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If it’s good, is that bad?

PROVENANCE:
How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art
Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo
306 pp. Penguin $26.95

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

In 1986 painter John Myatt was close to the end of his rope. He had a knack for copying the masters, but the precious skills he honed in art school never produced the kind of aesthetic vision the art world wants. For a time he gave up painting and had some small success as a song writer. Salisbury and Sujo have made the rest of his life into an absorbing detective story.

On a lark he produced for his boss two copies of works by the French painter Raoul Dufy, imitations that fooled people who owned real ones. He began advertising; he would produce facsimiles of famous paintings on commission. Copying old masters is not illegal; it’s a time-honored way for art students to learn technique. Myatt was doing it aboveboard, primarily for people who wanted something to match the couch.

Then a new client entered his life. John Drewe, an impeccably dressed gentleman who spoke with upper-class diction, told Myatt he was a professor of nuclear physics. He wanted a Matisse, then a Klee, then a couple of portraits in the seventeenth-century Dutch style. He paid handsomely for them, and always took time to talk at length with Myatt. The artist was flattered to be befriended by such an educated man. Not only did he speak about his own work—nuclear research, he said—he asked Myatt questions about the art establishment, painting technique, and the differences that distinguish masterpieces from second-rate work.

Although he had suspicions, the painter shut his eyes to them; he needed the money and he valued his friendship with Drewe. It wasn’t until 1990, when Drewe donated to the Tate Gallery two “Bissières” that Myatt had painted, that he understood what he was involved in.

Simply forging art is one thing, but Drewe carried his scam to unprecedented lengths. In the art market, the value of a work is enhanced by its provenance, the paper trail that can be traced back through dealers and collectors to the artist himself, in order to prove the work is genuine. Drewe conned his way into the archives of both the Tate and the Victoria and Albert museums and created bogus provenances, inserting references to Myatt’s fakes into catalogues and other records. His provenances were so believable that expert buyers failed to notice the art works were painted with ordinary house paint.

It was not an easy task to bring Drewe to justice. The Art and Antiques Squad, something of a stepchild at Scotland Yard, at first lacked the manpower to trace the convolutions and cul-de-sacs Drewe had created. The con man had hired a number of “runners,” accomplices who peddled the bogus works, some not knowing they were dealing in fakes. Finally beefed up by the presence of four members of the Organized Crime Unit, the art squad still found itself overwhelmed. In the end, to make the case understandable to a jury, these detectives narrowed the prosecution down to nine paintings out of many hundreds.

In the courtroom Drewe fired his defense team and insisted on representing himself—later he would appeal on the grounds he was denied proper representation. The British press turned the story into a sensational case. Delayed time and again by Drewe’s claims of ill health, the trial lasted six months. With his condescending and long-winded answers, Drewe proved to be his own worst enemy, blaming forgeries on his associates, some of them also victims of the scam, and claiming he was framed by secret intelligence cabals. He was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud, forgery, theft, and using a false instrument with intent; he served four years in prison.

The Drewe case brings to light one of the conundrums of the art market: If a work is aesthetically good, why does it become much more valuable if it can be proven to be the work of a famous artist? “If a drawing is a good one,” mused one connoisseur, “does it not have an intrinsic worth even if it is not by the artist it purports to be by?” A famous forger put it this way: “Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”

Salisbury and Sujo comment that “the art world holds no fury like the expert duped.” And yet, they calculate, a big percentage of the works in the world’s museums are forgeries: “Historians and dealers continue to be seduced by the notion that lost treasures are out there waiting to be found.”

These authors racked up years of research to try to pin down the slippery John Drewe - a.k.a. John Cockett, Dr. Carnall, Raymond Dunne, Robin Coverdale, and others ad infinitum. They interviewed dealers, archivists, researchers, detectives, museum staffers, connoisseurs, collectors, and the runners Drewe employed. Some were helpful; some could not bear to think or talk about the con man who deceived them so thoroughly. Drewe proved to be as bombastic and unrepentant as ever. A willing source was Myatt, who served a short sentence and has turned his life around.

Provenance reads like a good mystery. It’s also a testimony to the labor that writers will put into a book. We ought all to be grateful.

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Freelance journalist Marty Carlock, author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, has published more than 1,600 articles in thirty-plus publications. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines and for her own amusement.

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