Art forger fooled even Goering
The Reich Marshal traded 137 paintings for just one fake Vermeer
A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
By Edward Dolnick
HarperCollins. 349 pp. 26.95
Reviewed by Richard Di Dio
In the annals of World War II stories, full of odd events and even odder characters, there may be none more implausible than the tale thrillingly told by Edward Dolnick in
The Forger's Spell
.
A perfect
Sturm
of hubris, nationalism, war, and greed,
Forger's Spell
is the story of Han van Meegeren, a Dutch portrait painter of modest skills whose work was considered hopelessly dated.
Belittled by leading critics of the 1920s, Van Meegeren ultimately turned to forgery, more as a way to tweak these cultural despots into recognizing his true artistic genius than to earn a living - although Van Meegeren's first faux Vermeer,
Christ at Emmaus
, painted in 1937, fetched the equivalent of $3.9 million in today's dollars.
Being "hopelessly dated" when trying to channel Johannes Vermeer can be a good thing. Van Meegeren was so successful at mimicking the style of the 17th-century Dutch master that the same art critics who ridiculed his efforts were completely fooled, falling over themselves to proclaim the forgeries as the greatest works of Vermeer yet discovered.
He even conned that most rapacious of art collectors, Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, making Van Meegeren something of a folk hero.
But it was more than painting skill that fooled them. After many failed experiments, Van Meegeren discovered that he could reproduce the fine craquelure, or pattern of cracks, typical of a 17th-century painting by using oils mixed with Bakelite (the first synthetic plastic), followed by a careful baking regimen.
Rubbing ink onto the dried painting simulated dirt that would have collected in the cracks. An essential step in art forgery is to have a convincing appearance, and Van Meegeren's paintings looked centuries old.
In the end, though, it all comes down to the marketing plan, and here Van Meegeren proved to be an even better artist of the deal. With just a few dozen Vermeers known to exist at that time, a new "find" in someone's attic would not be unusual.
Vermeer's works fell naturally into two distinct periods. Van Meegeren's forgeries were sufficiently unlike Vermeer to convince art critics that they were the missing links between these periods, and therefore had to have been painted by Vermeer.
How did these critics fall so hard?
If, as Dolnick writes, "a forgery is performance, and a forger is in many ways a magician," Van Meegeren gave the performance of his life, masterfully playing critics, museum directors, and collectors against one another in their mad state of Vermeer mania.
The imprimatur of the experts launched the forgeries into a stratosphere of very competitive collectors, none more acquisitive than Goering, who was consumed with buying art "at bargain" in every occupied territory. He jumped aggressively into the market for the painting
Christ With the Woman Taken in Adultery
and, after his own unique brand of negotiation, became the proud if unwitting owner of a Van Meegeren special, trading it for 137 other paintings in his collection.
Van Meegeren earned millions, living lavishly during the war while his countrymen suffered. His exploits were eventually exposed when soldiers looking for stolen art after the war came across his name in Goering's little black book. He was sentenced to a year in prison and died of heart failure in 1947 before serving any time, but not before becoming the people's hero. After all, he had punked the Reich Marshal.
(Goering, "indignant and disbelieving," found out not long before his death by suicide the true nature of his "Vermeer," which had cost him more than any other work in his collection.)
Van Meegeren's forgeries are now ridiculed, described as "grotesquely ugly and unpleasant paintings, altogether dissimilar to Vermeer's." For Dolnick, this is the true mystery of the whole affair - obvious fakes were once taken to be the greatest works of one of the world's greatest artists. With a convincing psychological, social and historical analysis, Dolnick's "anatomy of a hoax" makes the mystery more understandable.
As in
The Rescue Artist
, his previous look at art theft, Dolnick exposes the seamier parts of the art world not covered in any art school, writing with pacing and prose as gripping as those of the best mystery novelist.
Full of scoundrels, schemes, and artistic dreams,
The Forger's Spell
is simply spellbinding.