The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [135]
He died a hero. Over the course of the year that passed between his confession and his trial, public opinion in Holland had swung completely in Van Meegeren’s favor. Once damned as a traitor, he became, in the words of the American journalist Irving Wallace, “the man who swindled Goering.” In one poll where the Dutch were asked to rank the popularity of public figures, the prime minister finished first and Van Meegeren placed second. A small group of writers and painters took up his cause. “I am for Han van Meegeren and I say so without shame,” declared the novelist Simon Vestdijk. “What did Van Meegeren do? He painted a picture…. Would Vermeer condemn him for that? I hardly think so. Many a person would have been spiritually deprived had he not witnessed this crowning achievement of the genius of Johannes Vermeer with his own eyes.”
For a time a movement to put up a statue to Van Meegeren won considerable support, at least in the form of enthusiastic talk. But no one in Holland in 1947 had money to spare, and the plans soon fizzled.
ON OCTOBER 1, 1946, the judges at Nuremberg had found Hermann Goering guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to death by hanging. Goering poisoned himself and was found dead in his prison cell hours before his scheduled execution. Still, he had lived long enough to learn the truth about his “Vermeer.”
Stewart Leonard, a Monuments Man, delivered the news a few weeks before Goering’s death. Leonard was in charge of the Munich Central Collecting Point, one of the round-up centers for looted art. In the course of an interrogation, Goering boasted to Leonard that among the thousands of paintings in his collection, there were no fakes.
“Oh, yes, there are,” Leonard said, and he laid out the whole Van Meegeren saga.
“No! No! No!” Goering shouted. He jumped up, indignant and disbelieving. It couldn’t be true. Soldiers standing guard rushed up to subdue the prisoner, hands on their weapons. There was no need. Goering’s anger quickly turned to anguish. “But it’s impossible! That picture was old, so old I had to have it restored!” Anguish in turn gave way to incredulity. How could the picture be fake? “It would be a colossal fraud, because I paid the most of all for that one.”
NO ONE KNOWS if Abraham Bredius ever learned the truth about his beloved Emmaus or Van Meegeren’s other forgeries. Bredius died on April 13, 1946, well after Van Meegeren’s confession but early enough to spare Bredius the ordeal of the trial. At his death, Bredius was within a few days of his ninety-first birthday. It would have been a small mercy if the last act of the Van Meegeren story passed him by.
Some of Van Meegeren’s victims never gave in. Hannema lived until 1984 and believed to the end that Emmaus was Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece. In his old age, Hannema retreated to his castle and his art. There visitors could examine his large collection of paintings, many of them first-rate. In Hannema’s eyes, the prizes of his collection were the Vermeers—seven of them altogether, in comparison with a mere four at the Rijksmuseum—though not a single one of the seven was truly by Vermeer.
The two most devout believers in Van Meegeren went even further. Both were prominent, well-regarded figures. The more outspoken was Jean Decoen, a Belgian art critic and painter who insisted that Emmaus and The Last Supper were genuine Vermeers. Not merely genuine, in fact, but “the most important” Vermeers of all. Van Meegeren’s confession was a “hoax.” In an expensive campaign that culminated in the publication of an impressive-looking book called Back to the Truth, Decoen fought not merely to correct the historical record but to win a lawsuit against the scientists who had manipulated and misrepresented the technical evidence. Van Beuningen, the owner of the Last Supper (and