The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [26]
Hitler’s fascination with art and architecture (and his grudge against authority, for rejecting him) never wavered. “After being appointed chancellor in 1933,” the historian Frederic Spotts writes, “the first building he had erected was not a monument to his own triumph…but a massive art gallery.”
Throughout the war, Hitler continued to feel architecture’s pull. The day after an Allied bombing raid on the cathedral city of Cologne, Goebbels found Hitler studying a map of the ruined city, heedless of the German lives lost and delighted at the chance to rebuild according to his own designs.
Long after his world had fallen apart, Hitler drew comfort from his architectural fantasies. At the very end, hiding in his Berlin bunker in 1945, he spent hours every day contemplating a minutely detailed model of his hometown, Linz, as he dreamed of transforming it. While the Russian army drew ever closer, Hitler focused all his attention on his scale model. No detail was too small to ponder. Would the bell tower be tall enough to catch the light of sunrise?
14
CHASING VERMEER
When Hitler began collecting art, his advisors had almost no idea what they were doing. The first was Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer. A cagey businessman, Hoffmann had no artistic qualifications beyond loyalty to the Fuehrer.
That devotion eventually made Hoffmann a rich man. Royalties poured in from such coffee-table books as The Hitler Nobody Knows and from an exclusive license to reproduce and sell photographs of Hitler, a fantastically lucrative perk in a state that made a cult of its ruler. (In one of Hoffmann’s studios, Hitler met a young assistant named Eva Braun.) But Hitler’s art-collecting ambitions soon outgrew Hoffmann’s talents.
Enter Hans Posse. Balding and bespectacled, Posse looked like just another museum curator. He had a fine record as an art historian, in fact, but in June 1939 Hitler bestowed powers on Posse that set him apart from all his peers. For two Decades, Posse had served as director of Dresden’s well-regarded museum, the Dresden Gallery. Now Hitler offered him, in the words of Frederic Spotts, “an opportunity never before offered any museum director—unlimited authority and boundless funds to buy or confiscate what ever he wanted.”
Posse, a man without scruples, seized the chance. His assignment, he wrote happily in his diary on the night Hitler made his offer, was to stock the Fuehrer’s dream museum with “only the best of all periods from the prehistoric beginnings of art…to the nineteenth century and recent times.”
Posse began by evaluating the paintings Hitler had accumulated without his help. This called for a certain delicacy. Not surprisingly, Posse praised Hitler’s eye. Many of the dictator’s favorite paintings would surely occupy a prominent spot in the future museum. Still, Posse noted regretfully, many others were “not up to the level of the Linz museum, not as I imagine it.”
Posse’s first self-assigned task, according to the historian Lynn Nicholas, was to fill “the Vermeer Gap.” Posse had been instructed, after all, to gather paintings for the world’s best museum. Whom better to start with than Vermeer? And what better Vermeer than the extraordinary work called The Art of Painting?
Like nearly all Vermeers, this cryptic picture evokes both awe and perplexity. Vermeer himself presumably placed a high value on it, for we know that although he did his best to sell his works, he hung on to The Art of Painting throughout his life. He died without a penny in 1675, and the next year his widow turned the painting over to her mother to help settle a debt.
The work depicts an artist, brush in hand, seated on a stool and contemplating a young woman who is posing for him. He has just begun to paint her laurel wreath. A tapestry that serves as a curtain within the room has been pulled back and tucked behind a chair, allowing us to peep in at this quiet scene.
The temptation is to think that Vermeer