Provenance

The motivations behind forgery are as varied as the types of forgeries that have been perpetrated over the centuries, but the most common fuel has always been greed. When demand exceeds supply, the forger is never far behind. In ancient Rome, when classical Greek sculpture became a status symbol and the supply of genuine pieces was exhausted, Roman craftsmen quickly filled the void. Today, experts believe that 90 percent of “original” Greek statuary was made by Romans. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries clandestine workshops operating across Europe produced paintings in the style of such masters as Michelangelo, Titian, and Ribera, and to this day these forgeries continue to surface. Some may never be properly identified. Forgery was so widespread that some of the masters became forgers themselves. The young Michelangelo painted a work in the style of his master Domenico Ghirlandaio and passed it off as an original after doctoring the panel with smoke to make it look older. He subsequently sculpted a sleeping cupid and sold it off as an antiquity. In the nineteenth century, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot knowingly signed copies made by others in his name. It is a long-standing French joke that of the twenty-five hundred paintings Corot produced in his lifetime, eight thousand can be found in America.²⁷

Searle had seen enough fakes to know that it wasn’t always the technical faux pas that gave forgers away. Just as often they left behind an unmistakable cultural footprint. A Madonna of the Veil purportedly by the fifteenth-century Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli was “discovered” in the 1920s and sold without provenance for $25,000. A celebrated find at the time, the piece was declared fake more than fifteen years later, after an art historian noticed that the Madonna looked more like a 1920s film star than a Renaissance beauty. Experts who examined the “Silent-Movie Madonna” found, among other inconsistencies, that the figure’s robe had been painted with a blue pigment not developed until the eighteenth century.²⁸ At a more prosaic level, holes on the surface that looked like they had been caused by an infestation of woodworms had in fact been drilled in.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin asserted that fakes lack the special aura an original artwork invariably carries, that the work’s essence, its personal contact with a particular time and space, can never be replicated. Those who believe in the eventual triumph of good over evil posit that most fakes are eventually exposed. Others are more skeptical. History supports the second group.

The art market is a potential minefield. With so many fakes being produced, even the most experienced dealer can make a mistake. Art historian Bernard Berenson, who consulted for major U.S. museums and collectors and established the market for “old masters,” once warned that the best of experts could be fooled. “Let him not imagine that a practical acquaintance with last year’s forgeries will prevent him falling victim to this year’s crop,” he wrote. Berenson cautioned dealers and experts not to be swayed by provenance, which he said could be forged more easily than the work itself. His words, predating Drewe’s scam by some eighty years, now seem prophetic: “[There is nothing] to prevent a picture being painted or a marble carved to correspond to a description in a perfectly authentic document. Nothing but a fine sense of quality and a practiced judgment can avail against the forger’s skill.”²⁹

It is impossible to calculate the exact number of forgeries circulating at any given time, but the guardians of high art have estimated that anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the works on the market are either fakes or genuinely old works that have been doctored to fit a more valuable style or artist. Thomas Hoving said that in his eighteen years at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he examined some fifty thousand works, “forty percent were either phonies or so hypocritically restored or misattributed that they were just the same as forgeries.” Italy’s Art Carabinieri, whose job it is to police the country’s cultural heritage, claimed to have seized more than sixty thousand fakes during the 1990s. And yet, despite a growing awareness of the prevalence of forgeries and an array of sophisticated technology using infrared and ultraviolet light, the most rigorous scholars and prestigious institutions can still be taken in.

The twentieth century witnessed a blossoming of inventive forgery. Han Van Meegeren was a failed artist who decided to prove his worth by painting works in the style of great artists of the past, particularly the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer. In the late 1930s and the 1940s, he produced some ten paintings that were accepted as genuine Vermeers and “great discoveries.” Van Meegeren earned millions for his forgeries, many of which had religious themes, and fooled the leading experts, museum directors, and collectors of the day. He used badger-hair brushes so that not a single modern bristle would ever be found embedded in the paint of his forgeries. He ground his pigments in oil of lilac and made a unique resin mixture that gave the paint an enamel-like surface, and he baked the canvas in the oven for two hours to harden the paint. Van Meegeren’s most notorious work was Christ at Emmaus, which the Dutch art historian Abraham Bredius acclaimed as Vermeer’s greatest achievement.

