Provenance

Starred review from May 18, 2009
A decade-long art scam that sullied the integrity of museum archives and experts alike is elegantly recounted by husband-and-wife journalists Salisbury and Sujo. In 1986, when struggling painter and single father John Myatt advertised copies of famous paintings, he never imagined he'd become a key player in one of Britain's biggest art frauds. Myatt soon met John Drewe, who claimed to be a physicist and avid art collector. Soon Drewe, a silver-tongued con man, was passing off Myatt's work as genuine, including paintings in the style of artists like Giacometti and Ben Nicholson. When buyers expressed concern about the works' provenance, Drewe began the painstaking process of falsifying records of ownership. Posing as a benefactor, Drewe even planted false documents in the archives of London's Tate Gallery, but suspicious historians and archivists eventually assisted Scotland Yard in bringing him to justice. Salisbury and Sujo (who died in 2008) evoke with flair the plush art world and its penetration by the seductive Drewe as well as the other players in this fascinating art drama.

May 15, 2009
Husband-and-wife writing team Sujo (recently deceased) and Salisbury (co-author: The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic, 2005) present the story of what Scotland Yard called"the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century."

In 1996, British con man John Drewe was convicted of forgery and theft, among other charges. Sujo and Salisbury carefully delineate how he wormed his way into some of the most tightly controlled art archives in the world. His scam—aided by the initially reluctant work of forger John Myatt—spanned ten years, hundreds of forged paintings and dozens of art galleries across the globe. The gripping narrative portrays Drewe as a master of creating pasts and telling people exactly what they want to hear, gathering and using even the tiniest pieces of information to gain the confidence of his marks. Though Myatt was a skilled forger who was able to produce convincing"originals" by modern painters such as Le Corbusier and Alberto Giacometti, it was Drewe's silver tongue—and pocketbook—that gained access to the materials from which he concocted convincing provenances of the artwork's originality. As a result, he not only committed fraud; he substantially undermined the system whereby works are authenticated, and thus art history itself. While the story of Drewe and his accomplices—many of them unwitting—is captivating, the narrative flow is occasionally interrupted by the insertion of seemingly irrelevant information. The authors don't always provide smooth transitions between the increasingly complex elements of the narrative, but the enthralling tale forces readers to rethink the question of what makes art valuable.

A flawed but ultimately mesmerizing portrait of the modern art market.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2009
Art crime puts a gleam in writers eyes. Theres something delicious about stories of duping the elite and reducing the passion for beauty to a sleazy con game. Salisbury and Sujo couldnt have chosen a more thrilling example than the chicanery of a wealthy London nuclear physicist and a starving artist, Dr. John Drewe and John Myatt, who, according to Scotland Yard, perpetrated the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century. It begins simply enough when Myatt discovers his knack for creating pastiches, paintings rendered convincingly in the style of a known artist, and Drewe commissions him to paint a nice Matisse. In no time, the partners in deception are passing off fake paintings by modern masters, but the expert forger isnt Myatt, whose imitations are rather clumsy, but Drewe, whose entire life story is a mad and brilliant fabrication, and whose phony provenance, that is, the documentary record of a paintings history and ownership, clinched the deals. A colorful cast and nimble detection make for a thoroughly engrossing tale of warped creativity and monstrous hubris.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)