HOW CRIME DID PAY

My husband and I (Jane posting, not Todd) were in Marfa, TX (West TX) over the Labor Day weekend with friends where the mountain air is light, the beauty is natural and the sky is vast, a growing community quickly becoming a rather sophisticated location for art and collectors. We stopped in the local book store before dinner for a book signing and reading of “The Seven Pleasures”, but I was more interested in a book that was on sale table. It is one of my favorites and a book that Todd and I recommend to our Workshop students. The title is “Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art” by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. Book Synopsis: A tautly paced investigation of one of the 20^th century's most bold and daring art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries, many, to this day are hanging in prominent museums and private collections.

Provenance is the fascinating narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. The investigative authors brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices.

Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history.

The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day.

Ironically I picked up a the free copy of ARTnews from our hotel upon checkout and lo and behold there was a book review by Milton Esterow on “Provenance”. He tells the reader what the Con Men are up to today after being released from prison.

To read a review from the Washington Post on Provenance, click HERE.