The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [137]
But it did happen, one minor misstep at a time. Almost inevitably, similar things will happen again. In September 2003, a museum in Bolton, En gland, paid $935,000 for an ancient Egyptian statue. The statue is gorgeous. Carved in alabaster, it stands about twenty inches tall and depicts the torso of a barely cloaked princess, the daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti. The British Museum authenticated the 3,300-year-old statue. The experts at Christie’s enthusiastically agreed, and The Burlington Magazine wrote an article hailing its importance.
Three years later, in 2006, British police raided a workshop filled with “equipment for making statues and the like” and arrested two men on suspicion of forgery. The Amarna princess, as the statue was known, had been carved not in 1350 BC but sometime in the twenty-first century, by a self-taught English forger using a hammer and chisel from his local hardware store.
The forgers had sung straight from Van Meegeren’s hymnbook. To begin with, their statue had a hazy and almost uncheckable provenance. Nor did it look like a run-of-the-mill fake (who would forge a torso without a head?), and, in fact, it had hardly any counterparts even among genuine Egyptian statues. Moreover, the princess had a strikingly modern look, a sexiness that appealed to museum directors and museumgoers alike. Finally, because the statue was unpainted stone, no scientific tests could be performed to evaluate it. Everything rested on the judgment of connoisseurs.
“This was,” one of the purchasers declared, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
NOTES
Sources for quotations and for assertions that might prove elusive can be found below. To keep these notes in bounds, I have not documented facts that can be readily checked in standard sources.
CHAPTER ONE: A KNOCK ON THE DOOR
The grandeur of 321 Keizersgracht…Fredrik Kreuger, De Arrestatie van een meestervervalser, pp. 96–97. (The title means The Arrest of a Master Forger.)
The front hall was…The bicycle story featured regularly in news stories about Van Meegeren. See, for instance, “One Vermeer After Another: A Forger of Genius,” De Nieuwe Dag, July 18, 1945, or “Master Hoaxer,” Newsweek, Sept. 10, 1945. Van Meegeren’s home is today the headquarters of the Association of Dutch Architects, which takes a natural interest in the building’s past uses; the building’s office manager debunked the bicycling story and confirmed the skating one.
Joop Piller…My description of Piller is based on Harry van Wijnen’s account in his Han van Meegeren en Zijn Meesterwerk van Vermeer (with co-author Diederik Kraaijpoel) and on my interviews with Van Wijnen. For many years a personal friend of Piller, Van Wijnen is a contributing editor at NRC Handelsblad and a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He is also the author of a biography of D. G. van Beuningen, a major player in the Van Meegeren saga. See Harry van Wijnen, Grootvorst aan de Maas: D. G. van Beuningen. (The title means Monarch on the [river] Maas).
He had brought his guitar…“One Vermeer After Another.”
CHAPTER TWO: LOOTED ART
“roof rabbit”…Walter B. Maass, The Netherlands at War: 1940–1945, p. 210.
“I love art”…Leon Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews, p. 129.
“I intend to plunder”…Robert M. Edsel, Rescuing da Vinci, p. 105.
“At the current moment”…Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum, p. 38.
This was the most valuable…David Irving, Göring, p. 305. Irving is an unpleasant character and a bigot who contends that Auschwitz was merely “a labor camp with an unfortunately high death rate.” Nonetheless, such eminent historians as John Keegan and Gordon Craig call Irving’s work “indispensable.” Irving is both a propagandist for ugly views and a formidable researcher. The quotations I have drawn from his biography are not controversial and are well documented in his notes. For