Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern ArtBy Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo
Penguin Press, 2009, 327 Pages, Nonfiction
What makes art great and who has the right to pronounce it great? Is it the style, the artist, the price? Provenance “paints” a fascinating and colorful picture of a devious con man, John Drewe, who sells fake art to high-priced galleries and rich clients. Rationalizing that if they thought what he was selling them was great art, then he was only giving them what they wanted, he sold hundreds of paintings created to look like the works of modern masters. His intrigues included gaining access to the archives of famous galleries where he introduced forged documents to create faked provenance for the art he was selling. His exploits were so prolific and convoluted that to this day there are still fakes hanging in famous galleries and forged documents in archives. Tracing some of the faked art from the painter, John Myatt, who was employed by Drewe, through middlemen, dealers, archives and galleries, investigative reporters Salisbury and Sujo have created a book that very is hard to put down.
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