The New Criterion

Jonathan Lopez
The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing
the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren.
Harcourt, 352 pages, $26

Does the world need another book on Han van Meegeren, or, for that matter, on Johannes Vermeer, the great Dutch seventeenth-century artist whom van Meegeren so assiduously forged during the 1930s and ’40s? Probably not, but the truth is that these two compatriots—separated by three centuries—will continue to cast their spell on future generations: the artist through the mystery of his life and the magical allure of his paintings, and the forger through the sheer audacity of his deception.

The van Meegeren saga has become, over the last fifty years of re-telling, a staple of popular culture: how a painter of middling talent and success undertook to hoodwink virtually the entire art-world establishment by producing not copies, not even derivations, but true inventions in the style of Vermeer. They were pictures—depicting elaborate Biblical subjects—for which there were no known original prototypes but which critics and scholars readily accepted as genuine because it was firmly believed by those same experts that Vermeer should have painted them. In effect, the forger “rediscovered” the paintings whose existence art-historians had already imagined and that were simply thought to have gone missing.

The first of these concoctions, The Supper in Emmaus, was such a resounding success that the Bojimans van Beuningen Museum of Rotterdam immediately acquired it with great fanfare in 1937. Van Meegeren went on to create five more paintings in this vein, although it is clear he progressively lavished less and less technical attention and inventive energy on them. No matter: one (Jesus Among the Doctors) was snapped up in 1943 by the Rijksmuseum of Amsterdam to keep it out of the clutches of the occupying Germans. In fact, just a year before, the über-collector Hermann Göring had spirited away to his Carinhall estate The Woman Taken in Adultery. Van Meegeren’s involvement with this sale earned him, after the war, an indictment for collaborating with the enemy. And it was at this juncture that the forger’s story takes on a truly mythical dimension. In his defense and with an air of supreme braggadocio, van Meegeren produced, under the watchful eyes of his captors, his last forged Vermeer (The Washing of the Feet). Voilà! … disbelief, chagrin, outrage, instant fame, and instant apotheosis—from wily and corrupt collaborator to national hero, not only for having duped those pompous art-world critics but for having cheated the hated Reichsmarschall.

Convicted for forgery at his 1947 trial and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, van Meegeren, aged fifty-eight, succumbed to heart failure in December of that year and, with characteristic flourish, exited the scene. Thus he was never to serve a day behind bars, a fact that has since been invariably viewed as justice mercifully accomplished.

Jonathan Lopez does not quite see it that way. In his meticulously researched and amply documented account of van Meegeren’s career, the author of this most complete biography to date sets out to expose (“unvarnish” as he puts it in the sub-title) the colorful forger in a way that runs counter to the established mythology—no longer the picaresque adversary of the art establishment and the cunning operator who subverted, in his own way, the despised Nazi occupation.

Picking up the van Meegeren story from a much earlier date than the famous “Biblical” paintings of the 1930s and ’40s, Lopez identifies a number of Vermeer forgeries that appeared more than a decade earlier, attributing these to him without hesitation. Created with an iconography much closer to the known and accepted work of the Delft artist, these paintings eventually found their way to distinguished American collections through the highly regarded firms of Duveen and Hanns Schaeffer. Another, The Girl in the Red Hat, passed, one might say with flying colors, through the respected Cassirer Gallery of Berlin to the collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1931. If van Meegeren was indeed the hand behind these deceptions, then, Lopez argues, his detour into forgery was hardly a late, splenetic fling of inspired fantasy, but a life-long, carefully plotted pursuit of profit and subterfuge.

Although the author has marshaled an impressive array of circumstantial evidence in support of this thesis, the fact remains that van Meegeren had enjoyed a reasonably successful career as a portraitist and commercial artist until he retired to the south of France in the late 1930s to devote himself full-time to Vermeer. He himself never mentioned the “early” paintings in his various post-war depositions, and they are absent from the careful and comprehensive study of van Meegeren’s works published in 1949 by Paul Coremans, the respected Director of the Institut Royale du Patrimoine Artistique in Brussels. Ironically, if these forgeries had, indeed, been executed by van Meegeren as Lopez claims, they were to prove by far his most successful, surviving critical scrutiny well into the late 1950s; two hung in Washington’s National Gallery and the other in a well-known upstate New York private collection. The Thyssen painting’s attribution to Vermeer was similarly long-lived.

Even though Lopez’s biography falls short in its goal of proving van Meegeren to have been a dedicated and sinister art-world trickster from his youth, it does shed fascinating light on the political and social milieu in which he moved during the 1920s and ’30s. In Holland, as elsewhere in Europe, the erosion of established order, greatly accelerated by the catastrophe of the Great War as well as the first dramatic successes of international Marxism, engendered strongly nationalistic, reactionary, even religious sentiments among the bourgeoisie. There can be little doubt that van Meegeren, in his published writings, political sympathies, and friendships—and even in his art—reveals himself as an arch-conservative. Van Meegeren’s involvement with the stridently right-wing periodical De Kemphaan (The Fighting Cock) is recounted here for the first time in detail, and it adds an important dimension to the forger’s biography—yet that fact alone is hardly sufficient evidence for viewing this talented, high-strung, and impossibly self-absorbed eccentric as a crypto-Nazi.

A decided merit of The Man Who Made Vermeers is the accurate account it gives of the technical means used by van Meegeren in his craft. Literally re-inventing in his studio the phenolformaldehyde resin patented in 1904 as Bakelite, the forger was able to create painted surfaces that not only appeared to be antique but also possessed the required resistance to solvents typical of genuine older oil paintings. This is but one of a wealth of other information that, together with an exhaustive bibliography, make this biography a rich trove of reference not only for van Meegeren, but also for the art world between the wars and the forces that shaped opinions and destinies during that troubled period. Whether the forger emerges from such close scrutiny a decidedly different—and far darker—historical figure remains uncertain.