15 Bytes Review: The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez and The Forgers Spell by Edward Dolnick

Reviewed by Shawn Rossiter for 15 Bytes journal

Art forgers have frustrated and fascinated the art world for years. The critics whose reputations can be ruined by false attributions, and the collectors who find themselves holding a painting worth less than a tenth of what they paid for it, conjure up visions of public flogging or Bush-era modes of interrogation when they think of the charlatans. But to the general public, the forgers can be superstars, objects of fascination, and even praise. Eric Hebborn and Tom Keating both wrote books on their exploits as forgers. John Myatt was less proud of his own work, but his story has also been the subject of a popular book (Provenance -- see our review). These now famous forgers were preceeded by Han van Meegeren, who created one of the century's most famous fakes. Van Meegeren died before he could write his own expose -- and chances are he would have loved to do so -- but his story, in various permutations, has fascinated the public since it first came to light at the end of World War II. Two books published in 2008 keep his story alive.

To briefly tell van Meegeren's story is difficult, because it is hard to know which is the true and which a copy. The basic story goes something like this. After critics panned his own artwork, van Meegeren set about creating forgeries to prove his talents to the art world and take revenge on the critics. He was eventually exposed when one of his fake Vermeers ended up in the hands of Hermann Goering. After the War, the Allies discovered that van Meegeren had been the seller of the painting. Rather than be tried for treason (for selling national treasure to the occupying German forces) van Meegeren confessed to having forged the work. This brought to light a whole series of works thought to be by Vermeer that were painted by van Meegeren.

Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell follows this account fairly closely. His story concentrates on van Meegeren's "Christ at Emmaus," the fateful fake purchased by Goering, which at the time of van Meegeren's trial was the most famous Vermeer in the world. Dolnick likes to create a good narrative, but he can take too much time painting the lurid background of Nazi atrocities that appear in his frame while leaving the main figures only loosely rendered. He does explore in detail the physical process of forgery -- van Meegeren's breakthrough was the use of Bakelite (plastic) to mimic the effects of hardened oil paint -- and makes strong attempts at examining the psychological forces that drive a forger and also make possible his success in the larger world. In the end, though seriously flawed, Dolnick's van Meegeren still comes off as a sort of hero who pulled one over on the Nazis.

Jonathan Lopez's The Man Who Made Vermeers is a much more sober account of van Meegeren. Its subtitle -- "Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren" accurately portrays Lopez's in-depth historical analysis of van Meegeren's entire life and work as a forger. In Lopez's account van Meegeren still plays the masterful psychologist to pass off works that in hindsight look atrociously bad as real Vermeers. But he shows us a different character than either a heroic Dutchman putting one over on the Nazis or a spurned artist trying to get back at the art world that spurned him. Van Meegeren was actually an ardent fascist, and his growing fascination with the Nazis dovetails with his growing success as a forger. It was the easy money found in forgery, not the critics, that drove him to it. Along that path he lost his way as a painter. Lopez's book deals less with a lurid description of the atrocities of the Nazis, and more with the inner workings of the art world, from feuds between art historians to the workings of forgery rings.

Dolnick's book draws the outline for van Meegeren's success, but Lopez fills in the details. Van Meegeren's trick was to create plausible works, by taking advantage of gaps in the art historical knowledge and appealing to the sensibilities and bais of particular experts or the public at large. This is why he concentrated on religious Vermeers -- for many experts, the only surviving religious painting by Vermeer pointed to a larger, unknown oeuvre -- and why so many of the people in his paintings look like the screen idols of the thirties, and his compositions resemble Nazi Volkgeist. Van Meegeren was a conservative who did bristle against the opinions of more liberal painters and critics, but his career was by no means ruined by critics. He continued to paint and exhibit throughout the twenties and thirties, and even flourished as an artist under the Nazis. For Lopez, van Meegeren was not merely a hack artist. He says he was a conservative painter, developing talents and could have been the "Edward Hopper of the Netherlands." He just didn't have the vision.

Some people will tell you that the legend is better than the truth. But though the legend is always easier to tell the truth is usually far more interesting. The Forger's Spell will interest you in the story of one of this century's most famous forgers. But to understand more of the man and less of the myth, The Man Who Made Vermeers is the true article.

