20

MYATT’S BLUE PERIOD

John Myatt put on his best suit and headed down King Street to Christie’s, where a crowd was spilling out of cabs and limos and into the lobby. The women were wearing their good jewelry, and Myatt could smell the powder and perfume. Feeling under-dressed and fidgety among the tuxedos and Chanels, he made his way to the salesroom and took a seat toward the back. About two hundred serious collectors and dealers sat in reserved seats, holding marked catalogs and numbered paddles and waiting for the bidding to kick off. Each year the house held two major sales of contemporary art, and tonight there were Vasarelys and Oldenburgs on the block, as well as Christos and Calders, Warhols and Hockneys.

And Dubuffets, half a dozen of them, courtesy of John Myatt and his labors during many quiet hours in Staffordshire.

Today, for the first time since he’d joined forces with Drewe, he was about to witness a sale of his work. The phones were open, and a gaggle of Christie’s staffers stood beneath a row of million-pound paintings fielding last-minute starting bids. Myatt could feel the tension in the room, an air of intense acquisitive desire coupled with unlimited resources. A handful of well-dressed men with cell phones milled about on the fringes of the crowd, just as Myatt had imagined them: slicked-back hair, wives and mistresses in Dior head scarves and Gucci shades.

He had been looking forward to this for years. A sale at a major auction house would have been an achievement for any artist, and Myatt was no exception. Tonight’s event was an acknowledgment that his skills had their own peculiar value in this reptilian marketplace, and there was the added satisfaction of being in on a mammoth inside joke. He and Drewe had managed to play an extended and very profitable game of reverse blindman’s bluff.

Myatt sat patiently and waited for his Dubuffets to come up. He had based these childlike renderings of cows on a series of bovine forms created some four decades earlier by the French painter, who had coined the term art brut. A Christie’s catalog for a later auction offering a genuine Dubuffet cow would proclaim that the artist had “harnessed the actual countryside, as he has painted not with oils, but with the very stuff of nature”—a blurb that might have amused the farm boy in Myatt. He had never much fancied the originals, which Dubuffet styled after drawings made by children and the mentally ill, but he knew he could forge them without breaking a sweat. To add to the luster of the bogus cows, Drewe had put together a slick provenance package that included genuine Dubuffet documents “borrowed” from the ICA. The provenance indicated that the works had once belonged to Lawrence Alloway, a former assistant director of the ICA and senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Drewe had even managed to get the Dubuffet Foundation to authenticate them.

Myatt held his breath as the bidding began and his drawings sold, one by one, for a total of about £60,000. He had dreamed of being present at such an auction ever since the scam began. He’d imagined the tingle of adrenaline as the paddles went up, then a record sale, followed by a victorious stroll through the city streets with a wad of money in his back pocket. The orchestra would swell as he gulped the cold winter air, the elusive forger with the dangling cigarette, a cloak flung over his shoulder and a smile on his face. He had expected a sense of relief and accomplishment, but the reality was quite different. He felt empty and disappointed.

He went up the street to a coffee bar and ordered a cappuccino, hoping it would lift his mood. He was thousands of pounds richer now, but he felt miserable, even though things had been going quite well. While the business had never yielded enormous profits for him, there was always plenty of money in the account for his simple needs, and he had developed a solid partnership with Drewe.

Every other Thursday, Myatt would bring some new work down to London in his Rover, Drewe would show up in his Bentley, and they would have a bite together. Their lunches were always enjoyable, a chance for Myatt to break free from the routine of painting and fatherhood. Drewe would order a good bottle of wine and drink copiously, and though he tended to flirt clumsily with the waitresses, he was never unruly. Myatt considered his partner utterly without sexual charm, so he found these flirtations both amusing and sad. He knew Drewe and Goudsmid were on the skids, and guessed that Drewe needed these little stabs at happiness, which inevitably ended in failure. After lunch, Myatt would hand over one or two paintings, and the professor would promise to deliver payment in a fortnight.

Lately, though, there were times when Myatt never got paid, and he had begun to suspect that Drewe was holding out on him. The professor always had an explanation. “Recession, John,” he’d say. “Business is bad. It’s only going to get worse.” Occasionally he’d turn up the next time with a stuffed envelope, and life would be rosy again for a while.

Myatt sat hunched over a second cappuccino. The street outside Christie’s was nearly empty except for a few well-heeled buzzards wandering up toward St. James. The limos were gone. He made a rough calculation: His profits from Drewe’s game—perhaps £100,000 over eight years—amounted to just about what he would have earned if he’d stayed at his part-time teaching job. Drewe had figured out exactly how much Myatt needed to keep himself afloat, and that was exactly what he’d given him.

Meanwhile, Drewe had been raking it in. By now he’d taken half of London out for quail and venison at L’Escargot and Claridge’s, and plied an ever-expanding roster of experts and curators with imported cigars and wines. He was at the top of his game, and his self-confidence seemed never to waver.

