The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [113]
Hoving has made a specialty of what he calls “fakebusting,” and his list of coups is long and undisputed. A patrician who affects the language and the impatience of an overworked cop, he shrugs off by-the-book approaches to telling genuine paintings from forgeries. “Provenance is a laugh,” Hoving says, “the fact that it came from so and so, and so and so gave it to the prince of so and so. Fuck off, that can all be faked up. Same thing with iconography. All of that stuff is superfluous and of no importance.”
Instead, Hoving starts a new case with a bout of total immersion. “If I’m going to see a Vermeer,” he says, “what I do is spend three solid days with all the Vermeers I can get my hands on. You go to the ones in the Met, you go to the Frick, and you saturate yourself. And then you have it brought in. You don’t look right away. Then, bang! You look at it and you look away, and you record that first, split-second impression.”
If you’re in the presence of greatness, Hoving insists, you’ll know it. “You don’t have to know anything about the Italian Renaissance or Florence or marble or the Bible to know that the David by Michelangelo is an absolutely unbelievable and earth-shattering thing,” he says. “The image of this boy just coming out of adolescence who’s looking confident and yet scared to death—it’s absolutely superb, and it talks on its own. That’s what art is for.
“Be stupid!” Hoving cries. “When you look at a thing, have a totally blank mind and be dumb—let it do the talking. ‘Talk to me, baby.’ If you let it talk to you, it will.”
The problem—and the great opportunity for crooks like Van Meegeren—is that so-so experts may not hear what Hoving hears. Second-rate experts may swoon in the presence of second-rate paintings.* Worse yet, they will deliver their misguided views with every bit as much sincerity and self-assurance as Whistler or Hoving.
“That’s the trouble with an ‘eye,’” says the historian Marina Aarts. “You can fool it. These people looking at Emmaus believed their eye was infallible, but it’s not true. Your eye is connected to the brain, there’s information in that brain, and that information depends on the age you live in.”
49
THE GREAT CHANGEOVER
Until its last act, forgery is a contest like many others. But the moment the forger’s victims take his bait, a strange thing happens. The forger’s dupes immediately become his greatest allies. Any doubts they may have held are abandoned, and almost invariably the new believers work with all their might to tell the world of their discovery.
For Van Meegeren, with his grand ambition, this switch was vital. In his eyes, selling a forgery was only the beginning. Hannema paid a fortune for Emmaus, but Bredius’s campaign on behalf of “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer” was praise beyond price.
What accounts for the strange partnership between the con man and his victims? It happens in many fields where one side is trying to scam the other, not just in art. In World War II, for example, the worst news a spymaster could hear was that the enemy had captured one of his agents and “turned” him. When a spy delivered information that turned out to be false, therefore, his own side tried mightily to find a benign explanation—maybe the enemy had changed its plans at the last second. The Nazis’ willful blindness was “sometimes so thorough and per sis tent as to strain credibility,” wrote Sir John Masterman, who ran teams of double agents for the British in World War II. “It appeared that the only quality which the German spymaster demanded was that he should himself have discovered the agent and launched him on his career…. It was extremely, almost fantastically, difficult to ‘blow’ a well-established agent.” Like a starry-eyed lover with a two-timing girlfriend, the spymaster was often the last to catch on.
The dupes went wrong in the first place by letting their