The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [23]
“The paint was no longer soluble in alcohol! I cried like a child, I could have yelled it from the rooftops!”
THIS STORY SOUNDS closer to the mark than most of Van Meegeren’s—it lacks the rococo details that usually marked his inventions—and it may well be true. In any case, he had indeed made a paint that passed the alcohol test. Moreover, this new paint behaved like paint—in color and tone it looked right on a canvas, and it felt right on the brush, so that the artist could put all his accustomed skills to work. That was a stunning accomplishment. The paint had a third virtue, too, one that Van Meegeren could not have anticipated. It was this third property that would, later on, bedazzle the very experts who knew the most about the technical side of forgery.
Kraaijpoel, the Dutch painter and writer, delights in Van Meegeren’s inventiveness as well as his achievement. “Bakelite is a solid,” Kraaijpoel observes. “Some types are soluble in turpentine, and the resulting solution can be mixed with sawdust or another filler, to thicken the suspension, and then a telephone can be poured from it. But you can also rub pigments in it, to make paint. I think that Van Meegeren was the first to think of it and to test it extensively…. Voilà, the most beautiful object ever made from Bakelite!”
Kraaijpoel is right to marvel. Vermeer died in 1675. Bakelite never existed until its creation, in a laboratory, in 1907. Van Meegeren fooled the world with a seventeenth-century painting made of plastic.
Part Two
Hermann Goering and Johannes Vermeer
12
HERMANN GOERING
All armies loot, and some of them, like the French under Napoleon, even carried “shopping lists” and looted to order. The Nazis did not invent art theft. But by harnessing their greed to the might of the modern state, they managed to plunder Europe on a scale that had never been seen before. Holland and Italy were hit hard, and France hardest of all. “By the liberation of Paris, in August 1944,” writes the historian Hector Feliciano, “…one-third of all the art in private hands had been pillaged by the Nazis.”
For Europe as a whole, the figures soared almost beyond imagining. Over the course of the war’s five years, hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, and drawings vanished into German hands. Numbers like that reflected not only efficiency but zeal. Hitler fantasized endlessly about the sprawling art museum he would build in Linz, his dreary Austrian hometown. Goering, too, talked about the great gift he would someday leave the German people, though only occasionally and in vague and windy terms. For Goering, the prospect of someday bequeathing a museum could not compare with the visceral plea sure of reveling, today, in treasures that he alone possessed.
Even in small ways, he delighted in showing that he had what others did not. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and one of the most prominent and polished Nazis, recalled a dinner at Carin Hall, Goering’s palatial country house. After the meal, a servant poured an ordinary brandy for the guests. Then, solemnly, he poured a better bottle for Goering. “This is for me alone,” Goering gloated, and he went on to explain which French chateau he had taken it from.
Speer was only one of countless visitors to Carin Hall startled and baffled by the perfumed monster at the head of the table. Handsome when young but then grown immensely fat—“at least a yard across the bottom as the crow flies,” according to one American official—Goering took flamboyance to the point of self-parody.
“In his personal appearance he was so theatrical that you could only compare him with Nero,” marveled Hjalmar Schacht, a German financier sometimes called “Hitler’s banker.” Goering