Saatchi hoaxed by 'schoolgirl' art
Collector Charles Saatchi has confessed that an art work displayed at his gallery is an elaborate hoax.
The County Hall gallery features the drawings and sketches of a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Naomi V Jelish.
Jelish’s life story – the family disappeared a couple of months after her father drowned – is told in the exhibition with newspaper cuttings, school reports and personal mementoes.
Jelish’s sketches, which showed talent beyond her age, were said to have been recovered from an abandoned house by a science teacher at Naomi’s school, John Ivesmail, and displayed in a London exhibition.
But the story is a hoax dreamt up by a 25-year-old art graduate Jamie Shovlin, from Leicester.
Mr Saatchi was at first fooled into believing the story when he saw the work displayed at a London gallery, which Mr Shovlin curated, where he snapped it up for £25,000 (€37,000).
He told The Daily Telegraph: “I believed in Naomi V Jelish until about halfway through the show.
“Being a scrabble bore, I saw that John Ivesmail and James Shovlin were anagrams for Miss Jelish.
“It is an effective, strangely moving work of art and I think that the artist is something of a prodigy himself.”
A gallery spokesman said: “This is an extraordinarily wonderful piece of art.
“It’s not deliberate deceit – it’s a story in the same way as a good book is a story.”
