The Tale of Van Meegeren and His Peculiar "Vermeers"


Ellen Stuttle

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Van Meegeren's [Christ series "Vermeer"] paintings were dreadful, and
still grown men swooned. That's what fascinated me. How did that happen?


Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell, P.S. section, pg. 7



I've inserted "Christ series" above and a number of places in the following passage because Dolnick's remarks don't properly apply to Van Meegeren's early Vermeer forgeries. Those, though not of Vermeer quality, were standard-type forgeries - attempts at imitating Vermeer's known style. The Christ series, on the other hand, were offered as paintings from a hypothesized transitional period in Vermeer's development. They were attempts at faking history as well as art.



The Forger's Spell, pp. 16-17

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.

[....] [W]hen 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 [Christ series] paintings stood out as "especially beautiful," "serene," and "exalted." The greatest Vermeer expert of the day singled out one Van Meegeren forgery [Christ at Emmaus, the first of the series] 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?" [1]

Today [these works] seem not beautiful but stiff and clumsy. "After Van Meegeren's exposure," one scholar wrote, "it became apparent that his [Christ series] forgeries were grotesquely ugly and unpleasant paintings, altogether dissimilar to Vermeer's. His success is, retrospectively, literally incredible." [2]

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. [Not all of it. There were dissenters.]

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 [...] 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. [....]

If art lovers mistook such [paintings] 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 [Christ series] 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.


[1] Dolnick doesn't identify which critics wrote "especially beautiful" and "serene." His references are to works written after the forgery was revealed, one by M. M. van Dantzig in 1947, the other by Sandra Weedenburg in 1988. The description "exalted" and the plaintive question come from a 1938 essay by Abraham Bredius. Bredius was the respected expert who certified Christ at Emmaus as genuine, writing of it, "We have here a - I am inclined to say - the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer."

[2] Mark Jones, ed. Fake? The Art of Deception. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press, 1990.


Ellen
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Van Meegeren Forgeries Link


This mystudios.com page has links to the Van Meegeren Christ series, plus the Young Christ which Van Meegeren painted at his trial in order to prove that he had forged the Christ and the Adulteress bought by Goering. There are also links to several but not all of Van Meegeren's early forgeries.

_____


The Complete Vermeer Works


The linked site, vermeer-foundation.org, has the best and most maneuverable display of Vermeer's works. The 136 images, arranged 24/page (except for the last page), include many close-ups of details. All the images can be clicked on to produce full-screen display.

Ellen
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This is far outside of my area of expertise. But I can speak to the "madness of crowds" that causes experts to embrace forgeries.



The only Vermeer I know is the overly famous "Girl With a Pearl Earring." That said, I was not impressed with the forgeries because they seemed stiff and they lacked detail. The one exception was "Woman Playing Music" which has a mirror behind her. And a little googling reveals that to have been Van Eyck's trick... (The Arnolfini Marriage). So, that is about my limit of perception and understanding in painting.



We get into this too often in numismatics. Recent cases include the (1997-1999) "Black Sea Hoard" forgeries of Slavej Petrov. In fact, two different lots were injected into the markets. After the first was exposed, another came up. "No, no, these are genuine!" I was told. They were not. See the story here: http://www.snible.org/coins/black_sea_hoard.html Perhaps the most curious aspect was the university professor who attempted to use atomic absorption spectrography to prove true what art historians by inspection declared was false.



Those are different from the more recent fakes of 19th and 20th century US coins coming from state-affiliated forgers in China. Some years ago, they came to the USA and bought 19th century machineries and dies. At ANA conventions, educational exhibits have been placed showing not only fake coins in certified holders, but genuine coins in forgeries of certified holders.



These are not isolated cases. The so-called "King of Coins" the 1804 dollars which sell for $6 million are at best $20,000 novodels, "new made" coins from the Mint. Two other series of 1804 dollars are known knock-offs, yet sell for millions, also. Along with them are the totally bogus 1913 Liberty Nickels. We know that they were made by over the Christmas holidays by Samuel W. Brown (http://1913libertynickel.com/), yet, they command world class prices. Most famously, about 1995, Stacks offered both an 1804 Dollar and a 1913 Liberty Nickel at the same auction and were praised and lauded by the numismatic community.



Again, that is not an isolated incident. To celebrate the Centennial of 1876, numismatist Montroville Dickeson made copies of colonial and early federal issues. Well-known today, they are highly sought by some collectors.



