The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [5]
Two weeks later, in early June 1940, Goering was back in Amsterdam. Jubilant in his quarters at the Amstel Hotel, he took out a pen and a sheet of hotel stationery and set down a heading: “List of Pictures Delivered to Carin Hall on June 10, 1940.” The tally included more than two dozen works, paintings by Brueghel, Rubens, and Rembrandt among them.
On June 27, Goering returned to Amsterdam yet again. This time the lure was the immense art collection of the renowned Jacques Goudstikker. One of Europe’s best-known and wealthiest art dealers (and a Jew), Goudstikker and his wife and baby had tried to escape Holland as the Nazis swept in. As he joined the desperate crowds rushing to the coast in search of a boat or ship, Goudstikker carried with him a small black notebook with handwritten entries on the 1,113 paintings he had left behind. The list was extraordinary. Under R, for example, the entries included Rembrandt, Rubens, and Raphael; under T, Titian and Tintoretto.
Goudstikker managed to snare three precious places on the SS Bodengraven, bound for South America by way of Dover. As the refugees neared the English coast, Nazi dive bombers attacked. On the night of May 16, with the ship blacked out in case of further attacks, Goudstikker lost his way in the dark, fell through an open hatch in the deck, and died.
In Holland, eager buyers immediately began circling around Goudstikker’s firm. One of them represented Hermann Goering. Exactly what deals were struck for Goudstikker’s various holdings, and on what terms, no one has ever learned. At his Nuremberg trial, Goering would reveal that he had paid 2 million Dutch florins (roughly $13 million in today’s dollars) for some six hundred paintings, including nine by Rubens. (The Nazis were criminals who went out of their way to profess respect for the law; rather than steal outright, they often preferred to make coerced purchases. Goering’s outlays, needless to say, did not come from his own pocket.)
However complex the negotiations, the outcome was brutally straightforward. “A few months after Goudstikker’s death, on a very hot day in July,” wrote the Dutch historian Jacob Presser, “a corpulent figure wearing a white uniform and clutching a baton appeared at his gallery in the Herengracht. Reich Marshal Goering was paying a visit. An eyewitness has described what happened a few days later: ‘Huge lorries and barges drew up outside, and were soon filled to overflowing with valuable paintings and antiques. Goudstikker’s was left empty. Everything went to Germany.’”
4
QUASIMODO
Han van Meegeren fervently believed he was a great painter. He was not. His own work was no better than that of countless others, and the worst of it was dreadful. Van Meegeren was versatile—he painted society portraits and Bible scenes and nightclub dancers—but his work was marred by a taste for the cloyingly sweet or the creepily erotic. His best-known picture, once so familiar that nearly every Dutch home had a reproduction, was a sentimental drawing of a huge-eyed doe. The marketing of the drawing, rather than the picture itself, set it apart: sales took off after Van Meegeren declared that the deer was no ordinary animal but belonged to Holland’s beloved Princess Juliana.
As a young man, Van Meegeren had won some recognition for his painting, but his taste was old-fashioned and out of favor. (He painted his doe around 1917, a decade after such Cubist masterpieces as Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.) By 1920, Piet Mondrian, Van Meegeren’s best-known Dutch contemporary, had already begun working on the geometric grids and colored squares that are now known around the