The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [64]
A painter who wants to involve viewers emotionally needs to leave us some work to do ourselves. Once having collaborated, we find ourselves hooked. Artists figured it out long ago. A painstaking, seemingly perfect depiction of reality has its charms, the art historian E. H. Gombrich explained, but a painting that contains less hard “information” may nonetheless seem more real and more compelling. The reason is the Uncanny Valley again. Gombrich cites a Manet oil of horses thundering down a track, all blur and commotion and energy. “No wonder,” says Gombrich, “that the greatest protagonist of naturalistic illusion in painting, Leonardo da Vinci, is also the inventor of the deliberately blurred image.”
Nor is it only great artists who have learned that less is more. Jonathan Franzen points out that “an old shoe is easier to invest with comic personality than is, say, a photograph of Cary Grant. The blanker the slate, the more easily we can fill it with our own image…. The most widely loved (and profitable) faces in the modern world tend to be exceptionally basic and abstract cartoons: Mickey Mouse, the Simpsons, Tintin, and, simplest of all—barely more than a circle, two dots, and a horizontal line—Charlie Brown.”
Now consider where this left Van Meegeren. A genius like Vermeer can conjure up psychological depths. An illustrator like Charles Schulz, Charlie Brown’s creator, can draw a rudimentary line or two and trust viewers to supply the depth for themselves. But imagine the plight of a forger chasing a genius. He has set himself a goal he cannot reach, and the closer he comes, the further he falls short.
For Van Meegeren, the moral was clear. The close-copy strategy carried enormous risk. Instead, like robot builders and video designers but Decades ahead of his time, he opted for the 50 percent solution—he would do 50 percent of the work toward creating a Vermeer, rather than 99 percent, and let his eager viewers collaborate in building their own trap.
28
BETTING THE FARM
Van Meegeren had taken the trouble to forge Ter Borch and Frans Hals, but in the end he chose to devote his real energy to Vermeer. To a minor extent, this was a question of taste—Vermeer was the painter Van Meegeren admired most. The Delft connection, which may have appealed to Van Meegeren’s mischievous side, may have played a small part, too.
The real reasons behind the choice had little to do with Vermeer as an artist and everything to do with his fame, the giant prices his works commanded, and his biography—his lack of biography, more to the point. Van Meegeren could fill in the gaps as he chose. “For me,” he once confided happily, “a blessed terrain lay fallow.”
But to choose Vermeer, despite all the advantages, was to ask for trouble. Arthur Wheelock, the Vermeer expert at the National Gallery, points out that even from a strictly mercenary point of view, Vermeer was a dangerous choice. “If I were a forger,” Wheelock says, “I wouldn’t be worrying about Rembrandt or Vermeer. I’d be painting Pieter Klaes and Frans van Mieris, second-or third-tier artists, who sell for $800,000, maybe $1.5-million, which isn’t a bad living. Nobody’s going to think forgery. They’re going to think ‘School of…,’ ‘Follower of…’
“Who else would be a good choice?” Wheelock wonders aloud, and then he quickly answers his own question. “Any artist you’ve never heard of. For most people there are only three Dutch artists—Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Frans Hals. Beyond that, take your pick.”
Van Meegeren had little of Wheelock’s prudence. He