The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [105]
Peer pressure is everywhere in human culture, and there is no reason to think art lovers should be exempt. A crowd is a powerful thing. Theater managers used to hire claques to cheer at plays, and ancient Romans hired mourners to weep at funerals, because they knew how easy it was to manipulate emotions. television producers found early on that audiences would take their cues from a laugh track, not even a crowd but a mechanized imitation of one.
We see depth and nuance in a painting the moment a museum singles it out for special notice. When a gallery marks a painting “sold” with a red dot, new offers pour in. Oscar nominations guarantee new ticket sales. “The main reason why a scholar gets an honorary degree,” observes the historian of science Michael Ghiselin, “is that somebody else has already given him an honorary degree.”*
And so the crowds lined up to marvel at Emmaus.
THE SURPRISE, PERHAPS, is that the experts fell every bit as hard as did the general public. This time peer pressure was only part of the explanation. The experts’ inclination, after all, was to dismiss other peoples’ opinions in favor of their own. One thing that led them astray was Van Meegeren’s success in producing a painting that looked convincingly like a physical object from the seventeenth century. Theodore Rousseau, the late chairman of the European Paintings department at the Met, was an authority on both old masters and Van Meegeren. “One of our most prominent scholars in Dutch paintings told me,” Rousseau once recalled, “that when he saw the article in The Burlington Magazine and the photographs of Emmaus, he said to his pupils, ‘That’s a forgery.’ But then he went to Holland, and when he saw the picture in front of him, with its convincing craquelure, convincing colors, convincing aging, he began to doubt his own first impression. There, close to it, he saw all the convincing details and not what was wrong with the style.”
That was a tribute to Van Meegeren’s technical skill. But even so, how was it that the experts missed “what was wrong with the style”? In his more impatient moods, Albert Blankert, one of today’s leading art historians, contends that there is no great mystery to unravel. Experts sometimes get it wrong because their task is difficult and they are only human.† A skeptical and worldly man, Blankert rattles off a list of human frailties that undo our judgment—vanity, gullibility, fear of losing face. And besides, the experts weren’t so expert. “Before the second world war, most museum people in Holland were amateurs who happened to have money.”
But on a different day, when he is feeling more expansive, Blankert brushes aside his own explanation as too glib. When he was a young man and a budding connoisseur in his own right, Blankert recalls, he decided that he had better look into cases where his predecessors had lost their way. In the years since, he has dissected several notable fiascos involving forgery and false attributions, for essentially the same reasons that safety officials probe the cause of airplane crashes.
“Connoisseurship is a crazy business,” Blankert says. “Think of the days before Archimedes, when people tried to tell if gold was genuine or not. Archimedes sat in his bathtub and figured out how to do it, and since then it’s been ‘Yes, it’s gold,’ or ‘No, it’s not.’ But gold was valued very highly long before there was any reliable or scientific way of finding out if it was the real thing. Well, even in those days there must have been gold scholars and gold experts and gold priests.” Blankert laughs. “That’s what we are, in a way.”
The system endures because no one has yet found a tool that compares with an expert’s eye. When he goes through a new museum, Blankert likes to play the game of trying to identify each painting by artist and era without looking at the labels. Nearly always he’s right. “Mostly it works,” he says. “It’s not like oracles reading messages in