The British Art Forger...

The secretive international art market - according to expert estimates - is awash with forgeries, reports The Guardian Astonishingly, some put the figure at up to 40%. It's extraordinary that John Myatt, an impoverished part-time art teacher and failed songwriter from Staffordshire, managed to get away with it for so long – producing more than 200 paintings over 10 years, which were sold around the world for a total of about £2m. With an aversion to the smell of expensive oils, which also took a long time to dry, he used house paint mixed with turpentine, linseed oil and lubricant jelly. His favourite targets were the modernists, the cubists Gleizes and Braque, Ben Nicholson, Nicolas de Stael, Giacometti and a dozen others. But whatever doubts were harboured by the experts – and there were many – they were assuaged by that other essential ingredient of the good fake: the provenance. Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo, two American journalists, have produced a riveting and perceptive account of Myatt and his Svengali – the obsessive and enigmatic fantasist John Drewe, who, with charm and apparent wealth, insinuated himself into some of Britain's leading art institutions and then systematically falsified and corrupted their archives to create bogus histories for Myatt's fakes. The two men met in 1986 when Myatt, struggling to bring up his two children, placed a personal ad in Private Eye offering "genuine fakes". He was impressed when a Professor Drewe called and offered him commissions. It took a while before Myatt realised – only half-reluctantly – that he was being drawn into a gigantic art fraud. Drewe's downfall came from an unexpected source, which pitches Salisbury's tense narrative into the realm of thriller. In 1993 Drewe left his Israeli partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, an eye doctor, for another woman and wrongly accused her of mental instability and abuse of their children. Goudsmid took her suspicions and a briefcase full of Drewe's forgery kit, which he had left at their house, to the police. Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad were alerted and Goudsmid turned up two black rubbish bags full of incriminating documents. The story of the painstaking, two-year investigation that led to Drewe's appearance at Southwark crown court is a wonder. Myatt served four months of a one-year sentence and has since become a celebrity – selling "legitimate fakes", lecturing and starring in several TV series, the latest of which, Virgin Virtuosos, is currently being shown on Sky Arts. (For full source and full article click the Headline). Irish Art