The Con Artist

Dan Bibb

"The Forger's Spell," by Edward Dolnick (HarperCollins, $27)

June 2008 Books

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A good thriller leaves you with the unsettling sense that things are not as they appear: The man you think is your husband is actually a serial killer, and your basement door may in fact be a gateway to hell. By that measure, The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick’s history of a subpar painter who bamboozled a war-torn art world with his fake Vermeers, is definitely a thriller. For several days after reading the book, I found myself questioning all that I thought was accepted common knowledge about Old Masters.

The story of Han van Meegeren, the 20th-century Dutch artist who managed to pass off six of his own paintings as Vermeers, has been told before. Authors like John Godley, a.k.a. Lord Kilbracken, and Frederik Kreuger have devoted tomes to the perjurer of paint, and three van Meegeren–inspired films plus two plays and a famous novel, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, already exist. But The Forger’s Spell puts a new spin on things. Dolnick, who won an Edgar—the annual award for superlative achievements in the mystery genre—for his last book, on the 1994 Edvard Munch thefts, accuses his predecessors of nearly always getting the story wrong. Instead of calling his protagonist “the greatest forger who ever lived,” Dolnick asserts van Meegeren’s “true distinction”: “He is perhaps the only forger whose most famous works a layman would immediately identify as a fake.” In fact, van Meegeren was a derivative painter of sentimental portraits who was never respected by his peers. Dolnick’s mission is to explain how this mediocre artist created Christ at Emmaus, which was “the most famous and the most admired Vermeer in all the world” between 1938 and 1945.

The picture, which shows the scene in which the risen Christ breaks bread with his disciples, is the crux of the book. Although the biblical scene is a far cry from the interiors typical of Vermeer, this discrepancy was actually intentional. Van Meegeren partially modeled the forgery on a painting by Caravaggio, hoping that its religious theme and dark shadows would seduce art historians who theorized a connection between the two painters. Van Meegeren created this “missing link” on the canvas of a 17th-century painting, which he scraped clean and painted over. To produce the illusion that the paint itself was three centuries old, he painstakingly invented a mixture that—believe it or not—contained Bakelite, plastic’s first incarnation. Unlike oil paint, which takes decades to dry, van Meegeren’s concoction hardened rapidly. Last but not least, he emulated authentic craquelure by gently bending the painting over his knee and wreaking localized damage in some areas of the canvas.

Van Meegeren then introduced the picture to the Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius, who barely hesitated before passing it on to Dirk Hannema, the director of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, in Rotterdam. The forgery was made-to-order for the two men: Christ at Emmaus demonstrated exactly the expected Caravaggesque influence and had a provenance so hazy it couldn’t be checked. Such a discovery was just the thing to revive Bredius’s reputation, which had been ailing since he authenticated a fake Vermeer years earlier. And it gave Hannema the opportunity to one-up the superior Rijksmuseum by making an enviable acquisition. A gift horse like this, Dolnick argues, couldn’t be looked in the mouth, and neither Bredius nor Hannema dared to, even though skeptics of the painting included the eagle-eyed Duveen clan.

Over the course of his career, van Meegeren made almost $3 million (the equivalent of about $30 million today) selling fake Old Masters to Europe’s leading museums and high-profile collectors, including the Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. The most important contribution of The Forger’s Spell is to situate van Meegeren’s story within the context of World War II, and these parts of the book tend to be more interesting than the sections devoted to the forger himself. The Nazis were, of course, rapacious pillagers of occupied territories. For Göring, art was a particularly high priority—Dolnick even goes so far as to say that the Luftwaffe commander seemed “focused as much on art as on battle.” Although this assertion seems exaggerated, Adolf Hitler and Göring did compete with each other for major acquisitions. The greatest prize, according to Dolnick, would be a major Vermeer. Early in the war, Göring seized Vermeer’s Art of Painting only to have Hitler pull rank on him and claim it for a museum he planned to build in Linz. Göring yearned for a Vermeer of his own and thought he had found one in Christ with the Woman Taken into Adultery, another of van Meegeren’s forgeries.