Provenance Read online

  In the early twentieth century museums began setting up archives to store these records. It was and remains the role of the archivist to make sure that files are updated and, most importantly, that they are never corrupted. Access to museum archives is closely monitored, with entrée restricted to those having a legitimate need.

  Despite the heavy burden archives bear in protecting the integrity of works of art, archivists are the beggars of the art world. It is far easier to persuade patrons to donate works from their private collections for display on the museum walls, or to write a check to fund the purchase of a new work or build a museum wing, than it is to convince them to fund the expansion or refinement of an archivist’s database. Archivists are always on the lookout for the rare person of means who understands the importance of this side of the art world.

  For Sarah Fox-Pitt, John Drewe was precisely that person: a wealthy, educated gentleman who valued the role of art in sensitizing society to beauty, and of archives in protecting art. She and the rest of the Tate’s senior staff were delighted when Drewe signaled that he was prepared to take his interest in the arts to the next level and was contemplating his first donation, two 1950s works by the French painter Roger Bissière, from Drewe’s own collection.

  The Tate accepted the offer and promptly arranged a show of appreciation, inviting Drewe and Myatt to the museum’s exclusive aerie for an afternoon reception to recognize Drewe’s act of generosity. Those at the Tate knew from experience that given too much time to think it over, many donors lost their initial enthusiasm and failed to fulfill their promises. But Drewe was not that kind of man. Within days the paintings had been delivered to the Tate.

  Now, in the elegantly appointed conference room above the public galleries, with the reception under way, Myatt sat quietly as Drewe, the principal guest of honor, chatted with his hosts and dropped names: Sir Alan Bowness, former head of the Tate; Bill McAlister, director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; the art critic David Sylvester; and the pioneering architect Jane Beverly Drew.

  Myatt watched, mesmerized. Drewe was a full-blown wonder, his speech smoothly modulated, his fertile mind drawing upon his broad knowledge of a whole array of topics and interests. Even his occasional bad joke was rewarded with polite ripples of laughter. Even Drewe seemed charmed by his own persona and its power to command the attention of this influential and powerful group.

  Two waiters poured tea. Myatt looked over his cup at Drewe. He had often wondered why a research scientist would immerse himself in the imprecise world of art appreciation. Did Drewe need a break from the tedium of physics research? Did he need validation, regular and open praise for his erudition? It didn’t seem so. Drewe’s house, his cars, his dining habits, his accomplishments all suggested a high level of self-confidence.

  The grand moment of the reception finally arrived. Two Tate conservators wearing white gloves came in carrying a pair of five-foot-tall paintings jointly titled Spring Woodland. The works were beautifully composed, semiabstract figures resembling birds and vegetation, set against an electric-blue background. Conversation stopped as everyone at the table acknowledged the gifts. There was a moment of respectful silence.

  “Ahh, the Bissières, how lovely,” someone said, in a voice barely above a whisper.

  Myatt was stunned. He had painted the two “Bissières” himself just two weeks before.

  1

  “I WANT A NICE MATISSE”

  We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  John Drewe and John Myatt, perpetrators of what Scotland Yard has called “the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century,” had first met four years earlier, in 1986, when Myatt’s life was in free fall. His wife had abandoned him, leaving him alone to care for their two children, Amy and Sam, both still in diapers, and he was desperate. The family lived on a narrow lane in the small rural community of Sugnall, Staffordshire, in a farmhouse that had once belonged to his parents. The house was old and run-down, with no central heating or hot water, and was warmed only by an ancient pale-blue Rayburn cooker, into which Myatt fed coal whenever he could afford it. The day’s wash was usually draped over a drying rack above the kitchen table. The furniture, most of it threadbare, had belonged to his parents too. He lived frugally, but his meager earnings as a part-time art teacher hardly covered the bills, and he had been forced to go on the dole.