Maine Antiques Digest: Review of The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez

By Jeanne Schinto for The Maine Antiques Digest

Like many people, I have always had an odd fondness for Han van Meegeren. True, the Dutchman was a forger, but didn’t he paint those fakes just to embarrass an egotistical art critic? Wasn’t he a discouraged artist who, treated unfairly by the art establishment, demonstrated that he was talented enough to have his work mistaken for Vermeer’s? Didn’t he also sell a bogus painting to someone who is nobody’s idea of a mensch, Hermann Göring? And wasn’t he able to prove himself innocent of selling that purported treasure-and becoming a Nazi collaborator in the process-by painting another worthless canvas while authorities watched? Not exactly.

In a fascinating new book by Jonathan Lopez, van Meegeren is revealed to be not only a forger-for-hire of at least nine Vermeers (as well as works meant to be taken for ones by Frans Hals, Gerard Terborch, and Pieter de Hooch) but also a foister upon the world of a fraudulent life story. For all the years since his trial in 1945, he should not have been revered as a folk hero. Rather, he should have been seen as an ordinary crook conducting an underhanded business transaction when he sold his phony Christ and the Adulteress to the Luftwaffe’s commander in chief.

What is morally more reprehensible, he actually was a Hitler enthusiast, Lopez shows in The Man Who Made Vermeers. “Van Meegeren truly believed in the fascist dream,” declares Lopez, who credits Dutch doctoral student Marijke van den Brandhof with combing through the Dutch state archives in the 1970’s to find the first “extensive documentary evidence of Van Meegeren’s wartime collaborationist activities.”

Lopez’s self-described “liar’s biography,” however, is much more than a simple debunking. By showing how van Meegeren’s gradual conversion to Hitlerism dovetails with his development as a forger, the writer (who is also an artist) tells a story with much more depth and interest than any of the previous, prettied-up accounts of van Meegeren’s life. For what is a forger, Lopez asks, “if not a closeted Übermensch, an artist who secretly takes history itself for his canvas, who alters the past to suit his present needs?”

Forgers never work alone. Van Meegeren (1889-1947) was part of a vast art trade network of dealers and others capitalizing on recently enriched industrialists’ taste for old masters. Besides a ready market, forgers also need front men and people willing to explain a newly “discovered” picture’s origins. In van Meegeren’s case, he wasn’t even his own mastermind. According to Lopez, it was Theodore Ward, an English businessman of German extraction and an expert in the chemistry of paint. As for van Meegeren’s unwitting accomplices, one was an elderly critic, Abraham Bredius, whose “certificate of expertise” pronounced van Meegeren’s The Supper at Emmaus to be not only a masterpiece but “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.”

Informed that Duveen Brothers literally wasn’t buying it (despite having bought and sold two fake Vermeers from others), Bredius, with his professional reputation at stake, helped van Meegeren’s go-between find a Dutch buyer for the painting. That buyer was Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, which with much pomp exhibited it there in 1938.

The painting, one of seven van Meegeren Vermeers with religious themes, shows a risen Christ eating supper with two of his disciples—his appetite being proof that he was alive again, not merely a spirit. Why was the art-buying public (including Göring) so willing to believe the lie that Vermeer’s career had a lengthy biblical period? Why didn’t it matter that these works don’t seem at all like authentic Vermeers?

According to Lopez’s carefully argued theory, it was because the works echoed “the volkisch Aryan propaganda imagery of the era.” The Supper at Emmaus, he goes so far as to say, is “a subtle homage to Nazi image making.” And, of course, “excitement and hoopla…had kept a lot of people from seeing the scheming dictator in Berlin for what he was too.”

Frauds and villains like these occur in a context, at a specific historical moment. That’s the lesson that Lopez seems to want us most to learn from his book. Van Meegeren, Göring, Hitler, all were products of their time and place, just as today’s frauds and villains are being revealed as products of ours.

Video: Jonathan Lopez on "The Man Who Made Vermeers"

Jonathan Lopez discusses Vermeer and Old Master forgery -

recorded at the Cleveland Museum of Art on November 11, 2009.