Myatt, on the other hand, felt like a petty thief. For most of his life he’d yearned for membership in the society of artists and art lovers, but after tonight’s auction that world seemed as shallow and false as the scam. His skills at the easel had been eclipsed by Drewe’s talent as a provider of fake provenance, and most of his paintings were horrible knockoffs anyway. If he’d signed them himself and rented a showroom, they would have been laughed off the wall. He wondered what kind of life he would be leading five or ten years from now. What would he tell his children? That he was a two-bit criminal who had squandered his talents?

So far he’d managed to lead a comfortably compartmentalized life. He did his job quietly and without bothering anyone. He was a good father, an artist, a sometime musician, an occasionally respectable member of his community. Half the time he sang with the church choir and painted portraits of the vicar. The other half, he forged pictures. The two Myatts coexisted without much fuss, as if one didn’t know that the other existed.

Drewe had at least one Swiss bank account and encouraged Myatt to open one for himself and to deposit £25,000. According to Myatt, Drewe had also suggested that he open additional accounts in Russian banks, which he claimed were the best places to hide money. He’d encouraged Myatt to invest in diamonds, as he himself had, and told his partner that he kept a stash hidden in a pouch behind his lavatory.²³

“You can’t go wrong with gems,” he said.

Myatt was grateful for the advice but hadn’t followed it. He wasn’t interested in the high life, and never dreamed of buying a new house or car. All he wanted was to provide for his children. He was earning enough from the fakes, he’d told Drewe, and happy enough to be in business with him. He had never once looked back.

But now he felt a wave of shame—an unfamiliar emotion that had never been part of his repertoire. He paid for the coffee, got into his beat-up old Rover, and drove north.

 

 

At home, the children were asleep and a blank canvas was staring at him from the easel. He went to bed and woke the next morning with something akin to a hangover, which he recognized as leftover self-disgust from his night in the doldrums on King Street.

With little enthusiasm he began work on a new Braque. Using various shades of burnt sienna and dark brown, he painted recklessly and without inspiration. By the following day he’d accomplished nothing. In frustration, he dipped his brush into a can of bright red emulsion and slapped it onto the canvas. The red stood out for miles, a little dash of angry Myatt. The piece was dreadful, but he didn’t care. He deserved a kick in the arse. He deserved to get caught. At the same time, he was terrified of getting caught, and he still felt some loyalty to Drewe. He had no idea how to get out of the game.

When he dropped off the Braque at their next meeting, he begged Drewe to rethink the operation. He suggested that they take a ninemonth breather from the conveyor belt and do things a little differently. Rather than cranking out paintings, he would focus on a single work, a small still life, say, or a Cézanne landscape. He had always worked from secondhand material, and now he wanted to get his hands on an original. He wanted Drewe to bring something genuine into the studio so that he could sit with it and take it in. Then, if the gods were on his side, he would go to work and produce something top-of-the-line, something absolutely right for a change. He would re-create the work faithfully. He would dust off his old art books and find the perfect age-appropriate brushes and paints. Drewe’s job would be to concoct the perfect provenance, a leakproof, rock-solid archival masterpiece.

One last glorious sale and they could both retire.

“Let’s do it properly or not at all,” he told Drewe.

The professor was unmoved. They were on a roll. The ship was on course. Why spoil things?

Myatt confided his fears of ending up in prison.

“Don’t worry,” said Drewe. “If you put a fake work through auction, it’s the auctioneer who takes the blame. Sotheby’s or Christie’s would have to reimburse the buyer. No one gets hurt. We’re free and clear.”

Rubbish, thought Myatt. They would never be safe.

It occurred to him that Drewe was addicted to the con, that every sale was like a junkie’s rush to him. The money wasn’t the object, it was the scam itself. Drewe had begun to believe in his imaginary status as a collector and to speak about the paintings as if they were authentic. Like every bad drug run, this would all come to a dreadful end. The market simply could not absorb the number of fakes they were producing. If they continued as usual, they would almost certainly get pinched.

When Myatt suggested again that they slow things down, Drewe replied that he was under intense pressure from dealers and collectors to come up with more work. Some of Myatt’s paintings had been returned to him, and a few clients were asking for their money back. This was no time to turn tail. If anything, they had to expand the business, not wrap it up. He proposed to add Russian and American artists to their roster, and urged Myatt to come up with one or two good Bar-nett Newmans and a few Frank Stellas from his 1960s period. These were certainly within Myatt’s range, and would be highly marketable.

There was an irritation and impatience in Drewe’s voice that Myatt hadn’t heard for years. In the early Golders Green days, Drewe had had tantrums now and then, but they were short-lived and usually provoked by a losing hand at bridge. Now the bad moods lasted for days. As Drewe obsessed over every bad transaction and cursed the dealers who had crossed him, the color rose to his scarred neck and the cork came off. A rage that had been kept under wraps swept through his system, his whole body shuddered slightly, and his facial muscles contorted. Myatt felt obliged to sit with him and ride out the storm, but the rants were becoming more and more worrisome.