“It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter’s studio!” Bredius wrote. “And what a picture! . . . we have here a—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft, . . . quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer.”³⁰

No one can say how long these forgeries would have remained in museums and prominent collections if one of the works hadn’t ended up in the possession of Nazi Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring. After the war the work was traced back to its dealer, van Meegeren, and he was charged with collaboration for selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy. He confessed to serial forgery, a much less serious offense, but no one would believe him. To prove it he painted a brand new fake in prison while awaiting trial. After the work was examined by a scientific commission, van Meegeren’s confession was accepted.

“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,” he wrote before serving a one-year sentence. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”

It may be said that the art world holds no fury like the expert duped. While it seems clear that van Meegeren’s success owed much to his talent, his brushwork and compositions are now criticized for their coarseness and shapelessness. Philosopher Denis Dutton has noted that a face in one of van Meegeren’s “masterpieces” resembles Greta Garbo’s.

Bredius’s praise for Christ at Emmaus helps illustrate why so many scholars and institutions are duped at least once in their careers. Often experts have preconceived ideas about a certain artist or era and are just waiting to see them proven by a “rare find.” Bredius was the scholar who had theorized that there might be undiscovered works by Vermeer with religious themes. In the words of Mark Jones, editor of Fake? The Art of Deception, the catalog for a popular exhibition held at the British Museum in 1990 (an exhibition which Drewe almost certainly visited), “Present Piltdown Man [a hoax in which an oranguntan’s jawbone and a modern man’s skull were claimed to be the remains of an early human] to a paleontologist out of the blue and it will be rejected out of hand. Present it to a paleontologist whose predictions about the ‘missing link’ between ape and man have been awaiting just such evidence and it will seem entirely credible.”

Historians and dealers continue to be seduced by the notion that lost treasures are out there waiting to be found; they are willing to pay top dollar as well as lower their threshold for scrutiny. Take the Zagreb museum, which opened with great fanfare in 1987 and claimed to be the Louvre of Yugoslavia. Its curators were said to have been pressured into accepting a collection of nearly four thousand items sold to them by a Yugoslav patriot. Museum officials insisted the collection was worth $1 billion and contained masterpieces by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Botticelli, and Velázquez, among others. The Yugoslav government had bent over backward to facilitate the acceptance of the scantily documented works.

In his revealing opening remarks, the museum director spoke of the thrill of discovery. “Who can evoke the collector’s trembling excitement as he stands before a secondhand dealer’s shop and sees a rare piece of ancient glass offered at a trifling price?” he said. “Or when, beneath the superficial grime of a picture bought at auction as a mere copy, the autograph of some classic ancient painting begins to emerge beneath the restorer’s hand?”

Some forgers work on a grand scale. Eric Hebborn, an art restorer and another failed painter, confessed in 1984 that he had produced a thousand forgeries in the style of the old masters, among them Tiepolo and Rubens, and boasted that many of his paintings had landed in esteemed collections, including those of the National Gallery in Washington, the British Museum, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

To Hebborn, whose works have been described as stylistically brilliant, the production of fakes was an intellectual exercise as well as an attempt to confound a market that had rejected him. He refused—or failed—to see the criminality “in making a drawing in any style one wishes . . . [and] asking an expert what he thinks of it.” He claimed to be a “fair player” in this game of wits because he was leveling the playing field. He established his own moral guideline of sorts: One of his rules was that he would never sell a work to someone who was not a recognized expert or was not acting on expert advice. “No drawing can lie of itself; it is only the opinion of the expert that can deceive,” he wrote in The Art Forger’s Handbook.³²

Skullduggery aside, Hebborn and his colleagues raise basic questions about what makes certain art valuable. If a drawing is a good one, does it have an intrinsic worth even if it is not by the artist it purports to be by? “It is the most tantalizing question of all,” said connoisseur Aline Saarinen, quoted by the Met’s Hoving. “If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine?”

If Saarinen had asked Picasso, the answer would have been yes. “If the counterfeit is a good one, I should be delighted,” he once said. “I’d sit down straight away and sign it.” In the 1940s, a dealer asked Picasso whether he would put his signature on an unsigned painting of his that a client owned. Picasso agreed, but when he saw the work he realized it was not actually his.

“In that case, the painting is mine,” said Picasso, and signed it.³³ The public is of two minds about history’s great forgers. It has celebrated them as beloved outlaws and vilified them as philistine rogues. After Han van Meegeren was released from prison, most of the Dutch public saw him as a clever crook who had succeeded in fooling both the art experts and the hated Göring. Several years ago one of his works sold at auction for $88,000.

