Provenance

If you like mysteries, police dramas, art history, and international intrigue, you will love Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo.

From the mid 1980s to 1990s a con man and pathological liar named John Drewe, together with the initially unsuspecting artist John Myatt, flooded the art market with hundreds of fake works of modern art. Drewe took his scams to a new level by seeding the archives of numerous museums with forged documents that provided Myatt’s forgeries with apparently solid records of ownership – a prerequisite for the successful sale of art work among collectors and museums. Drewe made a small fortune. His “friend” Myatt, less so. Then things started to unravel for them.

This book reads like a well paced work of suspense fiction, but is in fact the true account of one of the 20th century’s greatest art frauds. Apparently, there is a major motion picture in the works, so this should become a popular book!

If I had to come up with one criticism of the book, it would be that there are no photos (either of the forged work or of the forgers). Not a big deal, since Myatt has since found success as a legitimate painter of works in the style of the masters and has a web site!

-Paul