John Myatt & John Drewe — the forgers who faked the archive, not just the art

Summary

Between roughly 1986 and 1994, the painter John Myatt and his partner John Drewe ran what investigators and the press came to call the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century — not because Myatt's paintings were exceptional, but because Drewe attacked the thing that authenticates a painting rather than the painting itself. Myatt, a Staffordshire art teacher who had advertised honest "genuine fakes" in Private Eye, produced some 200 pictures in the manner of modern masters including Alberto Giacometti, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet and Roger Bissière. Drewe, born John Cockett, sold them through Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips and through dealers in London, Paris and New York, realising an estimated £1.8 million.

What set the scheme apart was Drewe's assault on the documentary record. A painting's value rests on its provenance — the paper trail proving who made it and who has owned it — and Drewe manufactured that trail at its source. Posing as a scholar and donor, he secured access to the archives of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum's National Art Library and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he inserted forged catalogues, faked exhibition records and doctored photographs that "proved" Myatt's inventions had a recorded history. He corrupted the very reference works that experts consult to verify authenticity, so that a sceptic who did the responsible thing and checked the archive would find Drewe's forgery waiting there to reassure them.

The fraud unravelled through human relationships rather than connoisseurship. Mary Lisa Palmer of the Giacometti Association in Paris distrusted the works submitted to her — guided by the look of the pictures rather than their impeccable paperwork — and pressed her doubts. Decisively, Drewe's estranged former partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, turned over to police a cache of documents revealing the operation. Scotland Yard's Art and Antiques Squad built the case, and in a trial at Southwark Crown Court that ran from 1998 into 1999, both men were convicted. On 13 February 1999 Drewe received six years for conspiracy to defraud and Myatt one year; Myatt served four months and Drewe about two years.

The case remains a landmark because of what it permanently damaged. Roughly 60 of Myatt's fakes were recovered, but well over a hundred are believed still to be circulating, and Drewe's forged insertions polluted institutional archives so thoroughly that curators could not always be certain which records were genuine. By targeting provenance itself, the pair did lasting harm not only to the buyers they defrauded but to the trustworthiness of the documentary record on which the whole field depends.

Timeline

The architecture of trust, turned into a weapon

Most art forgery is a contest over the object: can the paint, the canvas, the line survive expert and instrumental scrutiny. Drewe understood that the object is only half of what experts actually rely on. The other half is provenance — the chain of catalogues, receipts, exhibition records and ownership history that tells a buyer a picture is what it claims to be. Confronted with a borderline painting, a cautious dealer or auction specialist does not simply stare harder; they check the documentation. Drewe's insight was that if he controlled the documentation, the caution itself would lead the sceptic to a forged reassurance.

So the centre of gravity shifted from Myatt's studio to the reading rooms of London's great art institutions. By presenting himself as a respectable scholar and benefactor — and, in the Tate's case, backing it with a substantial donation — Drewe obtained legitimate access to archives whose records are presumed authoritative precisely because they are housed in trusted institutions. There he inserted forged exhibition catalogues, faked stock-books, and photographs of Myatt's paintings doctored to look like decades-old documentation. A genuine archive entry vouching for a fake painting is far more powerful than any certificate a forger could hand over directly, because its authority is borrowed from the institution that unknowingly holds it.

Why the paperwork beat the eye

The forgeries themselves were, by the standards of the trade, not especially good. Myatt worked fast and cheaply, sometimes using household emulsion rather than period-appropriate oils, materials that would not survive close technical examination of the kind that undid forgers from Han van Meegeren onward. Under sustained scientific scrutiny many of his pictures should have failed. The point of Drewe's provenance machine was to ensure that such scrutiny was never thought necessary. A painting arriving at a saleroom with a documented exhibition history and an apparently verifiable chain of ownership presents as a known quantity, not a suspect one, and the expert's attention is steered toward confirming the record rather than interrogating the canvas.

This is the mechanism that made the fraud so productive across so many artists. Each successful sale, lodged in the catalogues of major houses, became further evidence supporting the next. The fabricated archive entries and the real auction results reinforced one another in a closed loop, so that a dealer checking the background of a "Sutherland" or a "de Staël" found a web of mutually corroborating documents — some forged by Drewe, some generated innocently by the sales his forgeries had already achieved. Provenance is supposed to be the independent check on the object; Drewe collapsed the independence, making the check and the thing it was meant to verify products of the same hand.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Myatt-Drewe affair forced museums, libraries and auction houses to confront a vulnerability they had scarcely considered: that their own archives could be weaponised against them. Institutions tightened control over archival access, improved logging of who consulted and handled original records, and grew warier of unsolicited "scholarly" benefactors. The case became a standard teaching example in art-crime and authentication courses precisely because it relocated the battlefield from the studio to the reading room.

Its damage, however, proved unusually durable. Of the roughly 200 fakes Myatt produced, only about 60 were recovered; well over a hundred are thought still to be in circulation, some doubtless hanging as genuine works by the masters they imitate. More insidiously, Drewe's forged insertions left curators unable to be fully certain which records in the affected archives were authentic, a contamination of the documentary record that outlasts any individual painting. Myatt, after serving his sentence, rebuilt a public career as an openly "genuine fake" painter and television figure, and even assisted law enforcement — an unusually soft landing for a convicted forger, and one that has kept the case vivid in public memory.

Lessons

References

• John Myatt WIKIPEDIA
• John Drewe WIKIPEDIA
• The biggest contemporary art fraud of the century THE ART NEWSPAPER
• The Modernist fakes mountain: how many John Drewe forgeries remain unidentified THE ART NEWSPAPER