The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [0]
A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Edward Dolnick
For Lynn
It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown.
—Anatole France
We have here a—I am inclined to say the—masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer.
—Abraham Bredius
Contents
Epigraph
Preface
Part One
Occupied Holland
1 A Knock on the Door
2 Looted Art
3 The Outbreak of War
4 Quasimodo
5 The End of Forgery?
6 Forgery 101
7 Occupied Holland
8 The War Against the Jews
9 The Forger’s Challenge
10 Bargaining with Vultures
11 Van Meegeren’s Tears
Part Two
Hermann Goering and Johannes Vermeer
12 Hermann Goering
13 Adolf Hitler
14 Chasing Vermeer
15 Goering’s Art Collection
16 Insights from a Forger
17 The Amiable Psychopath
18 Goering’s Prize
19 Vermeer
20 Johannes Vermeer, Superstar
21 A Ghost’s Fingerprints
Part Three
The Selling of Christ at Emmaus
22 Two Forged Vermeers
23 The Expert’s Eye
24 A Forger’s Lessons
25 Bredius
26 “Without Any Doubt!”
27 The Uncanny Valley
28 Betting the Farm
29 Lady and Gentleman at the Harpsichord
30 Dirk Hannema
31 The Choice
32 The Caravaggio Connection
33 In the Forger’s Studio
34 Christ at Emmaus
35 Underground Tremors
Photographic Insert
36 The Summer of 1937
37 The Lamb at the Bank
38 “Every Inch a Vermeer”
39 Two Weeks and Counting
40 Too Late!
41 The Last Hurdle
42 The Unveiling
Part Four
Anatomy of A Hoax
43 Scandal in the Archives
44 All in the Timing
45 Believing Is Seeing
46 The Men Who Knew Too Much
47 Blue Monday
48 He Who Hesitates
49 The Great Changeover
Part Five
The Chase
50 The Secret in the Salt Mine
51 The Dentist’s Tale
52 Goering on the Run
53 The Nest Egg
54 Trapped!
55 “I Painted It Myself!”
56 Command Performance
57 The Evidence Piles Up
58 The Trial
59 The Players Make Their Exits
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Searchable Terms
About the Author
Other Books by Edward Dolnick
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
A NOTE TO THE READER
This is the true story of a colossal hoax. 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. The time was World War II. The place, occupied Holland.
Everything about the case was larger than life. The sums that changed hands soared into the millions; the artist who inspired that frenzy of buying was one of the best-loved painters who ever lived, Johannes Vermeer; the collectors vying for masterpieces included both Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering.
But the outsize scale and the extravagant color were only the beginning. The story differs in key ways from most true tales of crime. Usually we are presented with a crime, and we set out to find the criminal. Here, no one even knew that a crime had been committed.
Where there was no crime, it stood to reason there was no criminal. For a villain who craved recognition, that made for a vicious dilemma. Keep his crime secret, and he would live rich and safe but unknown. Confess what he had done, on the other hand, and though he would find himself condemned to a prison cell, his genius would be proclaimed worldwide.
A second, even stranger feature made this case of art fraud different from any other. What made the fraud succeed was the very thing that should instantly have revealed it.
In this mystery, then, the usual questions do not apply. For us, the central question is not whodunit but, instead, howdunit?
Part One
Occupied Holland
1
A KNOCK ON THE DOOR
Amsterdam
May 1945
Until almost the very end, Han van Meegeren thought he had committed the perfect crime. He had pocketed more than $3 million—the equivalent of about $30 million today—and scarcely a trace of scandal clung to his name. Why should it, when his dupes never even knew that someone had played them for fools and taken them for a fortune?
Even now, with two uniformed strangers at his door saying something about an investigation, he