The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [111]
IT’S NOT EASY to place ourselves in the position of art critics of the 1930s—we know about Van Meegeren and they didn’t, which means that we have peeked into the answer section at the back of the book—but the painter and art historian Diederik Kraaijpoel has tried hard to play fair. He has studied Emmaus carefully. His verdict: no masterpiece, but not a bad picture.
Kraaijpoel cites specific weaknesses in the painting. Both the tablecloth and the disciples’ robes look stiff, for instance, as if they were made of wood rather than cloth. Vermeer was a master of texture and drapery; cloth flows, and every material, whether a sleek fur or a nubby carpet or a perfect pearl, is distinct and invites a viewer’s touch. But look at the lower right corner of Emmaus, where sleeve and chair and tablecloth meet. Robe and cloth and wood might all be the same material, and the tablecloth juts into space like a rigid object.
Emmaus is two pictures in one, a still life surrounded by four figures. The still life is by far the better of the two. (The police would later find seventeenth-century pitchers, glasses, plates, and a map in Van Meegeren’s studio.) The objects on the table show far more life and animation than the human beings around it. The shadows on the pitcher and the glints of light on the glasses are particularly good.
But all the humans look dismayingly alike, and none looks quite alive. (Vermeer and his contemporaries would have made a point of portraying different sorts of faces and bodies, just as they demonstrated their skill by conveying the different textures of wood and pewter and silk.) Painting in secret, Van Meegeren had to conjure up his models from his imagination. Still, he indignantly kicked aside that ready-made excuse. “If you have painted two or three thousand heads in all lights,” he boasted, “it is not necessary to have models.”
48
HE WHO HESITATES
Van Meegeren’s hubris might have done him in, except for the marvelous fact that when it came to swagger and self-delusion he was no match for the experts he needed to outwit. The connoisseurs’ exaggerated regard for their own views was more than a quirk. It is a striking feature of the art world that experts have little choice but to put enormous faith in their own opinions. Inevitably, that opens the way to error, sometimes to spectacular error.
The problem is not merely that every expert regards his judgments about a painting’s authenticity as superior to those of everyone else. The deeper problem is that the experts rely on such subtle and hard-to-verbalize cues that they have the greatest difficulty persuading one another to see things their way. “Sometimes it is a question of lovely equipoise,” wrote Max Friedländer, “sometimes of stark, exciting vividness, sometimes again of an intensification of the sense of life, or a sense of pathos, of boundless abundance, of heroic exaltation—and every time the accent is unmistakable.”*
Experts command an immense store of facts, but the speed of their judgments is every bit as impressive as the breadth of their knowledge. Connoisseurs believe they can tell, within moments of looking at a work of art, whether it is first-rate or second-rate, genuine or fake. They know by looking, and they know for sure and at once. Just as important, they believe that such snap judgments are the gold standard in their line of work. Hesitation is a sign of uncertainty, not prudence. Their view echoes that of the chess grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca, who once snapped at a weaker player, “You figure it out, I know it.”
What was crucially important was that Bredius believed this, too. This was why he insistently repeated that he had immediately recognized that Emmaus was authentic and why he instructed Boon to write his letter to the editor repeating the same point.
“He was as good at recognizing Vermeers