Myatt wondered what had precipitated the change in Drewe. He thought back over the past year or so and recalled the many occasions on which he had witnessed or heard about Drewe’s deteriorating situation at home. Once, when Myatt brought a new painting over to Rotherwick Road, he’d found Goudsmid and Drewe facing off on opposite sides of the living room. Goudsmid was in the middle of a full-blown tirade, screaming that Drewe was a liar, an impotent bastard, and a crook. Drewe stood there with no expression on his face, waited for her to finish, and then hustled the embarrassed Myatt outside. They walked to a local pub and talked until closing time.

Drewe told Myatt that Goudsmid had become dangerously unstable and suffered from a serious mental illness. She was paranoid and had been diagnosed with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. She had declared all-out war on him, and he feared she might harm the children. After one argument, he said, she had thrown boiling water on the family dog. Then she had put the pet goldfish live into the microwave.

For the next few weeks Myatt had received updates on the couple’s deteriorating relationship, until Drewe finally called to say that the relationship was over, that he had left Goudsmid, taken custody of the children, and moved out to the country.

One night not long after, Drewe and Myatt met for dinner at one of their favorite Italian restaurants in Hampstead. Drewe drank heavily. Afterward they went out to the parking lot to look at a new piece Myatt had brought in. Drewe was beaming, reeking of Beaujolais and puffing on a cigar. Myatt opened the trunk of the Rover and handed him the painting, a Giacometti crayon and pencil drawing of a man standing beside a tree. Drewe held it up to the bright neon lights.

“I don’t think you realize, John, that this is a classic example of the artist’s work,” he said. “It’s powerful, simple, and symbolic. You don’t know how important it is.”

“I know what it is,” Myatt said. “I bloody well painted it.”

Drewe’s jaw clenched. “Don’t ever say that again,” he snarled.

Myatt remembered wondering, in the wake of that incident, whether Drewe was losing touch with reality. He’d called him up the next day and again made the argument for quitting the game, but there was no getting through to him. He’d written Drewe a long and heartfelt farewell letter but hadn’t had the courage to send it. It was tucked away in his briefcase.

 

 

Now a cloud hung over their friendship, such as it had been. Whenever they got together, Drewe went on for hours about his problems with Goudsmid and various art dealers, and endlessly repeated his stories about MI5, his weapons training, and his expertise in methods of interrogation, assassination, and political reprisal. Myatt could no longer follow these increasingly obsessive monologues.

One night, as they were walking through the city, Drewe pulled Myatt into an alley, opened his overcoat, and showed him a pair of handguns tucked into leather holsters. He drew one, pointed it directly at Myatt’s face, and smiled, and then laughed. He repacked the weapon and walked on as if nothing had happened.

That was the last straw for Myatt. Drewe was definitely crazy, and it was no longer a question of scaling back the business. Myatt wanted out. There was just one problem. If he quit now, he was sure Drewe would go after him, and maybe even his children. He thought the professor was quite capable of killing him. Drewe, in his paranoia, would build a case against Myatt in his head and then try to eliminate him. The two men had worked together for nearly a decade, and Myatt knew nearly every angle of the con. He knew about the professor’s larcenous visits to the Tate and the V&A and the British Council, and he had met several of Drewe’s runners. He knew too much.

Back in Sugnall, Myatt sat down on the sofa and had a stiff drink. What a bloody great fall from grace, he thought. From the beginning the scam had been a huge and soul-devouring mistake. He had been deceiving himself for years, ignoring the sharp end of what he was doing. He needed to talk to someone, but there was no one he could trust. He contemplated calling the police.

The phone rang. It was Drewe, calling from a service area on the highway.

“I can’t talk on your private line,” he said. “It’s not safe. Go down to the old phone box down the lane and I’ll ring you there.”

Myatt put on his coat and went outside to wait for the call.

“We’re in a jam, John,” Drewe said. He claimed that someone was trying to blackmail him and he’d been forced to take extreme measures. “Incriminating evidence” linked them both to the scam, and he’d had no choice but to break into the blackmailer’s house and “take steps.”

“What steps?” Myatt asked.

“Let’s just say there was a very smoky experience.”

A chill ran through Myatt’s bones.

“You do realize that you’re part of this as well?” Drewe said.

Myatt felt sick. He thought about turning himself in, but who would care for the kids if he went to prison? He wondered whether Drewe was bluffing again in order to keep the paintings coming in. Had there really been a fire? Was this another of Drewe’s extended theatrical pieces?

Myatt had painted more than 240 works for him, and Drewe must still have plenty of them. He didn’t really need Myatt; he could stay in business for years without him. Myatt was expendable. He thought about those guns and the way Drewe had smiled. He felt as if he’d been swept out to sea and had to swim back to shore, somehow keeping his head above water until he could feel the sand beneath his feet. Then he could start again.

Drewe phoned a couple of days later in the dead of night. Myatt shot up in bed. “Don’t call here again,” he shouted. “Just fuck off.”

Drewe was silent for a moment, and then he hung up.