The flamboyant Hungarian Elmyr de Hory was caught in 1968 after a twenty-year career of forging nearly a thousand works, in the style of such artists as Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso. De Hory used a number of aliases to sell his works, and at one time had two accomplices who not only sold on his behalf—and cheated him—but also searched antiquarian bookshops for out-of-print art books of the 1920s and 1930s, and got de Hory to produce forgeries that matched the descriptions accompanying the plates in these books. Then photographs of the forgeries were slipped into the books to replace the original illustrations, thus creating an instant new provenance and anticipating Drewe’s scheme, though on a far smaller scale.

Hoaxes tend to beget hoaxes. De Hory became a celebrity and was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving, who was later jailed for writing a wholly imaginary “authorized” biography of Howard Hughes. The de Hory story went on to become the basis for Orson Welles’s 1975 pseudodocumentary F for Fake. Welles, of course, had famously terrified the nation in 1938 with a fake radio newscast about a Martian attack on New Jersey.

The art restorer Tom Keating became a national figure in Britain and briefly hosted his own television series after confessing in 1976 to forging more than two thousand works in the style of a hundred artists. Keating, who had begun his career as an angry young painter, was determined to honor artists who had died in poverty after being exploited by unscrupulous dealers. His goal was to undermine the system. He planted clues in his forgeries for the “experts” to find. He would sprinkle dust from a vacuum cleaner and flick spoonfuls of Nescafé in the air to simulate foxing, the greenish gray or brown mildew stains that appear on old paper. Sometimes he hid the words “This is a fake” or “Ever been had?” in lead white beneath a painting. Knowing that a personal touch excited dealers, he would scribble inscriptions on the back of his work.

“Why is it that the dealers always seem to set so much store by this kind of thing, when the paper I did it on was probably made in England in 1940 or 1950, is a mystery to me,” Keating wrote in his autobiography, The Fake’s Progress. “I suppose the short answer is that it takes a brave man to destroy a fake, particularly if he is in the business of buying and selling pictures.” After his death, one of Keating’s original works sold for £274,000.

Detective Sergeant Searle believed that forgers like Keating and Myatt were “a healthy component to the art system,” because they forced dealers and historians to look more closely at the works they chose to sanction—and sell—as art. Counterfeiters were necessary irritants, he thought, like political radicals. He himself had participated in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Grosvenor Square in the sixties, but had subsequently spent a good deal of time going after elements of the extreme left. He now believed that those “rowdies” had made their own valuable contribution to the political discourse.

After his conversation with Booth and his epiphany at the Tate, Searle spent the next several weeks shuttling between the Yard and the archives, following Drewe’s path with the aid of the requisition slips the professor had filled out. He asked the auction houses to keep an eye out for Drewe and his many aliases, and provided a list of the painters he believed were being forged. Over the past decade, he assured the auctioneers, at least two dozen works bearing Drewe’s unmistakable stamp had passed through their hands. Whenever such works were brought to his attention, Searle seized them and had Myatt identify them.

One late fall day, as he was going through his files, a colleague from the Organised Crime Unit poked his head in and announced that he’d come across something interesting at Christie’s. “There’s a bunch of crap in the showroom,” he said, tossing a catalog onto Searle’s desk. “I’m sure it’s yours.”

Searle flipped through the pages of “Post-War Contemporary British Art” and came across four gouaches by Graham Sutherland, one of his favorite artists. They were studies of the Crucifixion, similar to the ones he’d found in Goudsmid’s bags, each painted on a background of a different color: red, yellow, orange, and green. He recognized the designs. They were based on the lower panel of Sutherland’s Coventry Cathedral tapestry, Christ in Glory, which was depicted in a rare book on Sutherland that he had found at Myatt’s. According to the catalog, Sutherland had donated the gouaches to the Order of the Servants of Mary in 1956, and they had subsequently been sold to an H. R. Stoakes. In the late 1960s, they had been part of an ICA show called “Art for the Cathedrals.”

They were impressive additions to his collection, intentionally untidy and more like works in progress. Searle found them attractive and interesting. Myatt had paid close attention to Sutherland’s method, particularly the way he thickened and thinned the line with his brush. Searle noticed that the O.S.M. stamp had been pressed onto one of the watercolors themselves, rather than on the reverse. This seemed like a dead giveaway. Drewe had gone to the trouble of paying a forger, faking a catalog, and aging the works, but then he had carelessly disfigured them.