NRC Handelsblad Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez and 'The Forger's Spell' by Edward Dolnick

Marika Keblusek / NRC Handelsblad

Some sixty years after his death, master forger Han van Meegeren (1889-1947) continues to intrigue: in the past few years, not one but three English-language biographies of him have appeared. In 2006, the British journalist Frank Wynne published his (rather simplistic) I Was Vermeer, and now two new books about “the man who swindled Goering” have just come out in America.

The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick and The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez beautifully illustrate how Van Meegeren’s deceptions can still capture the imagination. But the two authors’ interpretations of that deception--and their ultimate judgments of it--could hardly be more sharply at odds.

The facts of the case are well-known. In May of 1945, shortly after the Liberation, the police rousted wealthy artist Han van Meegeren out of his bed on the Keizersgracht. In the art collection of Hermann Goering, a painting by Johannes Vermeer had been discovered, and it seemed to have been sold to the Reichsmarschall by Van Meegeren. That was collaboration.

During his interrogation, however, Van Meegeren made an astonishing announcement: it was no Vermeer that Goering had on the wall, but a Van Meegeren. And in the same breath, the painter let it be known that the most famous Vermeer in Dutch possession was also his handiwork: The Supper at Emmaus, in Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum, was a forgery.

It was a crushing blow for some of Europe’s most prominent museum directors and art experts, who had praised Van Meegeren’s Vermeers to the skies. And that was the point--at least according to the forger. A self-styled “misunderstood genius,” he said he had undertaken to fool the art world with his fake Old Masters as a form of revenge. He who laughs last, laughs best. Public opinion agreed. Van Meegeren was soon taken up as a folk hero--a man who had outsmarted his critics and the Nazis alike. That he had made millions in the process--and during the war, moreover--was passed over in discreet silence.

Most biographers agree that Van Meegeren was motivated by ordinary greed, not a quasi-heroic, “I’ll show them a thing or two” quest for vindication. Nonetheless, the scope and audacity of his deceptions still make for an unbelievable story, one worthy of the periodic retellings it receives. Many archival documents remained unknown and unexamined until 1979, when the groundbreaking Een vroege Vermeer uit 1937 (“An Early Vermeer of 1937”) by art historian Marijke van den Brandhof appeared. In 1996, Diederik Kraaijpoel and Harry van Wijnen published new information. And more recently, Frederik Kreuger has annointed himself as “the world’s greatest Van Meegeren expert and authorized biographer” on his website and in his Meestervervalser of 2004. Nearly all of these writers place Van Meegeren somewhere in the spectrum between the colorful rogue and--in the harsher verdicts--the opportunistic villain.

It is the art historian Jonathan Lopez who truly does away with the last vestiges of the “misunderstood genius” hypothesis. In contrast to the journalist Dolnick, who has based his breezily written book on existing accounts, interviews, and outsourced research, Lopez has spent years combing through Dutch, German, British, and American archives to bring to light an impressive quantity of new material, which he presents with irresistible elegance.

Lopez pulls no punches: Van Meegeren was a professional liar who more than sympathized with the Nazi regime. Long before he duped the art world in 1937 with the first of his “biblical” Vermeers, Van Meegeren had been involved with a commercial forgery ring in The Hague (beginning in the early 1920s), operating out of the studio owned by the forger/restorer Theo van Wijngaarden on the Sumatrastraat. Playing upon the affection for Vermeer’s portrayals of young women, Van Meegeren, Van Wijngaarden, and their partners delivered up “newly discovered” Old Masters to bona fide art dealers and collectors, some of whom--as Lopez shows--were considerably less trustworthy than one might otherwise have thought. The American businessman and collector Theodore Ward, for instance, must have known quite well what was going on in that atelier in The Hague, where his agent, Harold Wright, was like a member of the family.

The “real” paintings produced by Van Meegeren as an artist in his own right were not all bad, but, suggests Lopez, the painter made a Faustian bargain, trading in his legitimate ambitions for the grand life of a top-flight forger. And what really made him such a good forger was the realization that technical skill and art-historical knowledge weren’t the only things needed to make a good fake. The public also has to believe in the fake as a work of art, and therefore the image must appeal, surreptitiously, to contemporary tastes, even as it simulates timeless beauty.

