The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [97]
Michel van de Laar, the chief restorer at the Rijksmuseum today, laments that we will never know. Despite Luitwieler’s skill, says Van de Laar, he may well have been fooled.*Van de Laar has studied four of Van Meegeren’s forgeries (but not Emmaus). Like a detective who comes to admire a thief ’s careful planning, he speaks of Van Meegeren with the respect of one professional for another. The hallmark of Van Meegeren fakes, Van de Laar notes wryly, is that they were “ripe for the restorer.” The scrapes and tears and grime cried out for repair and cleaning, that is, but the cries never seemed histrionic. Luitwieler, presumably noticing nothing amiss, busied himself with his accustomed tasks.
Van Meegeren had worked hard to earn that inattention. His care in choosing and then preparing a genuine seventeenth-century canvas, his success in crafting paints that would emerge from the oven lush and bright, his knack for inducing authentic-looking cracks in a painting’s surface, all served to disarm and distract his would-be investigators. (Neither Luitwieler nor anyone else ever subjected Emmaus to a single scientific test until after Van Meegeren’s arrest, in 1945.) When it came to the technical side of forgery, says Van de Laar, Van Meegeren displayed something close to genius.
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THE UNVEILING
Hannema presented Christ at Emmaus to the world on June 25, 1938. He had gathered 450 Dutch paintings for an exhibition entitled “Masterpieces of Four Centuries, 1400–1800.” Christ at Emmaus was the centerpiece of the show, the star of stars.
It hung nearly alone in a large room, not on an ordinary wall with the other paintings but on a specially built, brocaded backdrop that rose halfway from floor to ceiling. In its ornate gilt frame, in splendid isolation on its special wall, huge in its own right and magnified in scale by the backdrop (which had its own gleaming frame), the newest Vermeer shouted out its uniqueness.
On opening night, many in the crowd wore formal dress. Everyone was there—directors from other museums, Holland’s leading politicians, art critics, journalists. “I can still see the painting that evening,” one eyewitness recalled half a century later, “dazzling in the light. Bredius had stepped forward and unveiled it with a magnificent gesture. Everyone was stunned, gasping with admiration.”
The cover of Hannema’s catalog showed only a single painting, Emmaus. Inside, the first illustration depicted Emmaus once again. Beneath the painting a proud caption noted simply, “Johannes Vermeer—Museum Boymans, Rotterdam.” The next page was filled entirely with a detail of Jesus, eyes downcast, bread (and pointillé) before him, right hand raised in blessing. “Johannes Vermeer,” the caption read. On the next page, again given over entirely to Emmaus, a close-up of the servant girl’s face. “Johannes Vermeer.” Next page, another Emmaus close-up, this time the head of the disciple at Christ’s left. “Johannes Vermeer.”
Finally, on the fifth page of illustrations, another artist managed to break Vermeer’s monopoly. This was Rembrandt, relegated to half a page.
Time magazine’s art critic made his way through the jostling crowd in the Boymans and hurried to Emmaus, “the greatest attraction of all.” The painting had not only its artistic merits to set it apart, Time noted, but its story. For art lovers, Emmaus “had as much novelty as if it were dated 1938, for a year ago it was not known to exist.”
Art lovers knew, too, the astounding price that Emmaus had commanded. That price signaled desirability and magnificence, and onlookers lost their bearings as they would in any brush with celebrity. “Dutch visitors, who like to look at works of art in absolute silence, complained that the parquet flooring in the room where Christ at Emmaus is hung was noisy,” wrote Time. “Carpets were immediately provided and religious silence prevailed.”
VAN MEEGEREN