Odd this day
Artist John Myatt was sentenced to a year in prison for conspiracy to defraud, after painting around 200 fake works, including Chagalls and Matisses over a period of eight years, usually in household emulsion mixed with KY Jelly.
He only served four months, but he had testified against his (senior) partner in crime, John Drewe, who masterminded the whole thing. Drewe got six years, which is perhaps not surprising, considering that his defence was that there were 4,000 fakes, and that they’d been sold to finance international arms deals.
Our story starts in 1985 (or thereabouts), when Myatt, skint art teacher and single father, put a small advert in Private Eye:
Genuine fakes. Nineteen and twentieth century paintings from £150. Phone …
Someone phoned — a ‘Professor’ Drewe, nuclear physicist, looking for art for his large house in Golders Green (which actually belonged to his partner, who thought he worked for the Ministry of Defence). He bought a few paintings, and called Myatt one day with the news that he’d taken a work ‘by’ Cubist Albert Gleizes to Christie’s, who’d given him £25,000 for it. He gave Myatt half, and a rather dubious enterprise was born. Drewe kept a larger share of the money over the years, but then, as it turned out, he did rather a lot of the work.
Creating false provenance for a fake isn’t easy, and Drewe dedicated himself to the task. He inveigled his way into archives at the ICA, the V&A, and the Tate. He took apart a catalogue from a 1955 exhibition which had included Chagall, Giacometti and others, created new pages which included Myatt’s fakes, put them in and sewed the catalogue back together, then left it in the archive for the ‘benefit’ of anyone who went to check the authenticity of the work he was presenting.
He got friends to fake letters, tricked a religious order into verifying some works, and even set up a firm called Art Research Associates, through which he posed as an archivist who could authenticate art. To get access to the V&A’s National Art Library, he’d given as a reference a doctor called John Cockett, who wrote back to say Drewe was “a man of integrity”. Cockett was Drewe’s real name.
Eventually, people started to get suspicious, the police started to investigate, and when they turned up at Myatt’s house, they found a man who was heartily sick of the whole business and sang, in some relief, like a canary. Drewe was arrested, skipped bail, and got tracked down when police followed his mother to his hideout. He fired his lawyer because they wouldn’t use the ‘international man of mystery’ story, and conducted his own unsuccessful defence.
After his release, Myatt heard from one of his arresting officers: could he paint a portrait? Soon, the prosecution barristers got in touch, and soon Myatt had a career not only as an artist, but as a talking head on documentaries about art fraud, and an advisor to the police about the matter. He can also sell his own work for thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of pounds. The last anyone heard of Drewe, he was sentenced to eight years for conning a retired teacher out of her life savings.
