Free Provenance by Laney Salisbury

friends could remember were replicas imported from Spain.
    For his part, Drewe never let the facts get in the way of a good story, particularly one that could help him sell more fakes. He needed real names to attach to Myatt’s paintings, and Harris was a fine addition to his roster. The self-described “oldest newspaper delivery boy in Hampstead,” whose only artwork was a framed certificate proclaiming, “I’ve visited every Young’s Pub in London,” was about to morph into a wealthy arms dealer with a large art collection. This new, improved Peter Harris would be based in Israel and would have close ties to an ammunition manufacturer in Serbia.
    Piece by piece, document by document, Drewe reinvented Harris. Years after his con had come apart, the police were never certain whether Harris had wittingly posed as an owner of Drewe’s fakes or whether he had been another of his marks. In either case, his name figured large in Drewe’s provenance documents, even after Harris died of cancer. Police suspected that as he lay on his deathbed, barely able to talk, Drewe was feeding him blank documents to sign.

7
    WRECKERS OF CIVILIZATION
    O ne night in the late fall of 1989, as Drewe sat at home with his KGB paperbacks and Mossad memoirs, he got a call from one of the auction houses. He had recently gone to the auctioneer with one of Myatt’s Le Corbusier works, a collage pieced together from bits of newspaper from the 1950s. Drewe said it had come from his family’s collection, but the auctioneer had bad news for him: The provenance was insufficient, and the piece had been turned down.
    “Are you related to Jane Drew?” the auctioneer asked in passing.
    A renowned British architect with close ties to the Swiss-born architect and artist Le Corbusier, Jane Drew had helped design the original premises of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, which was founded in the late 1940s as a cutting-edge art gallery and cultural center. Drewe knew about her design work for the modernist Indian city of Chandigarh and her influence on the Modern Movement, a group of avant-garde architects and painters of the 1940s.
    The professor was not one to let an opportunity slip by. He told the auctioneer that Jane Drew was indeed a distant relative. Drewe carried on the conversation long enough to learn that the legendary woman was still alive, living just a few hours away, in the northeast.
    Perhaps, Drewe thought, it was time to pay her a visit.
    Drewe and Myatt drove north in the blue Bristol for three hours, until they reached the tiny two-pub village of Durham. Drewe had called beforehand and introduced himself as a patron of the arts who was writing a book on the history of the ICA. Jane Drew had immediately invited him up.
    As soon as they walked into the house, Myatt was in awe, for he considered the seventy-eight-year-old woman a living, breathing part of Britain’s culture. Before long they were chatting about her work with “Corbu,” her role in the Modern Movement, and her friendships with Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller, who had invented the geodesic dome and coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth.” At Drewe’s prompting, she reminisced about her involvement in the postwar celebration dubbed the Festival of Britain and her work as a pioneer in tropical architecture and public housing.
    She spoke with affection about some of the artists she had met through the ICA, particularly Ben Nicholson, a jaunty character who wore a beret and talked in a high-pitched voice. She remembered his uncanny penchant for design and his beautifully composed vegetarian dishes, with a red radish placed slightly off center, a fistful of asparagus laid out in a curve on the edge of the plate.
    Drewe was in top form, and Myatt noted his effect on the aging woman. When the professor suggested that it was high time she wrote her autobiography, she seemed flattered. Then he offered to finance the project himself. He was certain her memoirs