John Myatt: a story of fame and forgery
An art faker's journey from prison to mainstream television
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- guardian.co.uk,
- "The fakes I do today are actually better than the fakes I was doing when I was a crook," says John Myatt, on the phone from his home in Staffordshire. Between 1986 and 1994, in what Scotland Yard called "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century", Myatt forged "new" works by artists including Renoir, Giacometti and Matisse. "I'm a bit like the kid who takes a clock to pieces and tries to put it back again. I just want to know how things work, except in my case it's paint on canvas. It's liberating to cast off your own mannerisms and try on someone else's, particularly if they throw the paint around a bit."
The new series of Sky Arts show Fame in the Frame starts next week, in which Myatt paints six celebrity sitters into a famous painting – this time it includes Frank Skinner in Vincent van Gogh's Self Portrait 1888, Catherine Tate in Joshua Reynolds's Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, Lauren Laverne in Vladimir Tretchikoff's Chinese Girl and Paul O'Grady in Grant Wood's American Gothic. They would pose for around five hours, while Myatt paints and chats to them about their lives. "You get to see a side of your sitter that perhaps doesn't come out very often."
Still, it is Myatt's story that is the most interesting of all. He had always drawn and painted as a child. After art college, he worked as a teacher, but having to raise his two young children alone, turned to producing "genuine fakes" that he would advertise in the back of Private Eye.
When one of his customers, John Drewe, sold his copy of a work by the cubist artist Albert Gleizes through Christie's for £25,000, giving him half, Myatt was hooked. Over the next few years, the pair produced and sold around 200 works. "The way it turned from being something legitimate into a crime was an easy move," says Myatt.
When their scam fell apart in 1995, both men were given prison sentences. "I do wish it hadn't happened, because it's a blot on my life, yet if I hadn't done it, nobody would have asked me to do things like [this show]."
On his release from prison, Myatt had decided he would never paint again, but the police officer who arrested him commissioned him to paint a portrait of his family. Within six months, Myatt was making a legitimate living from his art.
He is hoping to have an exhibition next year, with original work alongside the fakes, which now sell for thousands of pounds in their own right. "I'm nervous about showing my own work to the public in case they laugh and walk away, but it's about time I did," he says. Does it bother him that people are more interested in his fakes? "No. That's the nature of the beast, and there's no escape. Many fakers have no voice of their own at all. I have paintings I want to paint. I'm not sitting there with painter's block."
Lauren Laverne sits for Myatt's interpretation of Chinese Girl by Vladimir Tretchikoff.
Amazing rersonality!What a talented artist!