And this is precisely why The Supper at Emmaus made such a big impact in 1937. The canvas appealed to the mentality of the ‘30s--covertly, perhaps, but still in a quite seductive way. It presented a Catholic reactionary version of Vermeer deeply influenced, Lopez suggests, by the völkische propaganda of the time--the well-known images of Aryan farming families in the countryside. In 1942, Van Meegeren painted, under his own name, just such a farm family taking their evening meal. The similarity of this picture to The Supper at Emmaus is noteworthy, but it is the undeniable similarity of both to numerous examples of fascist visual culture that is really shocking.

That culture was nothing new to Van Meegeren. As early as 1928, he could be found railing against “art Bolshevism” in a magazine called De Kemphaan that he set up to defend Dutch culture and the Dutch “folk spirit.” The publication, whose editor was Van Meegeren’s life-long friend the ultra-right-wing journalist Jan Ubink, was modeled on Italian and French fascist cultural criticism and propaganda; there were even verbatim borrowings from Mein Kampf.

The arch-opportunist Van Meegeren never officially joined any kind of fascist party, but he did associate closely with figures such as Ubink, the Dutch Nazi poet Martien Beversluis, and Ed Gerdes. This last person was an outspoken Nazi, who served during the war as head of the occupation government’s Department of Art and Propaganda, responsible for the promotion of “true” Dutch art. Van Meegeren worked hard to win Gerdes’s trust by making donations to Nazi causes, and in return he received official commissions from the Department. He was also invited to exhibit his pictures--including the aforementioned Aryan farm family--in shows that Gerdes organized in Germany to showcase Nazi-friendly Dutch artists. At one such exhibition, Van Meegeren dedicated his entry to Hitler, who, incidentally, would receive, in 1942, an inscribed copy of Van Meegeren’s album of drawings, Teekeningen 1, dedicated by the artist to “the beloved Führer.”

The deus-ex-machina confession of 1945 wiped Van Meegeren’s image clean: he completely avoided the stigma of collaboration. All the attention in the forgery matter came to focus on the deception and the deceived, not on the deceiver. The pact with the devil would remain too long unnoticed.

--translated from the Dutch by Han van Meegeren

Houston Chronicle Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez

Fascist forger's bio a great flashlight read

Douglas Britt / Houston Chronicle

The electricity came back on in my house last night, which means today I'm transitioning away from directing pious glares of disapproval at the power haves to offering cringeing, apologetic gazes to the power have-nots. If it's any consolation, I'll tell them, knowing full well that it's not, we still don't have cable or Internet access. I'll miss the badge of martyrdom, but I'd rather have the A/C.

However, my time as a have-not gave me a new litmus test to apply when recommending books to friends, and I can say with authority that Jonathan Lopez's "The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren" makes for a terrific read, even by flashlight as you lay on top of sweat-soaked sheets wishing you'd thought to buy a battery-operated fan before Ike struck.

Any reasonably capable writer could have made the story of Van Meegeren, who got rich forging and selling fake Old Master paintings -- including a Vermeer to Hermann Goering -- a page turner, and Lopez certainly does that.

But he also digs deeper, showing that what made Van Meegeren's fake Vermeers successful was not so much their similarity to the real things -- which, in fact, declined as his career progressed -- as his ability to make the paintings resonate with the zeitgeist of the period between the two world wars, when fascism was on the rise. He also effectively "reclaimed" (i.e., invented) a "lost" period of religious paintings from Vermeer's career that lent itself to the subtle symbolic coding that allowed art-world experts to see what they wanted to see in paintings that today, even in black-and-white reproduction, look unbelievably kitschy.

And Lopez shows how Van Meegeren duped Lt. Joseph Piller, the young Jewish Dutchman who first arrested him for trading with the Nazis, into turning a blind eye to the crook's history of support for fascism and helping create the popular image of the forger as an artist driven by the contempt of unfair modernist critics to show the world, including the Nazis, what he was capable of. In fact, Lopez writes, Van Meegeren's early work as an artist in his own right, while stylistically conservative, was fairly well received and declined, along with critics' opinions of it, only after he steeped himself in forgery and forever muddled his own artistic voice even as his technical mastery grew.

