Art Scam Fooled Experts For Years

JOHN DREWE and John Myatt were sentenced for painting and documenting fake works and passing them off as originals. Their scheme is said to have `rewritten art history.'

LONDON - John Drewe has a genius-level IQ of 165. But his is a warped genius, which he used in devising one of the most elaborate, costly and embarrassing art frauds in British history.

Drewe, 50, was sentenced yesterday to six years in prison, and his fellow fraudster John Myatt, 53, drew a 12-month sentence after testifying against him. After their convictions, there are a lot of red faces among internationally renowned art experts who were taken in by the scam.

With Myatt doing most of the painting, and Drewe arranging phony documentation, they worked together for almost a decade, producing fakes and passing them off as originals by seven world-famous artists: Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Nicholas de Stael and Roger Bissiere.

Police said Drewe made at least $1.7 million, and possibly $4 million, from the fraud, and only part of that has been recovered. They said they have tracked down 60 fakes in Britain, New York and Paris but have still been unable to trace about 140 others.

"The corruption which has taken place of the national archive of contemporary art has been considerable," said Detective Constable Micky Volpe, one of the investigators who spent three years tracking down the fraud.

Speaking of Drewe, Detective Sgt. Jonathan Searle said: "Anything he has touched becomes suspect. He has rewritten art history."

The fraud began in 1986 after Drewe spotted an advertisement in the satirical magazine Private Eye in which Myatt, an impoverished artist, offered to paint "genuine fakes" for prices starting at $250.

Myatt, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and became the principal witness against Drewe, told the court during a six-month-long trial that he initially thought Drewe wanted fake paintings for his own house. But later, he admitted, he became a willing accomplice.

Police said they believe another artist was involved because Myatt told them he did not paint some of the fake Nicholsons that were sold.

Drewe had no training in art history but immersed himself in a study of 20th century art. According to court testimony, he realized that modern art works rarely have the distinctive style of the old masters, making it more difficult for forgeries to be recognized.

The key to the success of the fraud was Drewe's ability to produce false documentation. He donated $33,000 to the Tate Gallery in London and, having thus gained the gallery's confidence, proceeded to raid its archives, stealing, copying and forging information.

He found private galleries that had gone out of business, doctored their records and forged old catalogs. He was meticulous in the way he operated, using antique paper and period ink. He also used an old typewriter to type slips that identified photographs of Myatt's paintings as originals.

He also gained access to the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, writing a character reference for himself under a false name, and was given the key to the Institute of Contemporary Arts' records after he donated two paintings, now known to be fakes.

He inserted the bogus catalogs, with detailed references to faked paintings, into the archives. Thus, when the paintings were offered for sale through fine-art auctioneers, experts checked the provenance of the works and found documentation that seemed to prove they were genuine.

Several dealers have now said they thought the paintings were of poor quality but were persuaded to buy them because of the documentation.

The scheme was uncovered when Bathseva Goudsmid, an Israeli with whom Drewe lived for 15 years and who became the mother of his two children, found documents he had left behind when they separated in 1994. She contacted the Tate Gallery and police.

Before that happened, many were taken in. Whitford Fine Arts, a London gallery, complained to Drewe after a de Stael painting it had bought turned out to be a fake. He persuaded the gallery to accept four sketches in exchange - which turned out to be bogus Sutherlands.