The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [9]
In the case of the Olympics or the Tour de France, every would-be champion has to run a gantlet of scientific tests. But when a painting with a giant price comes up for sale, there is no clamor for testing. During his years as director of the Met, Hoving says, there was never a time, no matter how big the purchase under debate, when the museum’s trustees insisted that they would raise the money to buy a painting only after it had been thoroughly tested scientifically. “Never!” Hoving cries out indignantly. “Nor should they. They’re a fucking bunch of lawyers. What the hell do they know?”
Hoving spits out the name of one trustee, a prominent investment banker, and makes a face like he has swallowed spoiled milk. “I want to ask [the banker] how to tell if a picture is right? Give me a break. If those guys want to make a fifty-million-dollar purchase, they hire people like me.”
They hire, in other words, connoisseurs with deep stores of experience, intuition, and savvy. So it has always been, in the world of art. When an exciting painting comes along, who would be the advocates for playing down the connoisseurs’ role and beefing up the scientists’? Not the dealers—if a dealer has a buyer lined up, to test it is to ask for trouble. Not the art experts who vouched for the painting—they have reputations to uphold, faith in the “eye” they have spent years training, and, quite likely, no patience or interest in esoteric technical findings.
And not the buyer. One might think that a buyer would take every precaution before spending a fortune, but it rarely happens. The buyer has fallen in love. He wants his painting to be authentic. Disillusioned spouses hire detectives to snoop on their partners only after their marriages have gone bad. No smitten young lover hires a spy in the early days, when life is still champagne and candlelight.
THE FORGER, THEN, is out to fool a person, not a machine. He does so by making the buyer see what he wants him to see.* A forgery is a performance, and a forger is in many ways a magician.
By the time a magician announces that he is ready to perform his next trick, the trick is already over. “Please give my beautiful assistant a round of applause,” he tells the audience. “And, Nancy, before you climb inside the box on this table, would you please touch the edge of this saw with your finger, and tell us if that blade is sharp enough to cut through a body.”
But this is all window dressing. No one is going to be sawed in half. The real trick took place weeks before, in a carpentry shop, where craftsmen fashioned a box that would give a contortionist like Nancy room to pull her legs up close to her body, safely out of the saw’s path.
Half a dozen years before Hermann Goering ever set eyes on Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, Han van Meegeren had already crafted the illusion that would one day befuddle the Reich Marshal. Van Meegeren had designed it without any thought of Goering, but he had spent years of his life pondering his illusion, and its presentation, in every detail.
6
FORGERY 101
A forger can hope that no scientists will examine his fakes, but he cannot take that for granted. For a forger who specializes in old masters, the first technical challenge is to simulate age. How can he give something that is in fact three months old the look and feel of a work made three centuries ago?
Start with drawings, which present many of the challenges posed by paintings but in a less daunting form. A forger might test his skills on drawings before he turns to oils, as a thief might hold up gas stations before tackling banks. First you need paper. You have to get it right because someone could call in the scientists, who can date anything made from a source that was once alive (such as a tree).
This part is easy. Christopher Wright, a distinguished Vermeer scholar and a man no one has ever accused of larceny, leaps up to demonstrate. Rummaging around the bookshelves in his London flat, which sag beneath thousands of tomes