Provenance

Frequently there is a tender complicity between faker and victim: I want you to believe that such and such is the case, says the faker; if you want to believe it, too, and in order to cement that belief, you, for your part, will give me a great deal of money, and I, for my part, will laugh behind your back. The deal is done.

Adrian Mibus was becoming increasingly unhappy with the de Staël he had bought from Danny Berger. The longer he stared at it, the more he realized something was off—the brush-strokes seemed a little too stiff, and the painter’s casual elegance was absent. It had been nearly a year since he’d bought the piece and put it up in his home. Now, in the summer of 1989, he decided to get a second opinion. He took it down, wrapped it carefully, and brought it across the Channel to Paris to show to the artist’s widow.

As heiress to the estate, Madame de Staël retained what in France is known as the droit moral, an absolute right to judge an artist’s oeuvre and declare whether or not a work is authentic. The droit moral is legally binding in France, where it often serves as the ultimate arbiter in disputed cases of forgery.

As soon as she saw the canvas, the widow de Staël expressed her doubts. What disturbed her even more than the painting itself was the inscription on the back—the scrawled reference to a walk in the park—and the signature, “Nicholas de Staël.”

Her husband, a Russian émigré who had settled in France, always spelled his name “Nicolas.” As for the alleged promenade through the park with “Mrs. Richardson,” Madame de Staël knew nothing about it.

When Mibus returned to London with the painting, he tracked Professor Drewe down through Danny Berger and told him he suspected the de Staël was “wrong.” The artist’s widow was not convinced that the work was her husband’s, and a Parisian dealer named Jean-François Jaeger, one of the foremost experts on de Staël, believed it was a fake.

Drewe suggested that they discuss the matter over lunch at White’s, a private members’ club near Mibus’s gallery. Mibus assumed they would have a quick, conciliatory meal and wrap up the whole unfortunate affair, but Drewe avoided the subject of the de Staël. He motioned for the waitress and ordered a three-course meal. He spoke quickly, as if he’d downed half a dozen espressos, and when the food came, he made a pass at the waitress, a thin young woman with a boyish haircut. She ignored him. Drewe was unfazed and continued chatting.

Not to worry, said Drewe. The work was genuine. Opening his briefcase, he removed two large photographs of another de Staël that had also been signed “Nicholas” and slid them across the table. He explained to Mibus that de Staël was known to have used the English spelling of his name occasionally.

Mibus heard him out. Like any other European or American dealer, he understood that while the droit moral added weight in disputes over authenticity, it was by no means the deciding factor outside France. Why should the opinion of a family member count for more than that of an expert or scholar? True, Jaeger thought the piece was a fake, but hadn’t Christie’s approved it the previous year?

Drewe perhaps noticed the doubt flickering across Mibus’s face and hinted that de Staël had had an affair with the woman in the park, and that the widow was letting jealousy get in the way of good judgment. He told Mibus that the piece had previously belonged to John Catch, a key member of a consortium of military defense contractors that owned a large collection of artworks. Drewe himself was a member of the consortium as well as its official representative delegated to sell the group’s artworks.

He ordered another bottle of wine and began to talk about his own career. Mibus listened politely. Drewe said that his research firm, AceTech Systems Ltd., was developing a machine gun that could fire a thousand rounds per minute. In addition, the company was working on a chemical warfare suit that could be folded up and reduced to the size of a golf ball. Drewe suggested that he was in a position to broker the sale of tanks and F-16s, and jokingly asked whether Mibus knew anyone who wanted to buy a fighter jet. When the dealer tried to steer the conversation back to the business at hand, Drewe dug another channel.

As lunch drew to a close, Drewe pulled from his briefcase a high-resolution transparency of a Picasso titled Trois Femmes à la Fontaine, a $2.7 million oil on canvas that a private collector in New York was willing to sell for just $1.8 million, according to Drewe. The work was represented exclusively through his consortium, and Mibus could get a jump on the competition. Given three days’ notice, Drewe could arrange for a private viewing in New York.

The transparency had the intended effect: The work looked good to Mibus. It was in fact the genuine article, most likely in the hands of a real collector. Mibus told Drewe he was interested, and for now the de Staël was forgotten. Drewe had bought himself some time.

Things had been going well until recently. Through a business contact, Berger had unloaded two Le Corbusiers and a pair of Bissières to an expatriate Fijian financial consultant and property developer who had made a tidy profit by flipping one of the Le Corbusiers at auction. Since then, however, Berger’s luck seemed to have dried up. Gallery owners were beginning to ask for more detailed provenances, documents proving the works’ authenticity beyond any doubt. Berger’s resources were limited to titles of ownership from John Catch of Norseland Industries, from John Drewe, and from Drewe’s mother, and these no longer satisfied the dealers.