  Myatt was not generally prone to self-pity, but these were hard times. In the middle of the night he would wake, overcome by the feeling that he was washed up, trapped in the rolling hills of western central England.

  Things hadn’t always been so gloomy. As a boy, Myatt had shown musical and artistic promise, and had been encouraged by his parents to attend art school, where his teachers recognized his compositional skills. They were particularly impressed by his knack for copying the masters, a talent he attributed to an innate ability to “stand in someone else’s shoes.” Brush in hand, surrounded by art books he’d borrowed from the library, he would fall into a kind of empathetic trance and lunge at the canvas, stroking away and then stepping back to imagine how the artist might have pulled the painting off.

  After college he won a grant for free studio space in nearby Lichfield, the hometown of Samuel Johnson. Myatt worked, ate, and slept in the studio. Like every other young artist, he was sure that he had one great canvas inside him, and that someday it would spring forth, fully articulated.

  Myatt was intrigued by perspective, composition, and brushwork. Having grown up in a countryside dotted with ancient churches, he liked nothing better than to spend weeks concentrating on their pointed spires and flying buttresses, getting the tone down and putting each brushstroke in the right place. He once spent eight weeks painting a single building, down to every last brick of its facade. Occasionally, his works toured central England in group shows, and in the early 1970s he was chosen by Lichfield to paint a mural of Samuel Johnson.

  But even Myatt had to admit that his work was overly traditional, passé, and uncommercial. The London art world of the time wasn’t looking for inspiration in country churches and pastoral landscapes. Instead, pop artists like Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, and Bridget Riley were all the rage, emulating their U.S. counterparts Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. While the arbiters of the art world recognized that Myatt’s work was technically adept, they deemed it “academic,” or dull, or worse, a bit of both.

  After years of late nights in the tiny Lichfield studio, Myatt realized there was little chance that he would ever make a reasonable living as an artist. He gave the studio up, more an act of surrender than of financial necessity. He knew himself. He was too involved with the minutiae of his craft to hold out any hope that some breakout creative inspiration would rocket him to fame and fortune. Reluctantly, he put aside his paintbrushes and tried his hand at writing and recording pop songs at home, sending his three-minute novelty tunes to London by post.

  To his astonishment, a music publishing company offered him a contract, and for the next several years he earned a living cranking out the tunes and working as a studio musician. In the evenings, whenever he could, he would paint portraits of his friends or members of the church choir or the local pastor. He had almost given up on producing a hit when in 1979, during an all-nighter at a London studio, a quirky little reggae number called “Silly Games” leaped out of the grand piano. Six months later, after he and a colleague had knocked it into shape, the song hit the charts. Its distinguishing feature was singer Janet Kay’s thin voice straining to reach climactic ultrahigh notes in a catchy if mediocre melody that appealed to young Britons.

  When the royalties began to stream in, Myatt split his time between the countryside, where his wife had founded a promising little herbal business, and the music company in London, where he came across an opportunity to put his extensive art training to use. His boss, who had been to dinner at the home of the owne
rs of the megastore Marks & Spencer, had been impressed by a Raoul Dufy that the couple owned. Myatt’s boss told him about the work and said he wished he had a spare hundred thousand pounds or so to buy a Dufy for himself. On a whim, Myatt offered to paint one or two for him. The boss was amused but unconvinced.

  Myatt had educated himself broadly in art during the years when he aspired to a career as a painter, and he relished the challenge. The prospect of picking up a brush professionally, of making money doing what he most loved, energized him. He and his boss thumbed through books on Dufy until the man took a particular liking to two images, one of the great casino in Nice, the other of a landscape over a bay.

  Dufy, a French fauvist, had specialized in bright, simple colors, and Myatt thought it would be relatively easy to copy the style. Dufy’s fluid brushstrokes were something else altogether, and it turned out to be no small task to replicate them. Still, it gave him a feeling of kinship with the painter, of a collaboration across time.

