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Untitled Document
I WAS VERMEER:
The
Rise and Fall of the Twentieth
Century’s Greatest Forger.
By Frank Wynne. Bloomsbury USA.
276 pp.
$24.95
In August 1937, Abraham Bredius produced a masterpiece. Bredius, the foremost expert on Dutch
painting, examined a picture for a lawyer who said he represented a young
woman from a wealthy Dutch family that had fallen on hard times. Two days
later, Bredius declared that he’d discovered a painting by Jan
Vermeer (1632–75): “This magnificent piece . . . has come to
light—may the Lord be thanked—from the
darkness where it has lain for many years, unsullied, exactly as it left
the artist’s studio.” With a brief treasure.
But Bredius was wrong. The
Supper at Emmaus, as the painting came to be
known, was a forgery, and not a crafty one. It depicts Jesus after his
resurrection breaking bread with two disciples while a serving woman
holding a pitcher stands to the side. The figures are lumpy and ill
formed, their clothes concealing what the forger couldn’t
render. The space behind Jesus is unadorned, whereas in Vermeer’s
finest work, maps, tapestries, and paintings hang from the walls, and
individually rendered tiles—usually Delftware, a product of
the painter’s hometown—decorate the baseboards.
Vermeer’s windows are often ornate and thrown open to the day, with
figures mirrored in the glass. Light reflects off a bowl’s lip or the
beads of a pearl necklace, and glows from within his human subjects.
In the forgery, just the corner of a window is visible, and the only light
is drab.
The Emmaus wasn’t a knockoff by a
lesser-known 17th-century artist or a student of
the master. Not more than a few weeks old when Bredius inspected it, the
painting was the handiwork of Dutch artist Han van Meegeren
(1889–1947). While still a student, van Meegeren won a prestigious
national art prize, but the rewards for being the year’s best young
Dutch painter were modest. He turned to forgery for fast profits and out of
frustration with his contemporaries, whose abstractions and
experiments he thought pointless, decadent, and dull. By painting in
the guise of more famous artists, he became a shameless success.
The story of van Meegeren has been told before, in
several out-of-print biographies and scholarly works of art
history. Frank Wynne, a London-based journalist and the English
translator of Michel Houellebecq’s novel The
Elementary Particles, adds little to
those accounts of the forger’s fizzy rise and ignominious fall, and
he only cursorily considers the uncomfortable questions about the art world
raised by a forger’s achievements. What makes one
painting—or one painter—more valuable than
another? Are such determinations rational, or arbitrary and faddish? Wynne
treats such questions as brief pauses in a brisk page-turner. He
has his story to tell.
Reading this easily digested, only occasionally
thoughtful historical reenactment is rather like watching the actors at
Colonial Williamsburg, or the weekend warriors who band together to replay
the Battle of Gettysburg. In a typical passage, Wynne describes a domestic
argument between the painter and his wife when they were alone, in which
her “sensuous lip” quivers. Van Meegeren and others speak in so
many unsourced passages of dialogue that one wonders whether Wynne has
purchased liveliness of plot and character at the expense of solid history.
His eagerness to embellish what is already dramatic leads him to overreach,
not unlike Bredius and his expert colleagues.
The Supper at Emmaus is larger than most works by Vermeer, about whom so
little is known that one writer called him “the sphinx of
Delft.” Its subject matter bears only a glancing resemblance to his
better-known, achingly detailed domestic
scenes—the milkmaid with a pitcher, the noblewoman writing
a s oeuvre includes few religious subjects, but Bredius
and other prominent critics had long supposed that the artist, who
converted to Catholicism so that he and his wife-to-be could marry, painted
other religious works now unknown to us.
Those critics further speculated that there must have
been a transitional period between Vermeer’s early canvases, which
tend to be larger, more romantic, and clearly influenced by Caravaggio, and
his smaller, more placid later works. With so few paintings credited to
Vermeer—in Bredius’s day there were roughly 50; today
there are only 35, and even that number is thought to be padded with
forgeries—the critics believed that the paintings of his
middle period were lost, casualties of time and the neglect into which
Vermeer’s work fell for nearly two centuries after his death.
