A 20th-Century Master Scam

Forging a Giacometti or a Braque was the easy part. The genius of the con rested in faking the provenance. The art world may never know how much damage was done.

Myatt confessed on the spot to having drawn and painted what the police later said were about 200 forgeries in the styles of nine modern masters and personally delivering them to London, one roughly every six weeks, to a man by the name of John Drewe. Scotland Yard already suspected Drewe of masterminding the sale of Myatt's forgeries (and perhaps those of at least one other painter, still unidentified) through the auction houses Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips, as well as reputable dealers in London, Paris and New York. Then Myatt told Searle something the police didn't know: that he'd made most of the pictures out of an easily detectable household emulsion paint developed in the mid-60's, decades after most of the paintings were supposed to have been executed. In some cases, he used K-Y Jelly as a medium to add body and fluidity to his brushstrokes. Myatt had no idea how many


Seven months later, on April 6, 1996, after recording conversations between the partners, detectives raided Drewe's home in the tony London suburb of Reigate, where they found hundreds of documents from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Art. Sitting on Drewe's kitchen table were two catalogues missing from the V. and A.'s National Art Library, still in the museum bag that Drewe had used to smuggle them out. There were rubber stamps bearing the authenticating seals of the Tate and of an order of monastic priests; receipts for the sale of paintings across continents going back decades; certificates of authenticity from the estates of Dubuffet and Giacometti; also the more mundane instruments of document forgery: scissors, razors, correction fluid, glue, tape.


The police say that John Myatt produced some 200 forgeries of modern masters. Many found their way onto the art market. Top: A 1965 Giacometti, titled "Portrait of a Woman." Bottom: A fake Giacometti executed by Myatt, dated 1955.

As police and art experts soon discovered, forging masterpieces, as Myatt had done, was the least of it. Drewe's real genius lay in his ability to authenticate Myatt's works through bogus provenances -- the history of a work of art, from its creation through its purchasings and exhibitions to its current ownership, crucial elements in the sale of any picture. It would turn out that over the previous 10 years, Drewe had systematically infiltrated some of the most security-conscious art archives in the world, altering the provenances of genuine paintings to establish a lineage making way for Myatt's mostly unexceptional forgeries, and then seeding the collections with false records that provided the pictures with instant heritage. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented. The method is, too. Archivists may never know how much of their libraries have been compromised. Of the approximately 200 "masterworks" Myatt painted and Drewe sold, the police have located only 73. Drewe did more than slip phony pictures into a market hungry for important contemporary art -- he altered art history. The police call the con the "the biggest contemporary art fraud the 20th century has seen." The British prosecution office declared Drewe a menace to Britain's cultural patrimony.

The scandal has not only upset the market for the artists Myatt forged, but it has also exposed the art industry as its own worst enemy -- too reliant on sources of authenticity that are vulnerable to manipulation and riddled with conflicts of interest that invite corruption. Drewe's story says less about his own brilliance than about the readiness -- if not the willingness -- of the art world to be deceived.

"It's one of the most extensive frauds in the visual arts," says Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art. "What distinguishes this case is how methodical Drewe was, and how well he understood the process of validation. His manipulation of the system is as interesting and troubling as the forgeries themselves."