  When he was done with the first painting, he forged the artist’s signature on the front and added a note on the back naming his boss as the person who had commissioned the work. It was all in good fun, and it made him a little money. Myatt’s boss paid him £200 for each piece,1 then spent £1,600 on the frames. After he’d hung them, he invited the Marks & Spencer pair over to dinner. Without mentioning Myatt, he showed them the two paintings.

  “These are better than the one we’ve got!” they exclaimed.

  Others too were fooled by Myatt’s work, his boss told him. One art historian friend swooned when she saw the fake Dufys and swore she could detect Matisse’s influence. Myatt roared when he heard this.

  In the meantime, Myatt’s brief career as a songwriter was hitting the skids. “Silly Games” turned out to be his only hit. He couldn’t produce a follow-up. Within two or three years, the music company went under, and Myatt’s royalties and retainers dried up. Soon after, his mother and father died, and then his wife had their second child, Sam, an event that had a drastically unsettling effect on her. She began to withdraw from the family, and several months after Sam’s birth she fell in love with a man who cut a romantic figure and announced that she was leaving Myatt and the kids.

  At forty-one, Myatt felt his life was over. A failed songwriter, portraitist, and landscape painter, he’d been reduced to part-time work teaching children how to draw, and now he was a failed husband too. His productive years gone, he could no longer define himself by the nobility of his aspirations. Though he had never been overly ambitious, he felt a crushing disappointment in himself. When he found himself with less than £100 in the bank in 1986, he decided he had no choice but to try the fake-art route again, knowing from his experience with his former boss that there was a market.

  Myatt took out an ad in London’s satirical biweekly Private Eye, a magazine with a cynical and well-heeled readership that he guessed would be drawn to his offer of “genuine fakes,” facsimiles of “19th and 20th century paintings, from £150.” To his relief, the ad brought in a trickle of interest and a few commissions. One client wanted a copy of his favorite Claude Monet landscape. Another wanted a Joseph Turner shipwreck. Most requests were a little more creative—a banquet or a woodland chase scene in the style of a particular artist, or a portrait of a client’s father, a retired naval commander, in the grand style of the eighteenth-century British artist Joshua Reynolds. In an art book, Myatt found a picture of a serious-looking old salt with a chestful of medals, copied it, and gave it a new face. Then there was the odd commission for a portrait of a relative or a family pet in an unusual setting—an uncle dodging bombs in the aerial blitz of London during World War II, a puppy chewing a bone during the Battle of Agincourt. One joker wanted a portrait of himself as a skeleton having intercourse with a fat nun in the ruins of a Gothic abbey.

  There was nothing illegal or improper in what Myatt was doing. For centuries, copying paintings had been standard practice for artists and art students. In the studios of Rembrandt and Rubens, young assistants often copied the works of their masters to perfect their own technique and to aid the master painter. These studios functioned as workshops, producing paintings entirely by the master or sketched by him and then “filled in” by an assistant. Some assistants specialized in heads, others in backgrounds. When the work was complete, the master would study the canvas, make corrections, add a final detail, a glaze, and a signature. Art historians have devoted entire books to the task of categorizing the gradations of masters’ paintings, differentiating between those done solely by the master and workshop “originals” painted or partially painted by assistants in the spirit of the auteur.

  Myatt too had copied a variety of masters for his art studies, sitting for hours in museums, sketching in front of a Rembrandt or a Reynolds. Now he was simply trying to turn a profit from his copyist’s gifts. As long as his clients were willing to pay £150 or more (the price depended on the size and complexity of the commission), he did his best to accommodate. Rarely did he hear from clients a second time, but he didn’t take this as a measure of his talent. After all, they were not serious collectors. There was the occasional art lover who couldn’t afford the real thing, but his clients for the most part were cultural tourists, mall safarians who weren’t ashamed to buy a painting that would go nicely with the curtains. In the same vein, hundreds of reproductions of famous paintings were routinely made for high-end hotels, interior decorators, and château owners.

