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

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.

Mark Landis — the forger who gave his fakes away and so was never charged

Beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing for roughly three decades, the American painter Mark Augustus Landis — born 10 March 1955 in Norfolk, Virginia, and based for much of his career in Laurel, Mississippi — placed meticulously aged copies of well-known artworks into the collections of more than fifty United States museums across some twenty states. He did not sell them. He gave them away, presenting himself as a wealthy philanthropist disposing of an inherited collection, often in memory of his late parents, and sometimes arriving in the guise of a Jesuit priest. Because no money ever changed hands and Landis sought no tax deduction, the most prolific museum hoaxer in modern American history committed no prosecutable crime.

The works were not original inventions in the manner of a Han van Meegeren; they were reproductions — of pieces by Paul Signac, Louis Valtat, Charles Courtney Curran, Maynard Dixon, even Walt Disney studio art — copied from auction catalogues and printed images, then disguised. Landis bought plain paper, canvas board and frames from craft and discount stores, stained his pictures with coffee to simulate age, and signed them. Up close many betrayed a tell-tale dot-matrix pattern from the printed source beneath the paint, but small and mid-sized museums, flattered by an apparently generous donor and lacking the laboratories of larger institutions, rarely looked that closely.

The deception was pieced together not by a curator but by a registrar. Matthew Leininger, then at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, grew suspicious of a donor in 2007 and began compiling documentation, eventually matching identical “gifts” turning up at institution after institution under shifting names — Mark Landis, Steven Gardiner, Father Arthur Scott, Father James Brantley, John Grauman. In November 2010 The Art Newspaper published a comprehensive account, and registrars and curators nationwide recognized their own donor. The story was confirmed, not litigated.

Landis was never arrested, charged or sued. The case became the rare forgery that ended in public exposure rather than a courtroom, and a peculiar one in art history: a faker who profited in nothing but attention and the satisfaction of acceptance, and whom the law could not reach precisely because he asked for nothing in return.