The Conman

The Conman: How One Man Fooled the Modern Art Establishment
By Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo
Gibson Square £14.99, 346 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

There is something fascinating about art forgery. Along with the sense that this is a victimless crime (fools being deservedly separated from their money), comes the Schadenfreude of knowing that the world’s top experts and institutions can be so easily hoodwinked – in this case, by a silver-tongued conman and his tame counterfeiter.

But the Drewe-Myatt faking scandal of the 1990s left a litter of victims in its wake, both human and institutional. This new book (published at the end of last year in the US, titled Provenance) unravels what Scotland Yard called “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century.” It shows how the conman – “professor” Drewe – promised money to museums and contaminated the archives of the Tate, the ICA and the Victoria and Albert Museum by creating false provenances. These were then used to palm off fakes by Giacometti, Braque, Chagall, Nicholson, Dubuffet and many others.

The story of how the penniless artist, John Myatt, was drawn into a web of deceit by John Drewe is well known. Recruited through a Private Eye classified ad, Myatt initially thought the pastiches he was painting for his sophisticated new friend were not destined to be resold. When he faced up to the truth, it was too late to turn back. Meanwhile Drewe was busily creating documentation for Myatt’s work, manufacturing false stamps, razoring out pages of catalogues in museum archives and replacing them with images of his fakes.

A few people rang alarm bells, notably the stubborn Mary Lisa Palmer, director of the Giacometti Association in Paris. She spotted a Giacometti fake in a Sotheby’s catalogue in 1991 and hopped on a plane to London. Seeing the work confirmed her doubts. But its provenance was impeccable, so Palmer went to investigate at the Tate. There she discovered that its archives had been doctored, with the crass forgery inserted into a gallery catalogue.

But it would be another four years before the net closed on Drewe and Myatt. The turning point came when Batsheva Goudsmid, Drewe’s estranged companion, went to the police with incriminating letters.

Confronted, Myatt readily confessed, and a raid on Drewe’s home turned up sackfuls of material. The book gives fascinating detail of the police investigation and its strategy: with so many fakes, investigators had to decide what, in the authors’ words, “would not only make the best evidence but would appeal to a middlebrow jury”. “Jurors might not have much sympathy for a collector who had paid several thousand pounds for a childish rendering of a cow – a diseased cow, at that,” the police reasoned.

Drewe managed to get his trial put off for months with various medical pretexts. When finally forced to appear, he claimed that he was the victim of a convoluted government conspiracy of crown spies and arms smugglers. He was found guilty and sentenced to six years in prison. Myatt got one year and was released after four months.

It is a pity the book has no illustrations, but the story it has to tell is enthralling, even if the art world doesn’t come out of it very well. Myatt’s fakes (painted with ordinary house paint diluted with KY Jelly) should have been easier to spot. Drewe’s far-fetched claims should have alarmed his interlocutors earlier. But in the art market, museums are desperate for money, while dealers are desperate for supply. In addition, many experts don’t want to lose face.

According to a police source: “We recovered about 80 paintings that Myatt had created. The remainder [some 120] are still out there somewhere and probably held by ‘experts’ that don’t (and didn’t), want to own up to having been duped into buying a fake that they thought might be authentic.”

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