If Lopez's book is that compelling by flashlight, I can only imagine what reading it with the lights on is like.

Essential Vermeer Interview with Jonathan Lopez, author of 'The Man Who Made Vermeers"

Interview conducted and edited by Jonathan Janson for THE ESSENTIAL VERMEER NEWSLETTER

Q: The Han van Meegeren case is by far the most “popular” and written-about art forgery scam of all times. What piqued your interest to take on the topic yet again?

JL: There have been many books on Van Meegeren over the years. Some of them aren’t bad. But none of them really gets at the issues that interested me most. In writing my book, I wanted to go back to the original Dutch sources — trial testimony, investigation reports, correspondence, etc. — and really bear down hard on the facts of the case in a way that hadn’t been done before. I wanted to steep myself in the literature of the period and to present the story with a deep sense of history, because that’s really the key to understanding Han van Meegeren. He was a product of his times to a degree that I think other treatments of the subject have missed.

Q: Perhaps the most far-reaching accomplishment of your book is that it answers a question avoided by those who have taken up the subject previously: how could the most renowned museum curators, art dealers, and private collectors have been taken in by fakes that appear almost laughable today?

JL: This is exactly where a sense of history becomes important.

Q: But the way you go about answering this question involves more than history. There’s also an idea. You discuss Van Meegeren’s forgeries in the context of 20th century art and politics and propose that “a fake doesn't necessarily succeed or fail according to the fidelity with which it replicates the distant past but on the basis of its power to sway the contemporary mind.” Could you elaborate on that a little more?

JL: Well, I'm not the first person to notice that forgeries tend to incorporate elements of the visual culture of their own period, and that this is one of the reasons that they can become so seductive — because they seem to suggest that these great painters of the past were so talented and so ingenious and had so much to say about life and the world that they actually anticipated our own concerns. But I try to delve into this idea with greater specificity and depth than has generally been done, particularly with reference to Van Meegeren’s later biblical Vermeer forgeries, which strike most people today as simply baffling.

Q: They are very ugly paintings.

JL: That’s true. They are. Van Meegeren’s Supper at Emmaus looks like an episode of The Munsters. And yet the great expert Abraham Bredius declared it to be the Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece in 1937. It was praised in the newspapers when it was first “discovered”; it hung in a major museum; exhibitions were organized around it; poetry was written in its honor. This was no small achievement for a forgery. But Emmaus and the other biblical Vermeer forgeries succeeded for a good reason: they really did blend in with the contemporary visual culture of their time. And today it's very hard for us to see that, because the elements of contemporary culture that they were drawing upon, or from which they sprung, were essentially wiped away, wiped off the face of the earth after the war.

Q: How so?

JL: In essence, what these forgeries had done was to re-interpret Vermeer in the light of art inspired by Nazi ideology — with which Van Meegeren, by the way, sympathized. In the book, I tease this out by pairing the forgeries with actual Nazi propaganda art produced during the time, including Nazi-influenced works that Van Meegeren himself produced during the war (under his own name) for the German occupation government of the Netherlands. The late Vermeer forgeries are basically a Nazi fantasy of Vermeer, and this was, of course, an entirely plausible image of Vermeer if you happened to be living in occupied Europe during the war, when Nazi imagery was an absolutely ubiquitous part of daily life. But today these fakes are stranded on a historical desert island. We don't know what they're referring back to. And they just look weirder and weirder as time goes by.

Q: Was Van Meegeren actually a Nazi?

JL: His relationship to Nazism was complex. On a personal level, Van Meegeren greatly admired Hitler — a fellow traditionalist artist, among other things — and he was a big fan of Mein Kampf, which he read just shortly after it came out. Then, during the war, he did these commissioned artworks for the Nazis. He also gave large sums to Nazi causes, joined Nazi-sponsored arts organizations, and once even sent an inscribed book of drawings to Hitler as a token of appreciation. So, I think it’s fair to say that Van Meegeren found Nazism quite appealing. On the other hand, though, he never officially joined the Party and, despite occasional crude comments, he wasn’t a pathological anti-Semite. Van Meegeren’s interest in the Nazi movement, like virtually everything else about Van Meegeren, was mostly narcissistic. He liked the idea of being the Übermensch, of standing, as it were, outside of history and bending the world to his will. For a forger, that’s a very powerful idea.