Van Meegeren’s success in passing off his Emmaus, for which he received
520,000 guilders, the equivalent today of about $4.7 million, encouraged
him to continue forging. During the next few years he rushed off six more
Vermeers, including The Last Supper, which fetched 1.6 million guilders, and three other
religious canvases, which sold for a combined 4.2 million
guilders—extraordinary sums of money for any artist, in any
age, but all the more jaw dropping when set against the
widespread deprivation in Europe during World War II.
Van Meegeren’s later forgeries piggybacked on
his earlier work. He copied himself, creating paintings that resembled his
own fakes more than original Vermeers. Critics dutifully called attention
to the striking way in which each latest discovery was so much like The Supper at Emmaus. In
all, van Meegeren is believed to have painted 11 Vermeers, three canvases
in the style of Frans Hals, and a couple mimicking Pieter de Hooch.
Through a web of intermediaries, van Meegeren sold Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, his sloppiest Vermeer by far, to Hermann Göring for the
price of 1.65 million guilders and the return of hundreds of Dutch old
masters looted by the Nazis. After the war, van Meegeren was arrested and
imprisoned for treason—for selling a national treasure to
the enemy. Six weeks in custody sufficed to extract his confession: He was
Vermeer. Few people believed him—nobody, after all, likes
being fooled—until he forged one last Vermeer for the
authorities. Convicted of lesser fraud charges and sentenced to a year in
prison, he died in 1947, before serving a day.
Van Meegeren’s
patrons were not rich, uninformed collectors, people with all the money in
the world and no taste. Rather, they represented major museums, galleries,
and private collections. Wynne speculates, correctly, that nationalism and
wartime anxiety fueled the intense bidding for the fakes. As the world came
undone, the least the Dutch could do was preserve their cultural heritage.
To seal the deals, the forger relied on the art world’s overly cozy
network of buyers, critics, and museum curators. That world, like all small
worlds, protects its own. After van Meegeren’s deceptions were made
plain, few people sought to press charges. Most didn’t want to
acknowledge publicly that they’d been duped. Others simply refused to
accept the truth. One critic insisted that van Meegeren was a boastful
liar, and prided himself on having rescued the fakes from being destroyed,
as Dutch law dictates.
Van Meegeren understood, as other forgers do, that
the stamp of authenticity can trump art. The proof, however spurious and
cobbled together, that a painting is by Vermeer (or any other
name-brand artist) is at least as important as the quality of the
work. It was enough for the forger to create a plausible resemblance to
Vermeer. Van Meegeren’s early forgeries crassly combined elements of
authentic paintings, cut-and-paste style, into pastiches.
While he eventually became an accomplished mimic, he was never a great
painter. But he didn’t need to be, for a painting’s market
value derives not just from the quality of the individual canvas but
largely from the reputation of its putative creator. Today the art world is
not appreciably different. Wynne concludes with an object lesson: In 2004,
casino developer Steve Wynn paid $30 million at auction for a Vermeer that
is far from the artist’s best—and one not all experts
agree is authentic.
Everyone wanted van Meegeren’s forgeries to be
masterpieces. The buyers and curators wanted desperately to acquire a
Vermeer for their collections. The critics wanted, no less desperately, to
claim responsibility for adding one more work to Vermeer’s
all-too-slim catalogue raisonné. And experts such as
Bredius wanted to confirm their pet theories. Pride and
self-regard colored judgment, and no one truly saw what he was
looking at, because no one dared look closely.
The forger’s story may be read as an enduring
fable about the art world. A modern-day Aesop might cast the tale with a
wily crow and selfish foxes: One day, the crow set the foxes fighting for
control of an apple. The apple, the crow swore, was unlike any other in the
world, and the foxes chose to believe him. But the apple was really nothing
special, and the crow, in the end, was found out and driven from the forest
for its lies. But what of the foxes that desired blindly and wildly, and so
were fooled? Should not they too learn a moral from such a story?
—Paul Maliszewski
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Paul
Maliszewski’s writing has appeared in Granta, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. He is currently completing a collection of essays about the varieties of faking.
To order this book from Amazon.com, click on the link below:
I Was Vermeer
Reprinted from Autumn
2006 Wilson Quarterly
This article may not be resold, reprinted,
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