The Case of Han van Meegeren ~ the Boldest Modern Forger of Old Masters |
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| Thursday, 30 October 2008 03:03 |
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He became the most original of fakers when, starting in 1936, he put aside mere canny simulations, mostly of the work of Johannes Vermeer, to create wildly implausible pictures which were presented as discoveries of a missing phase in the artist's conveniently spotty, little-documented opus. (Only thirty-five undisputed Vermeers exist today. As an added boon to forgers, a few aren't very good.) Van Meegeren's tour de force was a feat more of intellect than of skill. He knew whom he had to fool first: an eighty-three-year-old monster of vanity named Abraham Bredius, who had an earned, though moldering, track record as an authenticator of new found Vermeers. In 1937, in the august British art-history journal The Burlington Magazine, Bredius declared "The Supper at Emmaus," the first of van Meegeren's Dutch counterfeits, to be "the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft." Other Dutch experts concurred, under pressure to keep a national treasure from being sold overseas. (The remarkably dreary canvas still hangs, presented now as a historical curio, at the Boijmans Museum, in Rotterdam, which bought it in 1937.) It took van Meegeren himself to reveal the truth, in 1945, when not to do so might have put his neck in a hangman's noose. Two new books re-spin the van Meegeren saga, one breezily, with entertaining digressions on secondary figures and the arcana of forgery, and the other in profoundly researched, focussed, absorbing depth. "The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century" (Harper; $26.95), by the science journalist Edward Dolnick, aggrandizes the story's abundant hooks, such as the happenstance that van Meegeren's victims included the art maven Hermann Göring, who, in 1943, swapped a hundred and thirty-seven paintings from his largely ill-gotten collection for a van Meegeren Vermeer. "The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren" (Harcourt; $26), by the writer and artist Jonathan Lopez, brings hard light to van Meegeren's machinations and (very bad) character. Van Meegeren was born in 1889, in the provincial city of Deventer, the third of five children in a middle-class Catholic family. In 1907, his father, a schoolmaster, sent him to Vermeer's city, Delft, to study architecture. The feckless lad preferred to paint and draw. There he launched himself as an artist. With "his small, birdlike frame constantly aflutter and his irreverent sense of humor," in Lopez's description, van Meegeren beguiled the town. His work was sprightly, in a nostalgically conservative vein. His pretty, filmy drawing of a doe, identified as a pet of the young Princess Julianna, became a popular icon throughout the Netherlands. Reproductions testify that he had a subtle sense of color and a firm gift for telling portraiture. Come to think of it, what are artistic forgeries but portraits of imaginary art works? Van Meegeren's first legitimate exhibition in The Hague, in 1917, of work in several genres, reaped positive reviews. His second, five years later, of Christian religious paintings, sold well but repelled critics with its treacly piety-van Meegeren, it turned out, was a student of Scripture. (In the show, there was an early-warning "Supper at Emmaus"-representing Jesus, who has appeared as a stranger to his disciples after his death, being recognized at the moment when he breaks bread for them.) Informed opinion consigned van Meegeren to the always populous ranks of the formerly promising.  Lopez dates van Meegeren's initiation into The Hague's underworld of art swindlers to 1920, at the latest. He was mentored by a dealer and painter, Theo van Wijngaarden, who had apprenticed in chicanery with a make believe Titan: Leo Nardus. Nardus stuck American millionaires with innumerable old copies, fresh fakes, and fanciful mis-attributions of famous artists until 1908, when a panel of invited experts, including Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, convened at the home of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate P. A. B. Widener and concluded that his collection was worth about five per cent of what Nardus had charged him for it. The hardly less resourceful van Wijngaarden, on his own, perfected a paint medium, gelatin glue, to finesse a standard test for the age of oil paint: rubbing with alcohol, which dissolves oils that have had less than decades to dry. (The glue weathers alcohol but, as was later discovered-too late for a generation of marks-softens on contact with another chemical compound: water.) Van Wijngaarden maintained a network of well-placed accomplices, extending to London and Berlin, who could pilot fakes into the mainstream of respectable commerce. He lacked only top-drawer product. He himself painted well, but not well enough. He wanted an adept protégé, and he found him in van Meegeren, who was ready. Van Meegeren never admitted having produced any of the known gelatin-glue Vermeers, which included "The Lacemaker" and "The Smiling Girl," but