The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [108]
Van Meegeren was a master at drawing the experts’ attention and making sure they focused just where he wanted them to. So are all successful forgers. Experts truly are expert, so the forger needs to find a way to induce tunnel vision.
The strategy need not be subtle. Around 1920, for intance, one of En gland’s great classical scholars happened to spot a rare and highly valuable silver coin, from ancient Greece. If someone had turned up at the British Museum with a silver decadrachm, Sir George Hill would immediately have been on guard and wary of a fake. But instead a forger had mounted the coin in a necklace and enlisted an attractive Greek woman to wear it to a party. When Sir George spotted her and chatted her up and spied the coin nestling in her cleavage, and then found that the charming lady herself had no idea of the coin’s significance, he could scarcely wait to announce his find.
Hill’s problem had nothing to do with the depth of his knowledge. His mistake lay in forgetting that a gift for connoisseurship was only half the battle. Out of natural but misplaced pride, many experts make the same mistake. Max Friedländer compared the connoisseur of art to the connoisseur of wine. The wine connoisseur immediately recognizes, “with full certainty,” the year and vintage of a given bottle, Friedländer wrote, “and in the same way, the connoisseur of art recognizes the author on the strength of the sensually spiritualized impression that he receives.”
And, indeed, experts in both specialties do nearly always get it right, presuming of course that the test is fair. Which is where the con man comes in.
In 2002, for instance, a French wine researcher named Frédéric Brochet gave fifty-four experts an array of red wines to evaluate. Some of the glasses contained white wine that Brochet had doctored to look red by adding a tasteless, odorless additive. Not a single expert noticed the switch. Curiously, amateurs did better than experts. “About two or three percent of people detect the white wine flavor,” Brochet says, “but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make, because they are influenced by the color of the wine.”
Bredius and his fellow dupes knew an immense amount about seventeenth-century Dutch art in general and about Vermeer in particular. Faced with an honest question—what does Vermeer’s depiction of light owe to De Hooch?—they could deliver useful and learned answers. In the same way, a wine connoisseur could reliably answer questions like, how does a St. Emilion from 2000 compare with one from 1998?
But ask a question built around a lie—built around a Van Meegeren masquerading as a Vermeer or a glass of white wine disguised as red—and the expert might make a mistake that an amateur would not. Why? Because the expert is far more likely than the amateur to go zooming off down a false trail of his own devising.
For the pro, the name “Vermeer” and the category “red wine” carry countless associations. Each association points to further questions; each question calls for further exploration. For the amateur, “Vermeer” and “red wine” are unknown territory. The amateur makes a casual comment—“What an ugly picture!” “I don’t like this wine”—and then has no more to say. The amateur is unlikely to go wrong because he’s unlikely to go anywhere.
AS THE EXPERTS at Duveen Brothers demonstrated when they pronounced Emmaus a “rotten fake,” it was possible to look at the painting and reject it. Van Meegeren was performing magic tricks, not magic. But each time Emmaus won a new admirer, it made the downfall of the next connoisseur that much more likely.
What was at work was a subtle form of peer pressure—peer pressure with a college education. The public oohed and ahhed at Emmaus