The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [7]
THE STORY OF virtually every forger follows familiar lines: a talented but unscrupulous artist turns out paintings so like their famous counterparts that no one can tell worthless sham from priceless masterpiece. Van Meegeren’s story doesn’t fit that frame. To try to jam it in is to misrepresent the tale and to rob it of its strangeness.
Today no one who happened unaware upon a Van Meegeren forgery would admire it. A Van Meegeren “Vermeer” next to an actual Vermeer is like a Madame Tussaud waxwork next to a living person. But when Van Meegeren turned from his own work to forging old masters, the critics who had damned him as shallow and insipid hailed his forgeries as superlative, among the greatest paintings in the entire Dutch pantheon. Even in comparison with other works by Vermeer, these newfound paintings stood out as “especially beautiful,” “serene,” and “exalted.” The greatest Vermeer expert of the day singled out one Van Meegeren forgery where “Vermeer” had outdone himself and asked plaintively, “Why was there never again a canvas where he expressed so deeply the stirrings of his soul?”
Today the very works that the greatest connoisseurs of the 1930s and ’40s praised as superior to those of Rembrandt and Vermeer languish in museum storerooms and remote hallways. They seem not beautiful but stiff and clumsy. “After Van Meegeren’s exposure,” one scholar wrote, “it became apparent that his forgeries were grotesquely ugly and unpleasant paintings, altogether dissimilar to Vermeer’s. His success is, retrospectively, literally incredible.”
That turnabout is the great mystery at the heart of the Van Meegeren story, and it is what makes his tale worth telling. Van Meegeren’s best fakes should never have fooled a soul. Instead, they fooled the world.
The real question with Van Meegeren is this: How did the experts get it so wrong? How did they hail as Vermeer’s greatest achievement—supposedly superior to the stunning Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid and all the other masterpieces—paintings that were “grotesquely ugly” and “altogether dissimilar” to the real thing?
It would be one thing if Van Meegeren had produced fakes that nearly replicated authentic works by Vermeer. He might have painted a woman in a quiet room, for instance, but moved a chair this way or that or shifted a map on the wall. We might fall for that sort of tiny variation on a well-worn theme. Here, we would say, is proof of Vermeer’s obsession with achieving a perfectly balanced and harmonious composition.
If art lovers mistook such a painting for the real thing, who could blame them? Anyone might be fooled, just as anyone might mistake one twin for another. But Van Meegeren’s fakes were intentionally different from all known Vermeers, and still they won swooning admiration. When expert after expert, and then enraptured museumgoer after museumgoer, gazes at twisted and misshapen Quasimodo and sees Adonis, then we have a mystery to explore.
5
THE END OF FORGERY?
Forgery is a strange crime. Buy a fake Rolex on the street for ten dollars and a week later it stops running and the hands fall off. Buy a fake Picasso and the fake does its job—delights the eye—precisely as well as the real thing. At least it does so until the owner learns of his folly. Then yesterday’s joy becomes today’s reproach, and the masterpiece that once reigned above the fireplace ends up relegated to a guest bathroom.
But forgers themselves are seldom compelling figures. They tend to be bitter and self-centered—it is bad for the soul when the world shrugs its shoulders at your own work but falls at your feet if you pass yourself off as someone else.
Most accounts of forgers portray them as romantic and misunderstood. With a tiny handful of exceptions, this is a myth, akin to the myth that art thieves look like Thomas Crown. Real-life art thieves are