The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [55]
We have already discussed the resistance to science in the art world. The connoisseurs’ skepticism about science sounds like old-fogeyism, but as we have seen, it has some merit. De Groot might have chosen to emphasize the limits of science’s usefulness. Instead, he rejected science altogether. That extreme position, based largely on wounded vanity, left him dangerously exposed. The discovery of paint from 1820 in a work purportedly created in 1620 should have struck him as noteworthy.
For Van Meegeren and his fellow forgers, hardheadedness like that on the experts’ part was welcome news. It led directly to the third of the Hofstede de Groot lessons.
THE LAST LESSON was to get an expert on your side. Since science can never give a painting a definitive thumbs-up, the determination that a painting is truly a Rembrandt or a Vermeer will remain a judgment call.* The greatest asset a forgery can have is an authority’s endorsement.
Fooling those experts isn’t easy, but in the struggle between forger and expert, the forger has one built-in advantage. He works in secret; the expert is a public figure whose taste and judgments are a matter of record. In the case of De Groot, the great man’s public declarations made him vulnerable. Like a restaurant critic who had proclaimed himself a sucker for any dish cooked over a wood fire and seasoned with balsamic vinegar, De Groot had spelled out exactly which paintings of Frans Hals he liked best and which of their features he most admired. He particularly liked, for instance, Hals’s painting at the Schwerin museum, in Germany, of a young boy holding a flute. Imagine his delight, years later, to see “evidently the same boy” turn up in A Boy Smoking. Little surprise that the esteemed connoisseur could not refrain from cooing contentedly about the “great attractiveness” of the “marvelous” dish that had been cooked up especially for his delectation.
That sort of made-to-order effort to snag a celebrity endorsement was worth a forger’s while, for in many cases buyers tore open their checkbooks as soon as an expert gave a painting his blessing. “In no other field,” marveled the art historian Harry van de Waal, “is it possible to take a heap of scrap, tinker about with it a little and then sell it as a Rolls Royce, covered by a statement signed by a highly reputed expert, in which the latter declares that ‘to the best of his knowledge’ he considers the one to be the other.”
That had been the case with the two forged Frans Halses authenticated by De Groot, and it had been the case with the two forged Vermeers that ended up in the Mellon collection. Those fake Vermeers had been authenticated by some of the great names in connoisseurship. The director of the Mauritshuis, Willem Martin, declared that there could be “no doubt whatsoever” that both the Smiling Girl and the Lacemaker were by Vermeer. The formidable Wilhelm von Bode agreed.† For more than twenty years, Bode served as director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, which had been created under his leadership. For many of those years he also held the title of director-general of all Prussian museums. Bode had clout. When, in 1926, he proclaimed the Smiling Girl a “characteristic, fairly early work of the Delft Master Vermeer,” the painting sold almost at once to a Berlin collector, who quickly resold it to Joseph Duveen, who sold it to Andrew Mellon.
Van Wijngaarden’s Lacemaker enjoyed almost exactly the same free ride. Bode endorsed it enthusiastically—it was not merely a marvelous Vermeer but “one which, up to the present, has been entirely unknown!”—and, on the strength of that praise, a buyer snatched it up and soon sold it to Duveen, who sold it to Mellon.
In the case of The Lacemaker, other eminent experts chimed in, too. The esteemed Vermeer scholar Eduard Plietzsch echoed Bode’s enthusiasm, for example, and so did the renowned art historian Max Friedländer. These were titans in the world of scholarship. Friedländer succeeded Bode as director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum; he was the