The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [125]
PILLER MADE A characteristically bold decision. He ordered Van Meegeren moved out of his jail cell and into Goudstikker’s building, with him. Piller and his men would gather up as many of the supposed forgeries as they could put their hands on and go over them with Van Meegeren, inch by inch if necessary, and get to the bottom of this forgery business. Piller set aside a room in the top floor of the art dealership for Van Meegeren. Someone fetched a few of Van Meegeren’s favorite pictures from his home—the most striking was a portrait of his wife in a long blue dress—and hung them on the walls. Piller had a bed for Van Meegeren put in a corner of the room.
House arrest in such plush conditions was a vast improvement over a prison cell, and soon everyone had grown accustomed to the sight of the small, worn man padding around in his slippers, a cigarette perpetually tucked in his mouth. The secretaries liked Van Meegeren for his good manners and his friendly little jokes, but in the first days after his confession his most important colleagues were a pair of outsiders. These were two highly regarded scientists—a Dutch chemist named Froentjes and a Belgian chemist named Coremans. With the aid of a small X-ray machine of the sort a dentist might use, they looked beneath the surface of several of the old masters that Van Meegeren claimed were really his work. Van Meegeren, whose memory had been so shaky in the weeks after his arrest, now proved the most willing of guides. The three men huddled close together, cops and crook working as partners. Van Meegeren made sketches of the pictures he had painted over, to show the scientists how to prove his guilt.
The show-and-tell continued. Piller sent for Van Meegeren’s paints and brushes, and Van Meegeren told the scientists his secrets. He explained how he ground his pigments, how he baked the pictures in an oven, how he formulated his Bakelite paints. Outside the confines of the art dealership at 458 Herengracht, the world had no idea of any of this. Van Meegeren had been arrested weeks before, but the police had not been involved, nor had anyone in the Department of Justice. Nor had Piller chosen, in the intervening weeks, to give any law official or anyone in the art world even a hint of where his investigation was heading.
In his own way Piller was as much a showman as Van Meegeren. He had come to know a handful of reporters in Amsterdam. Within days of Van Meegeren’s confession he handed them an amazing story. This was as far as could be from the formal press conferences we know today, with a bouquet of microphones at a lectern and stacks of carefully edited press releases. Instead, Piller assembled a small group of journalists, including one who worked for the Dutch news agency ANP, and told them he had found something news-worthy. They might be interested to know that he had uncovered the greatest art hoax of modern times.
Piller appeared by himself, without Van Meegeren, but the forger had prepared a careful statement. As brilliantly manipulative as ever, he had devised a story tailored for his audience. Years before, he had seduced Boon, a liberal politician, with a tale about helping a family escape from fascism. Now, with Holland furious at its collaborationists, he chose not to defend his pro-German record but to skip over it altogether. Not a word about Nazis, then, but instead a simple story of a little man who had been done wrong. Van Meegeren was an underdog, he claimed, and he’d never wanted anything but the respect and recognition that had always eluded him. “One unlucky day,” his statement read, “driven half mad by frustration, I determined to avenge myself on the critics by proving that they had underestimated me.”
“Emmaus in Boymans a Forgery,” screamed the headline in Het Parool on July 17, and a subheadline added the stunning information that “Several Vermeers Are Fakes.” ANP’s coverage spread the word everywhere, and newspapers and magazines around the world picked up the story and added their