Art Forgery Stories United Kingdom
The fakes planted in the Tate archives
John Myatt made the paintings. John Drewe gave them exhibition histories in places dealers trusted.
John Myatt had advertised paintings made in the style of famous artists. The arrangement changed when John Drewe passed one off as an authentic Albert Gleizes. Myatt kept painting, while Drewe dealt with the people who might buy the work.
Drewe understood what a careful dealer would do next: check the provenance. He gained access to institutional archives and inserted images of Myatt’s paintings into old exhibition records. A dealer who checked an apparently independent catalogue could find the history Drewe had put there.
The men were convicted and received different sentences. For researchers, the case leaves a practical question: when the canvas and its paperwork agree, what independently establishes the age of the paperwork?
