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PrintRewriting history
Recent Tulsa visitor Laney Salisbury and her late husband, Aly Sujo, chronicle a decades-long art fraud case in their 2008 book.
Until I worked at Gilcrease Museum, I had never encountered the word “provenance.” “Provenance” means the origin or source, and no painting can survive the art market without proof of it. Who owned it, what gallery sold it and what museums exhibited the piece are questions that must be documented to realize its ultimate price at auction.
Laney Salisbury, via BookSmart Tulsa, lectured in Tulsa at Philbrook Museum of Art last May. She and her deceased husband, Aly Sujo, wrote the nonfiction book “Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art” (Penguin Books, 2008). Oprah Winfrey anointed the Edgar Award finalist as a summer 2008 must-read. All accolades are deserved.
“Provenance” reads like a fast-paced fiction of suspense. Along the way, the reader learns much about the high-tone art world in London. John Drewe and John Myatt perpetrated the biggest art fraud of the 20th century, which lasted a decade in the ’80s and ’90s.
After Salisbury completed the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she interned for the Jordan Times in Amman and reported on Middle East peace talks and other weighty issues. Her journalist husband, who came from a family of artists and collectors, had the background in art transaction nuances. Together they unraveled the exploits of Drewe and company.
Drewe conned the biggest names in the art world, including the curators at the Tate Museum, where he finagled entry into the archives and added forged documentation into their permanent collection. Then his cohort, Myatt, painted fakes to match the provenance. After fooling the art connoisseurs for many years, he was finally caught. Convicted, Drewe served four years in jail; Myatt one.
“Read it for the art history, read it for the psychology, but do read it.” — Chronogram magazine
