The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [68]
In the art world in the 1930s, insiders thought of Bredius not as a giant but as a codger who had a bad habit of shooting his mouth off. Albert Blankert, one of the few experts on the Dutch Golden Age who has also done original research on Van Meegeren, declares flatly that “Bredius’ authority on Vermeer matters had already sunk to zero in those years.”
His credibility with respect to Rembrandt had fallen nearly as low. In 1935, the year Bredius turned eighty, he published a detailed roster of Rembrandt’s body of work. This was a grand project, an assessment of exactly which paintings traditionally attributed to Rembrandt were truly his and which should be reassigned to students or followers or other artists entirely. In the world’s eyes, this was a magnum opus that capped the great scholar’s career. To those in the know, the true story of the seemingly authoritative Rembrandt: The Complete Edition of the Paintings was one of disaster barely averted. Bredius’s assistant, Hans Schneider, had scrambled to safeguard the project, using all his tact and energy to exclude Bredius’s worst misattributions from this formal tally.
Bredius was still a big name—and the farther from Holland, the higher his reputation—but his judgments had grown erratic and his influence unpredictable. This didn’t mean he could be ignored, but it did mean that seducing him was no guarantee of seducing the world at large.
Only one other person could have been as dismayed as Bredius by Harpsichord’s failure. That was Van Meegeren, its creator. He had painted his best “Vermeer” yet, but it had not lived up to his hopes. Harpsichord had met with applause from one connoisseur and sneers from all the others. Van Meegeren had conned a wealthy buyer, but his ambition was not only to add to his fortune but to make fools of everyone in the art world. “I meant to have my pictures hang in a Dutch national collection,” he insisted.
Harpsichord, like the two experimental Vermeer forgeries, was a Vermeer look-alike. Van Meegeren had taken that approach as far as he could, but he had fallen short. The Uncanny Valley had claimed another victim.
It was time to change strategy.
30
DIRK HANNEMA
The Harpsichord saga showed that Bredius, on his own, lacked the power to anoint a painting a masterpiece. But he was not on his own. Fortunately for Van Meegeren, Bredius had the ear of a colleague who was just as prominent, just as enamored of Rembrandt and Vermeer and their fellow titans, and just as sure of his artistic judgment. This was Dirk Hannema, director of Rotterdam’s Boymans Museum.
Hannema and Bredius made an unlikely pair—side by side, the plump old connoisseur and the tall young director looked like the number ten—but they got along well. Hannema was more reserved, Bredius more temperamental, and both were genuine authorities on art. Hannema was forty years younger, but he greatly admired his older colleague. To Bredius’s way of thinking this credential alone testified to Hannema’s merit. But of all the links between the two men, by far the most important was this: Hannema’s pronouncements on art were every bit as erratic as those of Bredius. Van Meegeren never dealt directly with Hannema, but if there had been no Hannema, there would have been no Van Meegeren.
Tall, handsome, aristocratic, Hannema seemed to live only for art. He was born to enormous wealth and throughout his long life retained the air of one set apart from the ordinary run of mortals. He had begun buying paintings as a teenager. By his old age he had put together one of the best collections in Holland—including works by Rembrandt, Goya, Van Dyck, and more modern figures such as Van Gogh, Picasso, and Duchamp. These works he displayed in his home, which was in fact a castle complete with moat, drawbridge, and roaming peacocks.
Hannema was named director of the Boymans Museum in 1921, at the age of twenty-six. Almost at once