuffy and uninspired, “a bastion of sluggishness.”

  An economist as well as an art historian, Serota was not shy about forming ties with corporations, wealthy new patrons, and private collectors. To float a single Cézanne exhibition, his accountants scheduled more than forty champagne receptions. Later Serota would inaugurate the Unilever Series, the Tate’s first brand-marketing collaboration with a company, and museum patrons visiting the restrooms would find the cubicles “adorned with a discreet notice—similar to those underneath some of its most famous paintings—thanking an anonymous benefactor for donating the wherewithal to keep them in toilet rolls,” as the Guardian reported.

  The director did not have much choice. The art market was booming, and the Tate and many other art institutions were being priced out of the business. To keep the museum’s goals and galleries afloat, its directors and trustees were forced to tango with any number of prospective donors.

  John Drewe was the perfect dance partner. He had been cultivating his relationship with the Tate for weeks, organizing lunches at the restaurant at Claridge’s Hotel for curators and senior staffers, including Fox-Pitt. If Serota embodied a new, less class-conscious Britain (he was known to wash his staff’s teacups after meetings), Fox-Pitt was Old World. A slim and sophisticated aristocrat in her late forties, she had worked at the Tate as a curator and archivist for more than a decade and had carved out her own fiefdom. Her archives had become an important part of the museum, and she was always looking for ways to expand. She had a reputation as a fearsome gatekeeper with X-ray vision that allowed her to peer into the heart of anyone she suspected of harboring anything less than the most altruistic motives toward the Tate. One luckless acquaintance who failed to pass muster recalled how Fox-Pitt looked through him, then past him, as if she had determined with a single glance that he was useless for her purposes.

  Drewe had piqued her interest from the start. He was versed in the archival arts and spoke eloquently about a cache of important letters, catalogs, and lecture notes that had passed through his hands over the years. He seemed to know a great deal about twentieth-century art records, particularly those of the avant-garde Institute of Contemporary Arts and the British Council, and he boasted about his own private archive, which he said contained letters from Picasso, lecture notes from Ben Nicholson, and a trove of material from Dubuffet and other major artists.

  In the course of his conversations with Fox-Pitt, Drewe talked at length about his background in the sciences. He had an impressive lineage: His father, a noted British physicist, had worked on the development of Britain’s atomic energy program, and had split the atom in Cambridge in the early 1930s. Drewe had followed in his father’s footsteps by going to work in the nuclear industry. In midlife he had become fascinated with art and its history, and as his collection grew he began to understand the importance of archives and documentation. He had developed a collector’s gratitude for the role played by archivists in the safeguarding of art history, and he hinted to Fox-Pitt that parts of his collection, as well as some other valuable historical documents, might find their proper home at the Tate. He also hinted that he was considering a substantial monetary donation to the archives.

  To the general public, museums are synonymous with the art that hangs on the walls. Few are aware that these institutions also take on the monumental task of assembling a record of an uninterrupted chain of ownership for each important work of art, from the moment of its creation to the sale of the work to its most recent owner. Exhibition catalogs help document the custodial history of the work, and receipts of sale show where and when it passed through private hands. Diaries, correspondence, and early drawings also she
d light on the works themselves. Today, it is this documentary record of ownership, as much as any professional evaluation of quality or artistic style, that confirms the authenticity of a work of art. In the world of art, the process is known as establishing provenance.