Stuttle wrote of the forger's attempt to rewrite history. In numismatics, that would be the infamous "John Ford / Paul Franklin Western Assay Bars." (http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2012/04/forgery-and-fraud-in-numismatics.html) Their material even entered the Smithsonian exhibits. When the forgeries were revealed the Smithsonian shut down its entire US display, threatening to discontinue it entirely, though, in fact, it re-opened after a couple of years of close inspection. Those forgeries were entered into "The Red Book" ( A Guide Book of United States Coins by R.S. Yeoman and Kenneth Bressett), which is easily the single standard reference for all collectors of American coins both federal and related issues. John Ford and Paul Franklin re-wrote history. The story continued even after a "Great Debate" in which US numismatist Michael Hodder (defending Ford) took on classicist Theodore V. Buttrey (condemning) because when Ford passed away, Stack's auctioned off Ford's vast collection in over 20 auctions, the bars going last of all. Not for sale was one bar (now condemned) which appeared in a standard reference of Western and Pioneer coinage and related material by Don Kagin, the only person with a doctorate in numismatics from an American university.


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This is far outside of my area of expertise. But I can speak to the "madness of crowds" that causes experts to embrace forgeries.

[....]

We get into this too often in numismatics. [....] Perhaps the most curious aspect was the university professor who attempted to use atomic absorption spectrography to prove true what art historians by inspection declared was false.

My knowledge of numismatics is close to zero - I know that there is such a subject, that's about it. The problems in detecting forgeries sound similar, however.

Thanks for the post.

I'll be adding some comments from The Forger's Spell about the interplay between connoisseur judgment and scientific detection in identifying art forgeries. But not today.

Meanwhile, altering people that I added a link to Vermeer's complete works in post #2.

Ellen

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The Forger's Spell, pp. 16-17

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. [Not all of it. There were dissenters.]

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 [...] 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. [....]

If art lovers mistook such [paintings] 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 [Christ series] 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.

Yeah, the psychology of it is very fascinating. If I'm remembering correctly, Van Meegeren started out hiring models so as to be very accurate with his visual representations of people and materials, but then, due to the fear of models potentially recognizing themselves in his forgeries, and also due to laziness, he started to paint his "Vermeers" by borrowing from existing images, or by abandoning all visual reference and painting from his imagination. As a result, the people and their clothing look much less real, they don't conform properly to perspective, the lighting looks made-up and inconsistent, and obviously the anatomy is atrocious.

I think that most of the people who thought that the paintings were actual Vermeers -- and that they were his best works -- probably couldn't actually see the differences. There are a lot of people who are quite visually incompetent. They have no sense of proportion or color or anything, yet they're very passionate about giving their opinions of visual art, and often times want very badly to be thought of as connoisseurs. It's fun to watch them fall on their asses. It's like a wine snob being fooled into praising Boone's Farm.

J

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Yeah, the psychology of it is very fascinating. If I'm remembering correctly, Van Meegeren started out hiring models so as to be very accurate with his visual representations of people and materials, but then, due to the fear of models potentially recognizing themselves in his forgeries, and also due to laziness, he started to paint his "Vermeers" by borrowing from existing images, or by abandoning all visual reference and painting from his imagination. As a result, the people and their clothing look much less real, they don't conform properly to perspective, the lighting looks made-up and inconsistent, and obviously the anatomy is atrocious.

The story as I glean it from reading Jonathan Lopez's The Man Who Made Vermeers is much more complicated, and I wouldn't say involved laziness but instead an ingenious idea. I'll go into details eventually.

I think that most of the people who thought that the paintings were actual Vermeers -- and that they were his best works -- probably couldn't actually see the differences. There are a lot of people who are quite visually incompetent. They have no sense of proportion or color or anything, yet they're very passionate about giving their opinions of visual art, and often times want very badly to be thought of as connoisseurs. It's fun to watch them fall on their asses. It's like a wine snob being fooled into praising Boone's Farm.

I'm suspicious that Dolnick overdid it in his estimate of how many people were fooled, and to what extent. Lopez's account is more "sober." Also, Lopez researched many sources which hadn't previously been examined, and he provides information which Dolnick doesn't appear to have known about.

The expert - Abraham Bredius - who certified Christ at Emmaus with the opinion that "We have here a - I am inclined to say the - masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer" doesn't seem to me like someone "visually incompetent." Instead, judging from selections he made which are now in the museum named in his honor, he knew the styles of the Dutch old masters well. And he was the expert who rejected an early Van Meegeren forgery - I think it was The Girl with the Blue Bow. I'll double check later. [* See Edit below.]

Lopez doesn't say much about Bredius, and it seems to me that Lopez's theory of why the Christ series won acceptance (a "Nazi fantasy of Vermeer") wouldn't apply to Bredius and his certification in 1937 of the Emmaus painting, the first in the series. I haven't yet gotten to Dolnick's discussion of Bredius.