While the source of Drewe’s inventory must have seemed vague even to Berger, he had not thought to ask more probing questions about provenance. He knew little about the traditions of the art world. For him, a painting was just another commodity. The art market was a realm outside his own, and he considered himself a salesman, not a historian. Although there were always gaps in the history of the works he was handling, Drewe had explained that collectors often preferred to remain anonymous and liked to keep their names out of the auction catalogs, which were notorious hunting grounds for burglars looking for a good haul.

But now Berger was telling Drewe that he needed a comprehensive history for each of the pieces he was trying to move. Could Drewe get him the names of previous owners? Were there sales receipts or exhibition catalogs detailing where the works had been shown?

With Myatt at his side, Drewe stepped into one of the more prestigious galleries that dominate London’s fashionable Cork Street. He had made an appointment to see a Bissière and wanted his art consultant to look over the piece and its provenance. When the dealer showed them the work, Myatt and Drewe agreed that it would fit nicely with the professor’s growing collection of twentieth-century modern masters. When the dealer’s back was turned, Drewe examined the painting for gallery labels or dedications that might provide clues to its history. Myatt and Drewe had been to several galleries earlier and discovered that dealers tended to be discreet about where a painting came from. It was good business, a way of keeping their clients from cutting them out of the deal by going directly to the source.

It hadn’t taken Drewe long to realize that Myatt’s fakes were sorely lacking in provenance. To overcome that handicap, he would have to learn how to create paperwork so impressive that any doubts about Myatt’s work would evaporate. He would need to produce a chain of documents that signaled a painting’s clear trajectory from artist’s studio to museum, from auction house to collector—receipts, invoices, letters, exhibition catalogs. If he could chronicle the involvement of a well-known collector or gallery along the way, all the better. A painting’s cachet was not based solely on the quality of the canvas but also on its lineage. The more prestigious or infamous the previous owner, the better. A piece of art with a juicy history was always worth an extra ten grand.

“Buying a painting that was once owned by a well-known person means, in a way, standing in their shoes, walking in their footsteps, possessing a small part of their myth,” Werner Muensterberger wrote in his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion. “The idea is that the value of the objects they buy will rub off on them. The objective is to convince themselves that they are ‘someone’ or alternatively they cultivate a secret garden which may bring to light a different self.” Muensterberger could just as easily have been writing about Drewe, a classic con man who presented himself as an empty slate upon which his mark could etch out a fantasy or wish.

Drewe walked out of the gallery, trailed by Myatt. He had seen enough. There were dozens of counterfeit histories he could attach to each of Myatt’s works. The possibilities were endless.

For the past several weeks, Mibus’s conversations with Drewe had revolved around two subjects. One was the promised viewing of the Picasso in New York; the other was the de Staël, whose authenticity Drewe was now certain he could prove through newly acquired documents.

At their next meeting, again at White’s, Drewe ordered an expensive bottle of wine and lunch for both of them, then proceeded to spend a good half hour criticizing the French expert Jaeger’s artistic eye. He said that Jaeger was a stubborn man, but that even he would be persuaded by this new evidence. He showed Mibus several letters from other well-known experts in France, all of whom appeared willing to authenticate the de Staël—which was only natural, since Drewe had written the letters himself.

As usual, he hogged the conversation. Mibus listened quietly as the professor bragged about his access to classified information about a secret city beneath London, a six-level subterranean fortress built by the government for wartime use as an emergency control center in case of a nuclear attack or a major disaster. He described a “ghost station” near Tottenham Court Road that had not been used since the 1930s but had recently been refitted as a government laboratory. He said he knew of a secret tunnel that had been built behind the Institute of Contemporary Arts for the express purpose of providing an exit route for the royal family in the event that they needed to flee Buckingham Palace and the city.

Mibus ran out of patience, excused himself, and took a taxi back to the gallery. There he learned about yet another problem with one of Drewe’s paintings, a Bissière he had bought from Catch’s consortium and then sold to a French client. The Frenchman had returned the piece after he tried unsuccessfully to sell it through an auction house. Bissière’s son had seen it at a preshow viewing and denounced it as a fake. The younger Bissière had the droit moral and had stripped the work of its signature.

Still unresolved was the dispute over the de Staël painting. Mibus asked for and received a formal letter from the artist’s widow officially nullifying the work. He sent this to Drewe and demanded his money back.

Drewe offered him an alternative: He would supply Mibus with a “generous” consignment of pieces by Giacometti, Tàpies, Oskar Schlemmer, Mark Gertler, and Dubuffet, and Mibus could keep 50 percent of the proceeds from whatever he sold.

Drewe wouldn’t budge. He refused to give Mibus his refund. He was polite but firm. He didn’t need to keep Mibus happy, because by now he had begun the process of forging documents for each of Myatt’s works.