John Drewe - Career As A Forger

Career As A Forger

Also in 1985, Drewe met John Myatt, who was in dire need of money. First Drewe presented himself as a nuclear physicist who wanted art copies for his own home and hinted at links to British intelligence. Eventually he persuaded Myatt to paint forgeries for him. He used mud and vacuum cleaner dust to "age" them. Drewe contacted auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's through intermediaries and sold about 200 of Myatt's paintings for £1.8 million. In the course of their many year relationship he gave Myatt a total of only £100,000 while he lived lavishly off the proceeds.

Drewe did not try to sell paintings in a vacuum but created false backgrounds for them. He forged certificates of authenticity and even invoices of previous sales to establish false provenance and paper trails for the paintings. He wrote to relatives of the artist to fool them into authenticating the forgeries. He tricked a small Catholic religious order in a village to sign a contract which would verify some of the paintings.

He also forged documents about previous owners so that the painting did not just suddenly seem to appear from nowhere. For this he used records of dead people, some of them his old acquaintances. He also convinced some of his living friends to sign documents as though they were previous owners of the paintings - most of them were broke or otherwise in trouble and accepted the money he offered them. To an old childhood friend, Daniel Stokes, he concocted a story about a drinking wife and needy children and convinced him to pretend to be an owner of a fake Ben Nicholson painting. Clive Bellman, another acquaintance, was told that the paintings were sold to provide money for purchases of archive materials from the Soviet Union about the Holocaust. When he could not find anyone to bribe, he just invented nonexistent people.

In 1989, Drewe gained access to the letter archives of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London by claiming to be an interested collector. He also donated two paintings - Myatt's forgeries - for a fundraising auction. Later he used the institute's stationery in his fake documents. The Tate Gallery received a donation of two Roger Bissière paintings but Bissière's son did not accept them. Drewe withdrew the paintings but he made a donation of £20,000 (about US$32,000) to the gallery, so the gallery opened archives to him. To become accepted by the Victoria and Albert Museum he needed a false reference - he provided one himself.

Drewe used the opportunity to introduce false records to the archives. He replaced old pages and inserted numerous new ones into old art catalogues to include Myatt's forgeries. The institutions have said that it will take years to purge the archives of all the false information. Through a middleman, Drewe also created a company called Art Research Associates and again used himself as a reference.

In 1995, Drewe left Goudsmid to marry Helen Sussman, a doctor. Goudsmid studied papers that Drewe had left behind and found a number of incriminating letters. She decided to tell the police and the Tate Gallery.