I want next to type in Dolnick's description of the invention of Bakelite - the material which Van Meegeren put to use in solving the problem of how to pass the alcohol test used at the time to detect fake old masters.

I think that admirers of Hank Rearden's quest to make Rearden Metal would find the Bakelite story interesting.

Ellen

* EDIT: I don't find an indication that The Girl with a Blue Bow was brought to Bredius for potential certification. The expert who rejected it as not being by Vermeer was Wilhelm von Bode. Bode doesn't seem to have suspected the painting of being contemporary. He just didn't think that it was by Vermeer. A year later Bode was fooled by Van Meegeren's second attempt at forging a Vermeer, The Smiling Girl. Bredius was of the opinion that both of these paintings as well as most other "Vermeer" discoveries of the 1920s were bogus. But then Bredius was taken in, in 1932, by Van Meegeren's first forgery using Bakelite, The Gentleman and Lady at the Spinet.

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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The Invention of "Bakelite"

The Forger's Spell, pp. 38-39

[extra paragraph break added]

Time magazine devoted the cover of its September 22, 1924, issue to a mild-looking, now-forgotten man. His round, bald head, thick eyebrows, and droopy mustache gave him the appearance of a balloon that had been decorated by a child wielding a Magic Marker. Under the man's name, Leo H. Baekeland, Time ran a cryptic caption: "It will not burn. It will not melt."

Leo Baekeland was a Belgian-born scientist who helped invent the modern world. He made his first fortune, in 1899, with a new kind of photographic paper. With $1 million from Kodak in his pocket, Baekeland bought a rambling, turreted mansion on the Hudson River, built a private laboratory on the grounds and set out in search of something else the world didn't know it needed. He began prosaically. The new century saw the birth of the Age of Electricity. Baekeland saw his opportunity not in a better light bulb or a vacuum cleaner or a refrigerator but in a cheaper form of electrical insulation.

The old form of insulation was shellac, named because it was made from the shell of the lac beetle. To make a pound of shellac took six months and fifteen thousand beetles. Baekeland set to work to find a synthetic alternative.

Early on he pinned his hopes on a recipe that combined a sickly-sweet-smelling liquid, phenol, and a pungent, caustic liquid called Formalin, made from formaldehyde. For five years Baekeland tried again and again to cook phenol and Formalin together at high pressure in an oven he had designed. He produced only a series of batches of melted goo. And then one day in 1907, he opened the lid of his Bakelizer oven and found what today we would immediately recognize as a piece of plastic.

No such easy-to-shape, hard-to-damage ("it will not burn, it will not melt") substance had ever existed. Man had fashioned something unknown in nature. Almost at once it became clear that this new substance had endless uses. By the 1920s, the era of Art Deco, the whole world seemed to be fashioned from the astonishing material that Baekeland dubbed "Bakelite." [....]

Time could barely stop gushing. Bakelite was a miracle substance, its writer proclaimed, "born of fire and mystery," and destined to spread without limit. Within a few years, "from the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush, until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray, and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses will be made of this material of a thousand purposes."

Han Van Meegeren devised use 1001.

Ellen

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[Van Meegeren] knew precisely how to seize on the zeitgeist and turn it to his own

ends; to match what people wanted to hear with what he wanted them to believe.

Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers, pg. 10

In May 29, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was arrested on a charge of collaborating with the Nazi regime during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Specifically, Van Meegeren was charged with selling a Dutch art treasure, a painting by Vermeer, to Hermann Goering. The painting, Christ with the Adulteress (or the longer title, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery), had been found in Goering's collection, and its sale to Goering had been traced to Van Meegeren and others.

In his defense, Van Meegeren made the international-headlines'-catching announcement that the painting was a forgery. "I did it," Van Meegeren said. He proceeded to explain that a lifetime of feeling unappreciated by art critics for his own work had driven him to forge Vermeers, thus taking vengeance on the connoisseurs who had under-rated him. The sale to Goering, similarly, had been made in mockery of the Nazis.

Van Meegeren was on the way to becoming a folk hero.

Some negative evidence against his show of anti-Nazi sentiment came to light - for instance, a book of his drawings inscribed "To my beloved Führer in grateful tribute, from H. van Meegeren, Laren, North Holland, 1942" was found in the ruins of Hitter's Reichschancellery. With characteristic ability to weave a fiction, Van Meegeren said that several signed copies of his book had been sold and that the words above and below his name had been added by someone wanting to make a gift to Hitler.

Many believed the story - and believed Van Meegeren's account of why he'd painted the Christ series which he sold as Vermeers.