It occurred to Searle that beneath Drewe’s cosmopolitan veneer he was a philistine with little feeling for the arts. He saw paintings as commodities to be traded for the best possible price. He passed himself off as a refined and cultured Englishman, but his actions defined him as a man entirely without values.

Drewe had recognized a niche opportunity in the art market. Given the number of works that passed through the auction houses each year—an estimated $5 billion worth—he had guessed correctly that the experts couldn’t possibly vet each of the tens of thousands of works in the lower price ranges. He had concentrated on midrange pieces, works that would bring in a steady income without drawing undue attention.

The dealer was more than happy to tell him the whole story of his relationship with Drewe. He mentioned the fake Bissières he’d bought, the de Staël, and the works Drewe had subsequently offered him a 50 percent share in. He told Searle that he’d finally accepted Drewe’s proposition because he got tired of watching these very same works sell at auction. He’d taken the four Sutherlands after Christie’s auctioned a similar group of Sutherlands successfully, and he believed they were genuine.

When the detective asked if Mibus had anything to back up his story, the dealer pulled out some documents Drewe had drawn up outlining the ownership history and the sales transactions. Then he showed Searle several other works he had accepted from Drewe in order to recoup his heavy losses. These included a Giacometti, a Ben Nicholson, and a Mark Gertler. Mibus also handed over a painting titled Composition 1958, purportedly by Bissière, which had been returned to him with the signature wiped off after the French dealer he’d sold it to recognized it as a fake. This last piece Searle recognized as one of the fakes Booth had shown him in the Hanover albums at the Tate—the one that wasn’t in the daybook. It would make for good evidence.

Searle went back to the Yard. On the way he reflected that Drewe always seemed to manage to turn events in his favor. It was like a fixed game of craps: The deeper his marks got into debt, the more desperate they became to earn their money back. Thus had Adrian Mibus become Drewe’s unwitting partner. Searle wondered how many others had been forced into the same position, how many had been duped, and how many still believed Drewe’s promises.

Searle had Mibus’s paintings and documents carted back to his office. They would be rich and substantial material for the trial, but Drewe would undoubtedly be a skilled liar on the stand, able to confabulate on the high wire without a net. Even under the most searing cross-examination, the detective couldn’t imagine Drewe being pressured or tricked into admitting any wrongdoing on his part, so the case had to be watertight.

Searle had spent most of his career undercover, in the shadows. Seldom had he put together a case from scratch. Four months into the investigation he had accumulated some forty paintings, each with its own attendant bundle of names, receipts, documents, and stamps. Organised Crime Unit staffers had begun to refer to his office as Aladdin’s Cave. Searle didn’t find that particularly funny. He feared the investigation was in danger of falling apart. He had witnesses and suspects in New York, Canada, France, and Sweden, but he still needed to interview dozens more in his own backyard. Moreover, he needed the cooperation of dealers and experts who had bought or authenticated pieces. They would all have to testify in open court. Some were cooperating, but others refused, saying it was bad for business. He was also running out of time. The longer he poked around, the more likely that news of his investigation would leak and Drewe would go underground and cover his tracks.

To make matters worse, he was now looking at the possibility that a second forger was involved. He begged his supervisors for reinforcements. He argued that in light of Drewe’s corruption of the archives, the case was a matter of national importance. The cultural patrimony was at stake.

Finally, Searle’s request was granted, and in January 1996 four members of the Organised Crime Unit made their way to Aladdin’s Cave. Among them was a career investigator named Miki Volpe,³⁴ a “Geordie,” or native of northeast England, from the predominately working-class city of Newcastle. Volpe, who pronounces “father” as “fatha” and “have” as “hev” and was brought up in a family of musicians, had worked the rough side in the past. He’d gone after car thieves, murderers, Chinese white slavers, Serbian gold diggers, Russian credit-card scammers, and Croats peddling bargain weaponry. With patience and a good deal of muscle, he’d smashed the strongholds of London’s “snakehead” traffickers in human flesh and pulled smuggled immigrants out of run-down hotels to safety. On the Kidnap Squad he’d rescued two ransomed Frenchmen who had been tied up and left for dead in a cupboard.