The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
by Edward Dolnick
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The con man was the most successful art forger of the twentieth century, his most prominent victim the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.
And yet, consider the dramatic conclusion to Valentiner’s essay. In his final sentence he highlighted two qualities above all others that made The Lacemaker a masterpiece. First, “The face of the girl is unusually pretty, as the features are smaller than in some of the artist’s other types.” Vermeer had painted a girl, in other words, who suited modern taste. In a second way, too, Valentiner noted approvingly, Vermeer had transcended the bounds of his own era. He had managed “a subtlety in the distribution of light and diffusion of color rarely to be found in the genre paintings of Holland in the seventeenth century.” It was as if Vermeer lived in the same world as twentieth-century art connoisseurs.
For obvious reasons, the rule of thumb is that the more expensive the painting, the more important its provenance. But Van Wijngaarden had proved that you could take the opposite route and succeed beautifully, provided you could find a buyer too eager or too sure of himself to bother with paperwork and background checks. Rather than spell out every detail in a fanciful pedigree, Van Wijngaarden outlined a fairy tale and let his eager-to-buy, eager-to-believe audience conjure up its own fantasy.
English painter Leo Stevenson claims that “art history is the only branch of history where opinion carries the same weight as fact.
Many times the experts did disagree, with glee and vigor. That was not necessarily a problem. A painting did not need unanimous support to make its way, for each scholar was perfectly prepared to dismiss his colleagues’ opinions. Art is a notoriously catty field, perhaps because it depends so heavily on value judgments. Feuds are rampant, and elegant insult an art in itself.*
In Van Meegeren’s day, and today as well, the experts like nothing better than to ridicule their rivals by showcasing their errors in judgment, preferably in a tone of mock bewilderment. “Gratuitous nastiness is part of the art historian’s weaponry,” observes Christopher Wright, himself a veteran of many duels at dawn.
To have mistaken Van der Laan for Vermeer was not ludicrous. Van der Laan had talent. He had painted other Vermeer-like works—for his own amusement, as far as anyone can tell—and over the years people had occasionally taken them for the real thing. Once or twice someone had improved a Van der Laan by adding a Vermeer signature.
In the 1600s, subjects taken from mythology or religion or history like this one were deemed better suited than any others to serious art. Landscapes, still-lifes, interior scenes with serving girls or ladies reading letters, all took second place, usually a distant second. Two centuries would pass before tastes shifted.
A painter who wants to involve viewers emotionally needs to leave us some work to do ourselves. Once having collaborated, we find ourselves hooked. Artists figured it out long ago. A painstaking, seemingly perfect depiction of reality has its charms, the art historian E. H. Gombrich explained, but a painting that contains less hard “information” may nonetheless seem more real and more compelling.
For Van Meegeren, the moral was clear. The close-copy strategy carried enormous risk. Instead, like robot builders and video designers but Decades ahead of his time, he opted for the 50 percent solution—he would do 50 percent of the work toward creating a Vermeer, rather than 99 percent, and let his eager viewers collaborate in building their own trap.
The real reasons behind the choice had little to do with Vermeer as an artist and everything to do with his fame, the giant prices his works commanded, and his biography—his lack of biography, more to the point. Van Meegeren could fill in the gaps as he chose. “For me,” he once confided happily, “a blessed terrain lay fallow.
it’s a big name you want, Rembrandt is hard to beat. “But with Rembrandt, everything is too complicated,” Pijbes says. “We know too much. We know who his pupils were, we know many, many, many of his drawings, we know his early work and his late work and everything in between. We know where he lived, we know all the house hold arrangements, we have letters, we can compare the paintings with one another. But Vermeer is special, almost unique in the art world, because his oeuvre is so small and so admired and yet so unknown in a way, because there are thirty-five icons in the world, and that’s it.
In time, when the two magnates began competing to put their hands on a Vermeer, their rivalry would put millions of dollars into Van Meegeren’s pocket. Throughout Van Meegeren’s story, rivalry was a major theme. Rotterdam and Amsterdam were rivals for prestige; so were Van der Vorm and Van Beuningen; so were Hitler and Goering. In the 1930s and ’40s, these various rivals had one thing in common: they all wanted a Vermeer for themselves.
He came up with a picture called Christ at Emmaus. “It is unique in the history of faking,” the art critic and historian John Russell observed, “in being quite unlike any known painting by its supposed creator.” Venturing so far from Vermeer’s familiar paintings had two advantages. First, it let Van Meegeren sidestep the hazards of the Uncanny Valley. The second was more personal. Van Meegeren was driven not merely by greed but by ambition and vanity. To fool the world with a “Vermeer” that was to a large extent a Van Meegeren would prove, he reasoned, that he truly was a genius on a par with the most admired figures of the past.