Q: After years of research, you probably know Van Meegeren better than anyone else. Could you sketch us a portrait of Van Meegeren, his personality, character, psychology, etc.?

JL : If you look at photos of Van Meegeren from his trial in 1947, you’ll see that he looks a bit like the old movie actor David Niven — silver hair brushed back from his forehead, impeccably tailored suit — all very soigné. He predated Ian Fleming’s novels, but he cultivated the kind of amused disdain that we might associate with a James Bond villain. In fact, I think he would have liked people to imagine him that way — as a sort of dangerous, impressive character with whom you would fear to bandy words. But the thing is that no one ever really took him all that seriously because he was so over the top, especially in his cynicism, which tended to become quite voluble when he was drunk, which he often was. Also, he was extremely short. And he spent a lot of time chasing after very tall women, which inevitably made him seem like a bit of a sight gag — an amorous, overdressed pipsqueak. He was definitely more like Dr. Evil than Dr. No.

Q: Did you enter your research with a thesis in mind, or did the accumulation of evidence suggest your book’s viewpoint on Van Meegeren?

JL: I had read and admired Marijke van den Brandhof’s book on Van Meegeren, Een vroege Vermeer uit 1937 (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1979), which was the first to document Van Meegeren’s Nazi connections, and I felt that it might be possible to go a bit further with this, to see where, biographically, these right-wing leanings might have come from in Van Meegeren’s life and to what extent they were related to his career as a forger. So, I think I had the basic framework going into the project, but I allowed the evidence to be my guide along the way.

Q: Can you describe the methods you used to research the subject?

JL: I did a lot of work in the state and municipal archives of the Netherlands. People kept telling me that I would never find anything — that the story was so old that there was no new material to discover — but there were lots of documents, particularly relating to the war years, that had never been exploited before. You just had to know where to look. For instance, if you knew the names of all of Van Meegeren’s friends and associates, you could turn up information about him in dossiers pertaining to them. I discovered a lot of new material that way. I also contacted descendents of people who knew Van Meegeren, especially descendents of his partners in crime. Their oral histories gave me leads for my archival research. Sometimes their stories proved to be verifiable; other times not.

Q: Did your background as an artist help you?

JL: I tried to examine every Van Meegeren forgery whose location is known, and being a painter definitely helped me understand what I was looking at. Van Meegeren had to invent completely new working methods in order to surmount some of the technical hurdles involved with forging Old Masters. For instance, none of his forgeries is actually painted with oil paint. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to forge an Old Master using oils, because oil paint can take up to a hundred years to dry and harden completely. So, a fake made with oils would be “soft” and fairly easy to unmask as a forgery. To get around this problem, forgers have, over the years, come up with any number of fast drying media to use in place of oils. In his earliest forgeries, for example, Van Meegeren used a paint based on gelatin glue, which hardened very quickly. But gelatin was actually not that difficult to detect if you knew what to look for, so it was risky to use. In his later forgeries, like Emmaus, Van Meegeren switched to a modern synthetic material that was virtually impossible to analyze using the scientific methods available at the time — Bakelite.

Q: Bakelite is a kind of plastic?

JL: It’s actually much more similar, in both its chemical and working properties, to the two-part epoxy resins commonly found in hardware stores today. You’ve seen this stuff, haven’t you? It comes in a syringe with two vials. You mix the contents of the two together to activate it. In any case, if you’ve ever used epoxy around the house, you know that it’s really runny, sticky stuff. So, imagine trying to paint a large, multi-figure, narrative history painting with a material like that. It would be pretty difficult. In order to work with Bakelite, Van Meegeren basically had to unlearn everything he knew from working in oils and re-invent his whole method of painting. He would apply very small amounts of the pigmented Bakelite to his canvas and then quickly pounce it smooth before it became too tacky to work with. If you examine the forgeries under magnification, you can see how it was done. It must have been an incredibly tedious way to work. But this is what forgery is all about. It’s not just about imitating Vermeer. There are many other considerations that go into creating a credible fake.

