Review 118: Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The title of this book explains how a master con man was able to sell many, if not several hundred, works of forged paintings. He learned the rules of provenance that makes an art piece more or less valuable depending on what happened with the art piece since it was created. The con man, John Drewe was quite sophisticated and had an excellent memory and ability to shift the conversation towards his needs. The painter, John Myatt was perhaps taken in by him, or not, it feels like the authors were biased towards him, not too critical in his part of this fraud.

The details of this case are fascinating, one of those tales where fact is stranger than fiction. The writing style wasn't as readable as fiction, and could have used slight improvement, on occasion got bogged down, as there was repeating information at times. Overall decent read.

I must admit to astonishment how Drewe was able to keep putting off the court after he was finally caught. Doubt you could get away with that in the U.S. In the end his term in prison did not seem to match the crime, way too short. And what about the forger, Myatt? Well now his paintings are “genuine fakes” and can be worth some money. The author’s don’t go into how these two “rewrote the history of modern art” and maybe that was what I found missing. In any case it is worth reading if you are interested in true crime or the art world.


Listened to the audiobook.  Didn’t like the narrator too much, but as the book went on she grew on me.