The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [103]
Why? According to Mendelsohn, not for reasons of plot or prose but because the message fit the mood of the time perfectly. The novel’s popularity was all the more startling because its subject could hardly have been darker. The second sentence reads, “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” The dead girl, Susie, narrates her own story, of rape and murder, from Heaven.
Reviewers and the reading public hailed The Lovely Bones for its unsentimental examination of the grimmest facts. The true appeal, Mendelsohn argues, was not confrontation but comfort. The novel offered reassurance to a nation newly traumatized by the murder of three thousand innocents on September 11. The Lovely Bones, writes Mendelsohn, is “bent on convincing us that everything is really OK.” Mendelsohn quotes Susie’s ghost, in the final pages of the novel. “We’re here. All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”
Critics had called the novel “the book of the year,” Mendelsohn notes. And so it was, he argues, but only in the sense that it delivered the message that readers in 2002 most wanted to hear.
During its brief reign, Emmaus was the picture of the year, for several years running. Dutch art lovers, laymen and connoisseurs alike, embraced Emmaus because this three-centuries-old picture resonated so powerfully with their own tastes and values. It resonated not because Van Meegeren cynically catered to tastes he scorned. On the contrary, Emmaus embodied precisely those qualities—mystery, stillness, piety, sobriety, modesty—that both Van Meegeren and his audiences esteemed the most. If he had lived half a century earlier, Van Meegeren would have produced a different sort of Vermeer forgery, lighter and brighter, more influenced by the Impressionists all around him. By the twenties and thirties, the light touch of the Impressionists had given way to an earnest, somber style. The motto of the new day was “Return to Order.” Van Meegeren responded to that vision wholeheartedly because he believed in it himself.
In some key ways, Van Meegeren’s vision differed from Vermeer’s. The most important was the depiction of Jesus. “With the old masters,” says the painter and art historian Diederik Kraaijpoel, “Christ was often seen as ravished but his expression was never pitiful. That was because people used to believe that in spite of his misery, he remained divine, with his eyes fixed on exalted value. I believe the defenseless, pitiable, human Christ was invented in the course of the 19th century.”
That newer vision of Jesus moved Van Meegeren and the Dutch nearly to tears. “Death seems truly conquered here, clad in mystery and full of promise,” one critic marveled. It seems almost blasphemous to say so, but if the real Vermeer had been moved to paint Emmaus, art lovers in the 1930s might still have preferred Van Meegeren’s overblown and sentimental version to the real thing.
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.” Van Meegeren spoke the same language as his audience, and they soaked up every word. When Bredius looked at Emmaus and reported that “I had difficulty controlling my emotions,” he had all of Europe for company.
EVERY FORGER OF old masters is a time traveler hoping to stroll unnoticed down a sixteenth-or seventeenth-century street. It’s not easy. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” the novelist L. P. Hartley famously observed. In particular, they paint pictures differently there. Time travel trips up most forgers. It tripped up Van Meegeren, but his mistakes—like his modern-day depiction of Christ—all worked to his advantage.
When the critic Kenneth Clark was still young and little-known, he asked an impertinent question about a Botticelli Madonna that had just been