Art Forger Becomes Cult Hero

March 15, 2003 -- John Myatt, the unassuming master forger at the heart of what British police have called the biggest contemporary art fraud of the 20th century, once stood at the back of an auction room and watched four of his fake masterpieces sell for thousands of dollars.

"I did think actually, as I walked out, 'The world is really a very stupid place, and I am probably one of its most stupid inhabitants,'" Myatt recalls.

Yet along with a partner who would turn out to be a career con man, John Drewe, Myatt took part in a sophisticated seven-year scheme that swindled many of the art world's swankiest specialists in the booming art market of the 1980s and 1990s — and brought in millions of pounds.

Working in household emulsion paint — a substance that hadn't even been invented when many of the paintings he mimicked were first done — Myatt replicated more than 200 works by masters like Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Dubuffet, and Giacometti.

"Part of me felt, 'Hold on a minute, these are painted in modern materials. They're painted in K-Y jelly and house paint, for God's sake. Anybody will look at it and they will just go, 'No!'" Myatt recalls.

But Drewe reportedly "aged" the paintings with vacuum dust and garden soil, then falsified documents outlining the works' ownership history so he could pass them off as authentic works by great artists of the 20th century. Drewe even made a £20,000 contribution to London's Tate Gallery in order to gain access to library records there that he used, and in some cases altered, to forge better histories. The extent of the damage done to art history archives is still unknown.

Fall into Forgery

Myatt — a former art teacher and one-time pop songwriter from the English Midlands — says he fell into forgery because of poverty. In 1986, recently divorced and struggling to raise his two children, he placed an ad in a London satirical magazine, offering "Genuine Fakes for £250." He started painting classics on commission, often adding a client's face into the original masterpiece.

One of his clients was Drewe, who ordered a "Matisse" for his wife's birthday, then several other works, regularly meeting Myatt to exchange canvases for cash at a train station pub. When Drewe ran out of ideas, Myatt made him a painting from a drawing he had seen in a book by French artist Albert Gleizes.

Weeks later, Drewe called Myatt to tell him that one of the top auction houses had valued his "Gleizes" at more than £25,000 — and to offer him his cut: £12,500 in a brown paper envelope.

"I suppose that's the moment when I should have said, 'No, that's a very silly idea and we're all going to go to prison if we carry on like this.' But I didn't," Myatt admits. "This just seemed like the answer to a lot of problems at the time, and the moral considerations about it — that it isn't actually right to be doing this — they came about 18 months later."

Misgivings aside, Myatt continued working for Drewe, turning out fakes that fooled museums and galleries, experts and buyers. Many of Myatt's works were sold directly to individual collectors, but others passed through major auction houses in New York, Paris and London — 14 works reportedly through Sotheby's alone.

The Game's Up

Drewe wanted to carry on the scheme, but Myatt ultimately decided he wanted out. "I just got to the point where I disliked what I was doing so much.... I was frightened," he says.

For a while, Myatt believed he had gotten away with it. "The more time that went by," he says, "I started to pat myself on the back." Then, one September morning in 1995, he rose to put his son on the school bus, and found 12 detectives at his door, shouting that they had a seach warrant and were going to enter his premises.

It turned out that Drewe's ex-girlfriend had tipped off police after figuring out the scam from Drewe's papers.

Myatt, now 57, remembers realizing, in a central London police station, the enormity of what he had done. "There were so many exhibits all wrapped up in heavy polythene," he recalls. "It was like seeing your life's work in front of you."

Investigators estimated that Drewe had made about £2.5 million from the con, and that he had paid Myatt only about £100,000. Myatt returned what money he had left, pled guilty to conspiracy, and collaborated in the case against Drewe.

At trial, Drewe apparently became unstable, firing his lawyer and defending himself. He was convicted in February 1999 and sentenced to six years in prison, although he served only two. Myatt served four months of a one-year sentence at London's Brixton prison, where he painted portraits of fellow prisoners, who paid him in phonecards.

The People's Painter

After his release in June 1999, Myatt found himself a cult celebrity, with a new career reproducing the same old masterworks — only now with the words "Genuine Fake" emblazoned on their backs in indelible ink.

"I came out of prison and I put down my paintbrushes," he recalls. "I thought, 'I don't know what I'm going to do, but I don't want anything to do with that.' Then the phone rang, and the policeman who'd arrested me called up and said, 'Would you paint a family portrait for me and my family? And then a few barristers came along and said, 'Oh, I remember that case?. Can I just have a souvenir ? and would you do me a Giacometti? We'll hang it up in the chambers.' So there I am — bloody barmy, this is."

Today, Myatt's "Genuine Fakes" get exhibitions in their own right.

Myatt claims to have painted 200 fakes for Drewe, but says only 80 have been detected. He says he has seen his fakes in unwitting auction house catalogues since he was released, but says he would refuse to help identify them, because it wouldn't benefit anyone.

"You're sitting there showing me this painting and secretly you're thinking, 'John, please don't say you painted this one, because I just paid $250,000 for it. So I say, 'No. I've never seen that before. Please take it away, officer.'"

This report originally aired on Nightline UpClose on Jan. 16, 2003.