The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [136]
Decoen argued that Van Meegeren had somehow discovered two authentic Vermeers and then concocted his forgery story in order to place himself on a par with Vermeer and to guarantee himself a place in the spotlight. Decoen agreed that Van Meegeren had faked the other disputed paintings but claimed that Emmaus and the Last Supper were achievements far beyond his reach. The critic’s admiration for the Last Supper especially was almost unbounded. “The whole picture reveals such knowledge and skill,” he wrote, “that it seems to me that it is difficult to go further in transmitting human sentiments by means of paint and brush.”
Decoen’s book-long argument was impassioned but unconvincing, a grassy knoll conspiracy theory that required, among other things, the rejection of all the scientific data. Still, its twist-in-the-tale complexity stirred confusion for Decades. Decoen himself never suffered any doubts, even after a face-to-face confrontation with Van Meegeren. “Listen, Monsieur Van Meegeren,” Decoen told the forger, “you will probably fool many people, but you can’t fool me!”
EPILOGUE
Underlying all the specific questions about who painted what, a deeper question lurks. Van Meegeren posed it in its starkest form: “Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he declared at his trial. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”
Van Meegeren presumably had an unflattering answer in mind. The picture had not changed, but it had lost its glamour. Why? Because the “experts and art lovers” were as fake as it was. The world was full of people who thought of themselves as art lovers but were in fact merely snobs.
Perhaps there is more to say in our defense. In his contribution to a brilliant collection of essays on forgery and art, the philosopher Alfred Lessing contends that Vermeer was great not only because he painted beautiful pictures. “He is great for that reason plus something else. And that something else is precisely the fact of his originality, i.e., the fact that he painted certain pictures in a certain manner at a certain time in the history and development of art.” To create something new is an achievement. Einstein was the first to see that e = mc2. Afterward any actor could don a fuzzy wig and scribble the identical formula on a blackboard. That wouldn’t make him Einstein.
The critic and philosopher Denis Dutton makes a related argument. When we praise a work of art, we have in mind not only the finished product but the way that product was made. Dutton asks us to imagine listening to a recording of a pianist and admiring her dexterity. If we learned later that an engineer had sped up the tape (while adjusting the pitch), we would feel cheated. In a similar way, a forger’s achievement is less than it seems, regardless of its beauty, because the forger has the unfair advantage of working from someone else’s model.
THE HAN VAN Meegeren story was the sort of disaster that engineers call a “normal accident.” It is a far different thing from a perfect storm, in which two or three calamities hit at once and each is big enough to be overwhelming on its own. A normal accident is made up of a string of small mishaps, and each on its own seems innocuous. The trouble comes if those miscues happen to interact in just the wrong way. A driver’s sunglasses slide off the seat, he leans forward to retrieve them and takes his eyes off the road; a car coming the opposite way slows for a puddle; an eighteen-wheeler tailgating the slowing car suddenly has to switch lanes…
One other difference is crucial. Unlike a perfect storm, a normal accident need not pan out. With a tiny change at any step along the way—if the driver picks up his sunglasses at once, without fumbling around—the accident might never come to be. At a dozen places, Van Meegeren’s scheme might have unraveled harmlessly. Bredius