  After Myatt’s ad had run a few times, he picked up the phone one day to hear a polished voice speaking with perfect diction and a Cambridge accent that telegraphed the privilege of the English upper classes. The caller introduced himself as Dr. John Drewe, a London-based physicist who wanted to commission a piece.

  “I want a nice Matisse,” he said, without being too specific. “Something colorful, memorable, not too large.”

  Myatt said he could have one ready within a couple of weeks.

  “Perfect,” said Drewe. “Would you mind bringing it into the city for me?”

  Myatt agreed to meet the professor at the Euston train station, one of London’s main terminals, in a fortnight or so.

  He finished the painting one day in late summer, a vivid little canvas with two colorful figures in the center. During the two-hour journey past farmlands and ruins and tidy backyards with minuscule gardens, through the outskirts of London and row upon row of cramped two-story brick houses, he could smell the varnish under the black plastic wrapper.

  Soon after he sat down at the station pub with the Matisse, Myatt felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Drewe, a tall man wearing a good mohair coat and handmade leather shoes, and sporting a rather dated Dirk Bogarde haircut from the 1950s. Myatt thought it was peculiar and a bit showy.

  “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Drewe,” he said.

  “Call me John,” said the professor.

  Drewe ordered beers as Myatt pulled down the plastic wrapper and showed him the top half of the Matisse.

  “Very nice,” said Drewe. “Exactly what I was looking for.” He handed Myatt an envelope containing his payment in cash and proposed a toast to Matisse.

  Drewe said he was a university lecturer in nuclear physics and worked as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. He was developing two new technologies for the military: One was a compressed-gas propulsion system for use on nuclear submarines, the other a landmineproof, battle-ready fire-suppression packet that could be installed beneath military vehicles.

  Despite his breathtaking set of academic credentials, Drewe was a skilled and amusing raconteur with none of the haughtiness Myatt had expected from such an upmarket city gent. Drewe joked about the government ministers he met in the course of his job and spoke breezily about his work as a scientist and inventor. Myatt’s life had been reduced to a run-down farmhouse and two young children, so chatting with Drewe was like a shot of adrenaline. Myatt found him hypnotic, a combination of charm and challenge, able to process and expand upon any topic o
f conversation. The professor spoke so quickly and with such authority on such a wide variety of subjects that Myatt could hardly keep up. “It was like going to the pictures,” he later recalled. “He just took me out of my world.”

  Drewe ordered a second round and asked Myatt whether he would paint him another early-twentieth-century work, this one in the style of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Myatt agreed, and they shook on it.

  On his way home on the train, Myatt reflected on what had been a very good first meeting. It dawned on him that he had been suffering from an insidious form of low-level isolation and loneliness, and that in some profound sense he’d taken leave of the real world. The work he was doing for Drewe might be a way back.

  2

  CANVAS GREED

  Over the next several months, Drewe became Myatt’s most valuable client. After Myatt had delivered the Matisse, he went to work on the Klee, and then on two seventeenth-century-style Dutch portraits and a seascape for Drewe’s wife.

  Their phone conversations were always a pleasure. Drewe brimmed with good stories and a palpable optimism, and each time Myatt brought him a fresh painting, the professor had an envelope full of cash for him.

  A few months after their first meeting, Drewe invited him to the city for dinner. Myatt took the Underground to Golders Green, a wealthy, predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Greater London, where Drewe lived with his common-law wife, Batsheva Goudsmid, and their two children, Nadav and Atarah, who were a few years older than Myatt’s children.

  Drewe was waiting outside the station when Myatt arrived. Together they walked to the house at 30 Rotherwick Road, a dark-red Teutonic brick building with heavy timber lintels and bay windows on a street that was one of the tidiest in the neighborhood, a model of quiet taste. The houses were all stately and anonymous, with identical iron gratings along the front and little gardens in the back.