In the high-stakes art world of London’s swinging ‘60s, Eric Hebborn, the most prolific art forger of all time, and his unwitting accessory Sir Anthony Blunt, celebrated art critic and advisor to the Queen secretly working as a Russian spy, fight to maintain their clandestine lifestyles while back-stabbing dealers, British and Russian intelligence services, snooping journalists and mafia assassins close in to bring them down.

Gerard & Trinder Projects is developing the series based on Eric Hebborn’s explosive memoir, Drawn To Trouble (option secured), that when published in 1991 spread chaos throughout the art world, casting doubt on the authenticity of artworks held in collections from NYC’s Metropolitan and LA’s Getty to the British Museum and Copenhagen’s National Museum.

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Rights to memoir of artist who died in 1996 secured for ambitious TV drama

Peter Gerard, a filmmaker working on a series about the master forger based on Hebborn’s memoir, thinks his story is still relevant in this “era of questionable authenticity of images.” Today, the term “fake news” is thrown around casually by the president of the United States in speeches and on Twitter, and anyone who knows how to use Photoshop can doctor an image. But Hebborn scoffed at experts long before the dawn of the “Post-Truth Era.”

The mythic art world swindler met an unsettling end; in 1996, Hebborn was found with his skull fractured in Rome, where he had resided for 30 years. Despite rumors that the mafia was involved in his death, no one has ever been arrested in connection with the crime.

Decades after Hebborn's death, concerns over authenticity in the art market remain alive and well.

About Gerard & Trinder Projects

Peter Gerard has won awards as a film producer and entrepreneur, including a BAFTA Scotland New Talent Award and the British Council’s Creative Entrepreneur Award, and has innovated in distribution, marketing and development at both his startup Distrify and at Vimeo, where he was most recently responsible for launching original series and films, including High Maintenance, as VP & GM of Entertainment.

Kingston Trinder is a frequently published writer and journalist, known for his widely-reviewed monograph An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour, published in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums, with an upcoming nonfiction novel, Lickety Split, about an innocent man’s 8-year battle to be freed from wrongful incarceration within a Colorado mental health institute.