The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [62]
It might seem doomed to failure. Think, for instance, of the Nixon masks that still turn up on the occasional trick-or-treater. Everyone who sees the ski-slope nose and the dark jowls recognizes Tricky Dick, but even if Nixon were still on the scene no one would ever confuse the spoof with the real thing. But forgers do often manage to pass off their caricatures. Look at Van Meegeren’s Woman Reading Music, a close imitation of a real Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. This was one of the experimental paintings that Van Meegeren did not attempt to sell. Breathtaking masterpiece or shoddy fake? Can you tell? Certainly most casual viewers would be far more likely to hail it as a Vermeer than any of the fakes that made Van Meegeren’s reputation.
We have a hard time judging the picture honestly because we know that it is fake, and we cannot discard that knowledge. For a fair test we would need an art-loving amateur who happened to come on Van Meegeren’s Woman Reading Music unaware. Would that man on the street be fooled?
By good fortune, we have such a man. Meet Jan Gerritsen, an editor at Holland’s best and most serious newspaper, NRC Handelsblad. In February 1996, an exhibition hall in Rotterdam called the Kunsthal put on a show devoted to Van Meegeren’s forgeries. (Not by coincidence, the renowned Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague had mounted a blockbuster Vermeer exhibition at the same time.) The Kunsthal designed a handsome poster announcing its show and slapped copies up all over town. The poster featured Van Meegeren’s Woman Reading Music. By happenstance, somebody taped one to a lamppost in front of Gerritsen’s apartment. On February 19, he wrote a short but furious editorial and signed it with his initals.
Under the headline “Art as Dung,” Gerritsen complained about the Kunsthal’s lack of scruples. Just as the dung beetle happily lived on others’ waste, he wrote, the Kunsthal fed on any sort of attention, no matter how unsavory. All publicity was good publicity. Even the Kunsthal posters were a lie: “Van Meegeren’s name is printed above a depiction not of an attractive Van Meegeren (because there aren’t any), but of Vermeer’s Woman Reading Music, which belongs to the Rijksmuseum.”
Oops! The newspaper discovered its mistake after the presses had rolled but before the paper hit the street. The top editor phoned the Kunsthal’s director to offer a preemptive apology. It turns out we’ve made a bit of a mistake. No hard feelings, I hope.
The Kunsthal settled for a letter to the editor, which announced gleefully that Van Meegeren had struck again. “JG Discovers a Vermeer!” the letter crowed. The Kunsthal basked in the publicity.
THIS WAS ALL good fun, but Van Meegeren’s decision not to try to sell Woman Reading Music was the right one. The trouble with close copies is that they work best on amateurs, whose opinions carry no weight. A major painting, one that commands serious money and close attention, will bring the experts running. They have spent their careers steeped in authentic Vermeers and other genuine masterpieces. That day-in, day-out immersion produces, first of all, a huge amount of specific knowledge. When experts look at a painting, they automatically compare it with a vast number of other works and ponder countless details beyond the obvious. What does it mean that the lion’s head finials on the chair in Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat face backward, away from the seat of the chair, for instance, while the finials on the identical chair in Girl Asleep at a Table, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, The Glass of Wine, Woman with a Water Jug, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, and Lady Writing a Letter all face forward?*
Far more important, every