Newark Star-Ledger Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez

Forging a name for himself in art

JEAN GRAHAM / THE NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
Jonathan Lopez
Harcourt, 340 pp., $26

Disclosure: I am a Vermeer groupie. At 4 a.m. on a February morning in 1996, I joined the queue outside the National Gallery in Washington to snag one of the few unreserved tickets for the blockbuster Vermeer exhibit. I regularly visit the three Vermeers at the Frick Collection and the five at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have seen almost all of the three dozen paintings attributed to the Master of Delft.

So when I look at the photographs of Han van Meegeren's "Vermeers" in Jonathan Lopez's well-researched and well-written book, I can't help but wonder how anyone - much less art experts, gallery owners, museum curators and wealthy collectors - could have been fooled into thinking these coarse paintings came from the hand of Vermeer. But fooled they were, not only by the paintings themselves but, according to Lopez, by van Meegeren's motives, so that the myth of the underappreciated artist who made the fakes to show up the critics who had panned his own original work persists to this day.

Han van Meegeren was not without considerable talent. His early work was well received by the critics, and he was much in demand as a portraitist. But van Meegeren, always an opportunist, saw an opportunity to earn far more as an art forger, especially at a time when museums and collectors yearned for a Vermeer.

Art forgery was a tricky business, but van Meegeren figured out how to add Bakelite to his paint so that the rudimentary tests done for authenticity didn't reveal how recently the works had been painted. He found willing front men to place his phony Vermeers into the art market and, after Holland was occupied by the German army during World War II, even collaborated with the enemy so that one of his "Vermeers" was sold to the infamous Nazi leader Hermann Goering.

More than 60 years after van Meegeren's death, Jonathan Lopez deftly reveals that the man who made the fake Vermeers was quite a fake himself.

Jean Graham is a writer and artist from Brookside.