Q: How did museum personnel whose collections have a Van Meegeren on their hands receive you?

JL: You know, there’s this great myth that museums who own these old fakes are embarrassed by them and that this why they keep them in storage. Nothing could be further from the truth. Curators are generally quite amused by the fakes in their collections, and I’ve never yet had anyone turn down a request to see one. Fakes are kept in storage mostly because no one really knows what else to do with them. How do you display a fake? What do you say about it? Also, due to the way they’re made, fakes often deteriorate quite badly in a physical sense, and it’s difficult to keep them in presentable condition for display. Quite literally, they aren’t made to stand the test of time.

Q: Why did Van Meegeren fixate on Vermeer?

JL: Back in Van Meegeren’s day, scholars were still attempting to sort out who Vermeer really was as an artist. Very few authentic paintings by him were known to exist, and most of them had been identified only in recent decades. So the Vermeer forgeries that came on the market played up to this atmosphere of inquiry and investigation. They proposed a fictional narrative of Vermeer’s career, answering the implied question, “What else did Vermeer do?” — for instance, did he do portraits, did he do religious scenes, and so on. But from today’s vantage point, these forgeries now seem astonishingly anachronistic, because they weren’t really about Vermeer per se: they were about the way that the 20th century looked at the 17th century. Van Meegeren’s earliest attempts at Vermeer forgeries, for instance, have much more in common with his own 1920s society portraits than with any real work by Vermeer. But at the time, of course, this went unnoticed and, in fact, probably made the fakes all the more appealing on a subconscious level. They seemed both authentically old and hauntingly up to date.

Q: Did your investigation change your perception of the art of Vermeer?

JL: The fakes only underscore what a precious legacy Vermeer’s body of work really is. No more than 36 pictures by his hand are known to exist. It’s remarkable. And Vermeer is timeless — unlike the fakes, whose time has come and gone.

Q: What is your opinion of Van Meegeren’s legitimate work? Would there be any sense in any kind of Van Meegeren exhibition?

JL: It’s often said that Van Meegeren had no talent. Personally, I think that’s a bit too harsh. He actually did have some real ability, and he enjoyed a measure of success as a society portraitist during the 1920s. But as he became involved with forgery, he lost his way as an artist. In his review of my book in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl had a wonderful line about this: “The state of being oneself dies when set aside.” There actually was a Van Meegeren exhibition in Rotterdam back in 1996, to coincide with the big Vermeer show at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. It was interesting, but a bit too large, I thought. Really, a little Van Meegeren goes a long way.

Q: If you could meet face to face with Van Meegeren today and ask one question, what would it be? What don’t we know that we need to?

JL: Well, if it really were Van Meegeren, I wouldn’t trust a word he said. But it would be nice to know more about his early career. There have been rumors about him as a forger that date back to newspaper articles from the 1920s. But when he was arrested at the end of the war, Van Meegeren only confessed to the fakes that the authorities already knew about, all of which were made after 1936. People have long suspected that there must have been more. Paul Coremans, who worked on the Van Meegeren court case, for example, maintained a lively correspondence on the subject. In the course of my own research, I was able to trace three Vermeer forgeries of the 1920s back to Van Meegeren through documentary evidence, visual analysis, and interviews with the family of one of Van Meegeren’s associates.I wrote up those findings in an article for Apollocalled “Van Meegeren’s Early Vermeers.” I also incorporate this material into the book.The case is fairly compelling, but there can always be room for doubt as Van Meegeren never claimed these particular fakes as his own. Of course, I suppose there could be equal room for doubt about the attribution of many pictures, when you come right down to it. Wouldn’t the Rembrandt Research Project have a much easier time if they could just ask the old fellow, “Excuse me, Mr. Van Rijn, is this one over here yours?”

Q: Would you afford Van Meegeren one saving grace?