he almost certainly did paint them. Van Wijngaarden steered the pictures to the attention of a revered German connoisseur, Wilhelm von Bode, who was taken in by them-predictably, as they seem to have been created with him in mind. The two paintings were sold to the Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon by the magus of Old Master dealers, Joseph Duveen, and adorned the National Gallery in Washington, at one point nervously reassigned to a "Follower of Vermeer," in the nineteen-seventies. The art historian Max Friedländer, who said, "Forgeries must be served hot," promulgated a forty-year rule-four decades or so being how long it takes for the modern nuances of a forgery to date themselves as clichés of the period in which they were painted. Duveen was misled, although he wasn't by van Meegeren's "Emmaus." In 1937, he sent his right-hand man, Edward Fowles, to inspect the painting in Paris. Fowles cabled, "PICTURE A ROTTEN FAKE." (Duveen kept the verdict to himself; saving other dealers from disgrace didn't figure in his business plan.) Dolnick is good on van Meegeren's studio practice, which kept pace with scientific progress. Mediocre old paintings, from the prolific Dutch Golden Age, were cheaply available, as grounds to paint on; but the overnight creation of a convincingly antique paint surface was a challenge. Van Meegeren's late fakes deploy Bakelite, which, as a liquid medium, hardens with heat and stands up to almost any solvent. He learned, with difficulty, to make an ancestor of modern plastics ape the fluency of oils. Many failed experiments led at length to a proper blend, with admixed floral oils, and the correct baking recipe. "Emmaus," a big picture, would have been larger, but the old painting, on its original stretchers, that van Meegeren bought for the job wouldn't fit in his makeshift oven. As a matter of course, he used only pigments that were available to Vermeer, and concocted effects of age: craquelure, wormholes, yellowed varnish, soilage, and, for good measure in "Emmaus," a poorly repaired rip. He turned negligent in subsequent works. Göring's canvas, "Christ and the Adulteress," employs cobalt blue, a nineteenth-century innovation in paints, and it is carelessly drawn, with anatomical solecisms in the figures. But van Meegeren no longer had to evoke Vermeer. It was enough that the hand that painted the works plainly be the same that had painted "Emmaus." In 1945, while van Meegeren was imprisoned, an awkward item turned up in Hitler's private library at the Reich Chancellery, in Berlin: a deluxe volume of poems by a Dutch Nazi poet, illustrated by van Meegeren and inscribed, in German, "To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942." Van Meegeren acknowledged the signature but theorized that a German officer must have penned the dedication, even though the handwriting was clearly the same. At his trial on an open-and-shut charge of forgery, all such matters were ignored. Urges to go easy on van Meegeren seem to have afflicted ordinarily sensible people  Apparently, by 1947, the Dutch were not only tired of the war but tired of being tired of it, too. After a paroxysm of angry revenge on collaborators, they craved a carnival. Van Meegeren became a giddy nation's "Lord of Misrule," Lopez writes. Van Meegeren's humiliation of so many stuffed shirts, Nazi and otherwise, was too pricelessly funny to be marred by stale grudges. The trial took place in a courtroom hung with "Emmaus" and other van Meegeren hoaxes. Superfluously, the artist having confessed, technical experts presented charts, graphs, and slides of a new test that proved the works' recent manufacture. Van Meegeren fulsomely congratulated the men on their ingenuity. He had done the Vermeers only to prove himself, he testified, hewing to what Lopez calls "the master-forger-as-misunderstood-genius storyline," which the prosecution failed to deflate. At one point, the judge hazarded a skeptical note: "You do admit, though, that you sold these pictures for very high prices?" Van Meegeren's answer cracked up the room: "I could hardly have done otherwise. Had I sold them for low prices, it would have been obvious they were fake." Cheering fans greeted van Meegeren when he emerged from the court. He was sentenced to a year in prison and forfeiture of his wealth (except for a sizable chunk that he had settled on Johanna by the legal stratagem of divorcing her). He died two months later, of heart failure-probably. He was fifty-eight years old. "To give him his due, he was indeed a truly brilliant fraud." Art forgery is among the least despised of crimes, except by its victims; the identity of those victims being more than exculpatory, for many people. Art is unique among universally esteemed creative fields in its aloofness from a public audience. Faith in authorship matters. If we are disappointed enough, when the named artist is familiar, we get suspicious. But we can never be certain in every case that someone with a veiled mind-isn't playing us for suckers. Art lovers are people who brave that possible chagrin. Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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