The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [6]
In 1922, he organized an exhibition of his biblical pictures. One of Van Meegeren’s paintings, scarcely noticed at the time, was a New Testament scene called Christ at Emmaus. Years later, in 1937, one of the best-known authorities on Dutch art would announce a startling discovery. He had found a new Vermeer, the greatest masterpiece that Vermeer had ever painted. It, too, was called Christ at Emmaus.
The show of religious paintings was a financial success: Van Meegeren sold all his paintings, and the exhibition led to a number of portrait commissions and a cushy gig teaching young ladies from The Hague’s tonier neighborhoods how to draw. But the critics had been less charmed.
Some reviewers hailed Van Meegeren’s technical flair, but most damned his work as more akin to magazine illustration than proper painting. “Here and there one finds something to praise,” observed a writer from the magazine De Groene Amsterdammer, before going on to complain that “there is too much frivolity, too little depth, too little psychology, too little respect, and no sense of religious feeling.” In similar fashion, the writer from Het Vaderland offered a bit of perfunctory praise—Van Meegeren had “a unique, fluent way of painting”—and then a hearty slap: Van Meegeren’s paintings of Christ were “often insipid and sweet, sometimes miserably forsaken, always weak and powerless.”
Even a placid soul might have snarled at such treatment. Van Meegeren had nothing placid about him. Jumpy, vain, and prickly, he treasured his grievances. Each critical snub provided further proof that he had fallen victim to a smug and narrow-minded clique. First in coffee house diatribes and then in angry essays in a tiny magazine he helped start up, Van Meegeren fought back. Modern art was a scam, and the critics who endorsed it were ignoramuses and crooks. Painters of real talent met with sneers and sarcasm, if they managed to win any attention at all. The critics reserved their praise for “art Bolsheviks,” fashionable frauds whose abstract paintings were nothing but smears on canvas. These so-called artists were a “slimy bunch” of “drunken madmen.”
Sometime after that fateful 1922 show, Van Meegeren set to work on his first forgeries. If he could not win the critics’ applause, it would be nearly as satisfactory to make fools of them. A good hater, Van Meegeren did not mellow as the years passed. A scribbled note turned up in his papers after his death. “Revenge keeps its color,” it read. “Who waits, wins.”
FEW PEOPLE TODAY recall Van Meegeren. Outside the art world, even those in educated circles respond to a mention of his name with blank stares. (Inside the art world he remains notorious, so much so that insiders refuse to believe that his story is not every bit as familiar in the world at large as that of, say, Benedict Arnold.)
To ask a historian or an authority on Dutch art about Van Meegeren’s forgeries feels rude, like asking the owner of a three-star restaurant about the time the health inspectors shut him down. Why not ask about great paintings instead? And, indeed, Van Meegeren’s fakes are as clumsy and lifeless as the experts maintain. Ask scholars for specifics and they scarcely know what to criticize first. How about the “heavy-lidded eyes with raccoon-like shadowing”? Or the “overly fleshy lips and noses” or “the bag-like garments” or “the faker’s lack of ability in achieving correct anatomical structure and volume”?
That badness is undeniable, but it is precisely Van Meegeren’s badness that gives his story its sting. Van Meegeren was a tireless experimenter, a savvy tactician and dealmaker, and a brilliant psychologist. What he was not especially good at was painting. He found a way to make that not matter.
Van Meegeren’s tale has been told often. Nearly always it is told wrong. Van Meegeren was a genius, we read, a master forger, the greatest forger who ever lived, and so on. This is to get the story almost exactly