In fact, Van Meegeren's career as a forger was already under way by 1922, when he was in his early 30s. (He was born October 10, 1889.) In fact, he wasn't antifascist. Although he never became a member of the Dutch Nazi Party, he formed reactionary views and sympathies for Hitler as far back as the late 1920s.

Nor had he sold the painting to Goering in mockery of the Nazis. Art dealer confederates had arranged the sale, against Van Meegeren's better judgment, given the possibility of the sale being traced and collaborationist charges being leveled.

Nor was he altogether that unsuccessful as an artist in his own right. He was sought after as a portrait painter by the wealthy families of Den Haag, and his non-portrait work had a modicum of success.

As a forger, however, he became maybe the wealthiest artist of his time, amassing tens of millions by today's monetary values. Especially lucrative were the "Vermeer" forgeries which today seem entirely improbable.

Possibly Van Meegeren's greatest talent is well expressed by the caption quote of this post:

"He knew precisely how to seize on the zeitgeist and turn it to his own ends; to match what people wanted to hear with what he wanted them to believe."

Ellen

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Why Vermeer?

At his trial, Van Meegeren said that he'd focused his forging efforts on Vermeer because Vermeer was "one of the five greatest artists who ever lived" and thus provided a standard of excellence against which to display artistic prowess. (Van Meegeren added that his other choices for his top-five list were Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Frans Hals.)

Jonathan Lopez suggests a less glamorous reason for the emphasis on Vermeer:

The Man Who Made Vermeers, pp. 52-54

[L]ike virtually everything else Van Meegeren ever said, his comments on [his rationale] have to be taken with a grain of salt: for it wasn't a list of art history's top stars that led him to his preferred object of emulation. On the contrary, there were practical, business-minded factors of supply and demand that made Vermeer an especially tempting target for forgers and swindlers, as Vermeer was then an art-historical enigma waiting to have the blank spots in his career filled in.

[Following Vermeer's death in 1675, his work was dispersed and remained mostly unknown until it piqued the curiosity and enthusiasm of a French writer named Théophile Thoré.] [D]uring the latter half of the nineteenth century, [Vermeer emerged] as one of the art world's biggest celebrities. By Van Meegeren's day, Vermeer's works commanded prices on par with the very finest masterpieces of Rembrandt, [and] as Vermeer's reputation grew, people naturally began to wonder what else might be waiting to be discovered. [....]

As the great German art expert Max Friedländer once put it, art dealers of the 1920s lulled themselves to sleep at night dreaming of Vermeer. Discovering a picture - any picture - that might be accepted as a Vermeer was the interwar artworld's equivalent of the quest for the Holy Grail. Dealers all across Europe pestered [art experts] to attribute a multitude of minor seventeenth-century paintings to Vermeer - portraits, landscapes, still lifes, interiors, religious scenes, whatever they could find. [....] Although trying to attribute paintings by lesser hands to great painters was a standard art dealer's gambit, in the case of Vermeer, it was actually quite difficult to pull off. Whereas Rembrandt, for example, had a workshop full of assistants whose paintings could sometimes be taken for the master's, Vermeer, who inspired no known school of disciples, did not. Credible near-Vermeers were not easily found, leaving the fonder hopes of many a treasure hunter to languish unfulfilled.

Turning this atmosphere of wishful thinking to their advantage, some of the picture trade's more creative operators soon enlisted the help of forgers to furnish the market with all the works that Vermeer didn't paint but that collectors still hoped he had.

Van Meegeren got his start as a forger in the 1920s through his connection with "some of the picture trade's more creative operators," including a paint manufacturer, Theodore Ward, who, along with having unscrupulous dealers among his contacts, was helpful with technical aspects of art forgery.

(to be continued)

Ellen

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Thanks, Ellen! My interjection of an aside from numismatics was intended only to highlight the fact these cases show surprising similarities. A friend of mine who restored a Mustang told me about having to validate the parts she bought, there being no shortage of fake "original equipment." Apparently, no one stands out as a master forger of classic Mustang parts, but perhaps we do not know that market well enough.

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  • 3 weeks later...
I've inserted "Christ series" above and a number of places in the following passage because ...

Ellen

On a different project entirely, at the library today, I ran into a book of Vermeers. I found the Christs. Got it. Thanks... Thanks also for your hard work.

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Michael,

Thanks for the thanks.

If you notice this post next time you're looking at OL, what's the title of the book you found at the library?

I have lots more for this thread, but I want to wait to return to it until I've provided some material about Rand's views on literary history (this thread) which I want to connect to the Van Meegeren tale.

Ellen

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