JL Personally, I find Van Meegeren utterly fascinating, and I always will. For all his faults, he was intelligent, clever, and profoundly resourceful — a truly brilliant fraud. And in an era when we have Bernard Madoff running around, and our entire economy looks more and more like a Potemkin village every day, I think Van Meegeren can probably still teach us a thing or two.

Q: Could a Vermeer forgery happen again today? Have we completely assimilated the case?

JL: I would have to say that the chances of anyone passing off a Vermeer forgery today would be pretty much non-existent. A good con artist always tries to find the common ground between what people want to hear and what he wants them to believe. In Van Meegeren’s day, experts fully expected that more Vermeers would turn up, so Van Meegeren was able to work within the bounds of that conceit. Today, however, no such expectation exists, so creating a fake Vermeer would be a non-starter. That’s not to say that forgery has ground to a halt. Good, convincing fakes continue to get made, and they continue to deceive laymen and experts alike. For instance, until Scotland Yard recently encouraged him to retire, John Myatt enjoyed a nice run duping the experts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s with fakes in the style of Matisse, Chagall, Gleizes, and Dubuffet. Forgery will always be with us. But it takes different forms in different eras.

Q: The success of The Man Who Made Vermeers has been amply confirmed by enthusiastic reviews, robust sales, award nominations, and numerous public lectures you have given. What is your next topic?

JL: I’m looking at a few possible subjects. The sort of work that I like to do tends to be research-intensive, so it may take a little time to refine a topic. But I’d definitely like it to be Dutch, and I’d prefer it to involve a completely admirable figure this time around. Van Meegeren is a very dark personality, and after four years in his company, I think it’s probably time for me to move on.

click here for a slide show of all the images from the book.

click here for an extract containing the introduction and first chapter

click here for the book website

click here for New Yorker review

Brooklyn Rail Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez

Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren

In 1945, Han van Meegeren was arrested in a liberated Amsterdam by a Dutch resistance fighter, not only because van Meegeren (an art dealer and painter) had close ties to local fascists, but because during the war he had sold off one of his nation’s greatest treasures, a recently discovered Vermeer, to none other than Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe and a man who envied Hitler’s collection of Old Masters. But van Meegeren had an excuse, one that turned him from arch-traitor to something like a patriot—the Vermeer he had sold to the German was a fake, painted by van Meegeren himself.

That’s not all. Pride of place in the Dutch Boijmans Museum was held by what more than one critic called Vermeer’s greatest painting, The Supper at Emmaus. This, too, was from the brush of the master forger.

What makes Jonathan Lopez’s book such an engrossing read are not only his details of art forgers and their methods (such as over-painting on canvases fitting a particular period, after scraping them to the base layer), but his description of how van Meegeren read the minds of the collectors he was set on fooling.

A Dutch–fascist theorist of the 1930s, and friend of the forger, claimed that the Netherlands’ earlier glory—don’t forget it was the world’s chief power in the 17th century—was based on the fact that, though the elite was Protestant, the masses were Catholic, and their spirituality gave the era a special, elevated tone. Vermeer, who was a Protestant that had married into a Catholic family, had, aside from a few early, weak works, never painted a religious picture. Since the artist left few works overall, many critics speculated that he may have taken up biblical themes in lost pieces. Van Meegeren obligingly provided them, after being inspired by the kitsch he saw at the Aryan art festival accompanying the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

But here’s the crowning touch. Not only did the Vermeer forger dupe Goering and leading art dealers, he even tricked the man who arrested him, selling the soldier the story that he took up forgery because his first gallery show had been trounced by critics, and he was determined to make fools of them (and the Nazis) with his new Old Masters.

All previous books have shared this view of the forger’s life, which, Lopez shows, is also fake. Van Meegeren was an old hand at forgery, way before his first art show, and was a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, pouring some of his ill-gotten gains into supporting a right-wing, anti-degenerate art magazine. Lopez does a wonderful job depicting the pre-World War II art world, in which American millionaires like Andrew Mellon proved particularly easy pickings. He also gives a vivid depiction of the crafty and corrupt van Meegeren, a well-rounded portrait depicting his absolute shallowness.

—Jim Feast, The Brooklyn Rail