The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [126]
The news was sensational, but reporters treated the affair as a mystery that had yet to be resolved. They larded their stories with doubts about Van Meegeren’s claims. Time’s coverage was typical. Christ at Emmaus was an “exquisite” painting that had been “authenticated by impeccable Dutch art experts.” Van Meegeren, on the other hand, had no one to vouch for him. “One official of the Rotterdam Museum has a theory of his own,” Time noted, and the magazine seemed inclined to agree with its unnamed source (who was almost certainly Hannema). “Van Meegeren may be a muddy-minded fantasist with a grudge against museums.”
For years, Van Meegeren had lied to the world, and it had fallen for every lie. Now he had told the truth, and no one believed a word of it.
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COMMAND PERFORMANCE
Piller harbored doubts, too, despite what he had told the reporters. Van Meegeren had every incentive to make up a story to save his hide. Forgery, after all…what prosecutor could be bothered? But treason!
Piller agreed that someone had forged the disputed Vermeers, he told friends years later, but how did he know that Van Meegeren was the forger? He was hardly a sterling character, after all. Maybe Van Meegeren could talk so convincingly about forgeries because he moved in the same circles as a forger or two. And why was it, Piller wanted to know, that Emmaus was so much better a painting than the five forged Vermeers that followed it? Van Meegeren claimed he had painted them all. But how could the same person have painted a masterpiece like Emmaus and then a series of awful, awkward follow-ups?
The easiest answer was that, after Emmaus’s stunning success, Van Meegeren had coasted on his reputation. Piller didn’t quite buy it. But the most conspicuous hole in Van Meegeren’s story, in Piller’s view, was that no one had ever seen him at work. That seemed awfully convenient. How did anyone know Van Meegeren was a forger? Because he said so. Piller had Van Meegeren’s word to go by and the opinions of some scientists, but nothing he could put his hands on.
Piller decided to put Van Meegeren to the test. If he had painted Vermeers before, he could do so again. While Van Meegeren rounded up a blank canvas and his paints and brushes, Piller occupied himself with logistics. This time there would be witnesses. Van Meegeren would paint while guards watched over his shoulders. By now, journalists were everywhere, and both the press and the public thrilled to the idea that the collaboration charge could be resolved so dramatically. “He Paints For His Life,” one newspaper headline proclaimed.
IT WAS NOT an idea anyone in the art world would have come up with. Everyone agreed, after all, that Van Meegeren was a competent painter who knew perfectly well what the disputed paintings looked like. In every art museum, painters set up their easels in front of their favorite pictures and try to copy them. What would it prove if Van Meegeren did something similar?
But this was Piller’s call. He knew that, in the end, proof would come down to complicated technical questions that had to do with such things as the chemical analysis of paint samples, but to settle his own mind he wanted something more concrete. He wanted to see whether Van Meegeren could create, from scratch, a painting like those that had bewitched the aesthetes of the art world and the brute who headed the Luftwaffe.
In his attic studio at Goudstikker’s, Van Meegeren happily set to work on yet another biblical scene. He painted “under the constant supervision of six silent men,” one newspaper reporter declared, but that was an exaggeration. Usually two guards stood watching, and the mood was not austere. Van Meegeren had always had a performer’s love of the spotlight. That had been a hardship in a profession that demanded secrecy,