The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [104]
No Kenneth Clark came along to unmask Van Meegeren. This was more a matter of good fortune than good planning. 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. In similar fashion, science fiction always tells as much about the era when it was created as about the era it tries to imagine. In the future as it was portrayed in the fifties, for instance, husbands commuted to work in personal rockets and wives stayed home and cooked up meals in a pill. For a Decade or two, readers found it all quite plausible.
In art, the rule of thumb is that fakes have about a forty-year lifespan. “Forgeries must be served hot,” the great art historian Max Friedländer once observed. Art historians are fond of Friedländer’s rule, for it implies that time is on the side of the good guys.* But the rule has a flip side that is often overlooked and that played an enormous role in Van Meegeren’s success. It’s perfectly true, as Friedländer pointed out, that forgers of old paintings may run into trouble because they cannot help revealing that they live in our world and share our assumptions. But, precisely for that reason, as we have seen, it’s also true that sometimes we prefer a fake to an original.
Authenticity can be off-putting. When we listen to early music played on period instruments, for example, it often sounds worse to us than what we are used to, thinner and less powerful, because our ears have been conditioned by the new sounds of the intervening centuries. Van Meegeren tried to impersonate Vermeer. He failed, and that failure was the key to his success.
Van Meegeren’s pictures bore the taint of the modern world, but his audiences sensed only something unusual, not something amiss. What was unusual, they decided, was that these seventeenth-century paintings spoke with greater authority and depth than other paintings from the Golden Age.
And then, before anyone had time to catch his breath and take a sober second look, Emmaus was whisked offstage. Van Meegeren was arrested only seven years after Emmaus’s first appearance. The arrest was disastrous for Van Meegeren but ideal for his reputation. Perhaps he would have been one of those fortunate forgers whose misdeeds are never uncovered. More likely, he would have had a grace period of a generation or two. After that, his paintings would probably have come to look silly. James Dean is in the pantheon in good measure because he died before he could lose his hair and grow a paunch. Even in his undoing, Van Meegeren benefitted from perfect timing.
45
BELIEVING IS SEEING
A tale of a con man who pulls off a bold and ludicrous fraud and wins the applause of adoring crowds is sure to evoke thoughts of the emperor’s new clothes. But Van Meegeren’s story was not an updated version of the famous old fable but something altogether stranger.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, everyone saw the truth, but only a little boy dared to say aloud what everyone knew. In the Van Meegeren saga, the loyal citizens lining the parade route genuinely believed that the emperor had never looked more splendid. They gazed at their naked ruler and saw a sumptuous robe of purple velvet with golden braid gleaming in the sun. They cheered themselves hoarse, and the cheering was nearly universal and utterly sincere.
Perhaps it is not such a surprise that the public thrilled to Emmaus. The greatest experts in the land had proclaimed its beauty and its importance, and it would have been hard not to get swept away. “We have a saying in