The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [124]
Museum Boymans–van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Van Meegeren’s Christ at Emmaus detail;
Teekeningen I, 1942
Van Meegeren’s Mother and Children, detail
Who produced luxury goods in a time of nearly universal misery? And what of the book itself? Its cover was black and red—the Nazi colors—and Van Meegeren’s drawings were accompanied by the poems of a notorious Dutch Nazi named Martien Beversluis.
On July 11, 1945, a Dutch reporter in bombed-out Berlin added a curious sidebar to his story. He had wandered into Hitler’s private library in the once-grand Reich Chancellery, the seat of government. There he happened to see Van Meegeren’s book. Inside was a handwritten dedication: “To the beloved Fuehrer in grateful tribute.” Below the dedication Han van Meegeren had signed his name.
The next day, in the midst of yet another cat-and-mouse interrogation, Van Meegeren cracked. After one question too many from Piller and two colleagues, he burst out with an indignant cry. “Idiots!” he yelled. “You think I sold a Vermeer to that fat Goering. But it’s not a Vermeer. I painted it myself!”
Piller rejected the ludicrous claim at once. Treason meant death. Forgery meant a fine or a brief jail sentence. A desperate man would say anything.
The timing of this astonishing confession was not coincidence, for Van Meegeren had no choice. Even the suspicion of a link to Goering was bad; the revelation of a link to Hitler was disastrous. Across Holland low-level collaborationists and Nazi sympathizers had been beaten by mobs and pummeled with rocks and thrown into prison. What would be the fate of someone in a position to send inscribed gifts to the Fuehrer? Only by detonating a bombshell could Van Meegeren shift attention away from his Nazi sympathies.
Van Meegeren talked vehemently and, it seemed, indignantly. For weeks he had responded to every question about Goering with vagueness and double talk. Now, for the first time, he spoke in specifics. Of course he could prove what he was saying. He’d painted the Goering picture on top of an old painting that he hadn’t even bothered to scrape off. He took a piece of paper and sketched a battle scene with soldiers and horses. All Piller’s crew had to do was X-ray Goering’s “Vermeer”—Van Meegeren indicated a position next to Christ’s raised hand—and they’d see the battlefield beneath it.
Piller gawked. Wound up now, Van Meegeren plunged on. “I painted other Vermeers, too, and a couple of De Hoochs. And Vermeer’s Emmaus in the Boymans—it’s mine, too!” By the time he was done, Van Meegeren claimed to have sold eight old master forgeries to Holland’s best museums and wealthiest collectors. He rattled off names—the Boymans, the Rijksmuseum, Vermeer, De Hooch. All this was completely out of the blue. None of his questioners had ever mentioned a word about any picture except Adultery. As far as Piller knew, no one had ever said anything about any of the eight paintings being fakes. All were multimillion-dollar trophies, and Emmaus was a world-renowned masterpiece.
Piller had learned from informants that Van Meegeren had been mixed up in the sales of hugely expensive old masters, but Piller’s focus had been on where the paintings had come from, not on whether they were genuine. Van Meegeren’s bizarre claims made him less believable, not more, as if a man brought in for picking pockets had confessed to robbing Fort Knox.
Piller and his two partners staggered back from Van Meegeren’s jail cell to their office. Sixty years later, a woman who worked as a secretary in Piller’s office still recalled the bewilderment of the three men as they tried to sort out what they had heard. They debated among themselves for hours. Was Van Meegeren’s story