Every forgery is a game of “I think that you think that…” The forger needs to anticipate the connoisseur’s expectations and build in precisely those touches that will move the expert to say, “Just as I figured.
WE CANNOT BE sure of Bredius’s state of mind in 1937. We can only be certain that, whether he fell in love with Emmaus at first sight or wrestled with his doubts all summer, he ended his long career by destroying the reputation he had built up over a lifetime.
Bredius had been fighting to keep Vermeer’s best work away from the upstart Americans for thirty years, since his long-ago tug of war over The Milkmaid. Hannema, the director of a museum yearning for a place at a table dominated by haughty Amsterdam and the mighty Rijksmuseum, was desperate to win this one-of-a-kind jewel for himself. Hannema had an extra incentive, though he hardly needed one. Nearly a century before, Rotterdam had kicked away a chance at one of the best-loved Vermeers of all, The Lacemaker. Through all the succeeding Decades, the pain of that loss lingered on.
But Bredius’s reliance on a signature was a sign of weakness, and he knew better than to write about it openly. Neither the presence nor the absence of the artist’s name should have counted for much. Many of the greats, including Michelangelo and Raphael and Vermeer himself, sometimes neglected signatures. Titian, one story has it, signed only paintings that his students had helped with. Work that he had done entirely by himself, he reasoned, shouted out his name without a signature.
Astonishingly, most experts had no such qualms. With the exception of Duveen and a tiny handful of others, the leading scholars of the day all shared Bredius’s opinion that Emmaus was a masterpiece.* They focused their attention on the Vermeer touches they liked best and ignored or downplayed the others.
if the painting is that bad, how did Giltaij’s predecessors get the story so wrong? And not only did they get it wrong, but they got it wrong time after time. Emmaus was only the first of six forged Vermeers that Van Meegeren sold between 1937 and 1943. He grew increasingly sloppy and careless through the years—why wouldn’t he, since even the crudest fraud brought him millions?—and each new painting was uglier than its predecessors. “They sold just the same,” Van Meegeren would later marvel, and they sold at once, and nearly every one brought in even more money than Emmaus had.
The forger was right to lavish care on Emmaus, because its acceptance cleared the way for all the fakes that followed. “It’s not what anyone would have called a Vermeer in the past,” the experts reasoned each time Van Meegeren put another biblical forgery on the market, “but the resemblance to Emmaus is unmistakable, and that’s the greatest Vermeer of all.
But Emmaus was more than a symbol. In effect, Van Meegeren had sneaked into the Archives and substituted a false meter for the real one. With Emmaus as the new benchmark, Van Meegeren no longer had to compete with Vermeer. Now he could churn out forgeries that only had to measure up to his own far more forgiving standard. Even better, each new fake broadened the definition of what counted as a Vermeer, so Van Meegeren’s task grew easier and easier as his “Vermeers” grew worse and worse. The result was an innovation in forgery as impressive as the use of Bakelite—not content to sneak a single, familiar-looking work past the arbiters of the art world, Van Meegeren invented an entirely new and self-contained chapter in Vermeer’s career.
Six paintings in six years, moreover, with barely a question asked, even though only thirty-odd Vermeers had turned up over the course of the previous three centuries.
The Rotterdam tycoons Van der Vorm and Van Beuningen showed up again, too, still competing for old masters. Back and forth they went, snatching up each new forgery as if they would never have such an opportunity again.
By the time they put their wallets away, Rotterdam’s two most acclaimed collectors owned five Van Meegeren forgeries between them.
IN A TROUBLED time, a work of art that provides consolation will win admirers by the thousands.
Art from past centuries, the art historian Otto Kurz pointed out, is written in a dead language. “Forgery is a kind of short-cut that translates the ancient work of art into present-day language.
The problem for Van Meegeren and most forgers is that, even as they try to travel into the past, they bring the trappings of their own world with them. Their peers don’t see anything awry because they share the same blind spots, but sooner or later a new generation will come along and giggle.
More generally, as the Met’s Theodore Rousseau once remarked, “We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls.
Why hadn’t Van Meegeren thrown away so incriminating a piece of evidence? He had kept it, he said, precisely so that he could prove beyond question that Emmaus was his work. And perhaps that had once been his intent. But if Van Meegeren had truly wanted to tell the world that he had painted Emmaus, he had missed chance after chance.
