It’s a tale that made Dutch painter Han van Meegeren legendary worldwide when it broke at the end of World War II: a lifetime of disappointment drove him to forge Vermeers, one of which he sold to Hermann Goering, building a mockery of the Nazis. And it’s a tale that’s been believed ever since. Too terrible it just isn’t right.
Jonathan Lopez has done what no additional writer could–tracking down primary sources in four countries and five languages to tell for the first time the real tale of the world’s most legendary forger. Neither unappreciated artist nor antifascist hero, Van Meegeren emerges in The Man Who Made Vermeers as an ingenious, dyed-in-the-wool crook–a talented Mr. Ripley armed with a paintbrush, who worked virtually his entire adult life building and selling fake Ancient Masters. Drawing upon wide interviews with descendents of Van Meegeren’s partners in crime, Lopez also explores the networks of illicit commerce that operated across Europe between the wars. Not only was Van Meegeren a key player in that high-stakes game during the 1920s, landing fakes with powerful dealers and legendary collectors such as Andrew Mellon (including two pseudo-Vermeers that Mellon donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), but the forger and his associates later offered a case study in wartime opportunism as they cashed in on the Nazi occupation.
Jonathan Lopez has drawn on never-before-seen documents from dozens of archives to write a revelatory new biography of the world’s most legendary forger. Neither unappreciated artist nor antifascist hero, van Meegeren emerges as an ingenious, dyed- in-the-wool crook–a talented Mr. Ripley armed with a paintbrush. Lopez explores a network of illicit commerce that operated across Europe: Not only was van Meegeren a key player in that high-stakes game in the 1920s and ’30s, landing fakes with legendary collectors such as Andrew Mellon, but he and his associates later cashed in on the Nazi occupation. The Man Who Made Vermeers is a long-overdue unvarnishing of van Meegeren’s legend and a deliciously detailed tale of deceit in the art world.
A Q&A with Jonathan Lopez, Leader of The Man Who Made Vermeers
Q: It seems incredible that Van Meegeren was able to forge a whole Vermeer oeuvre. How did he get away with it?
A: Supply and demand played an vital role. Vermeers are extremely rare–only thirty-six are known to exist–and a lot of wealthy collectors wanted to get hold of one.
Q: Did real Vermeers turn up on the market in addition to the fakes in persons days?
A: Sure. The appearance of the occasional gem is what kept everyone searching for more. One of Vermeer’s best pictures, The Girl with the Red Hat, for instance, was learned in 1925 in a private collection in Paris. It was the last genuine Vermeer ever establish. Andrew Mellon bought it and later donated it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it remains on view to this day. Mellon was a very generous man.
Q: Didn’t Mellon also buy a fake Vermeer?
A: Really, he bought two: the first in 1926; the second, in 1927. He never realized they were phonies. He showed them in his home, right next to the The Girl with the Red Hat, and gave them to the National Gallery along with the rest of his collection. Mellon’s two fakes hung at the National Gallery as genuine Vermeers until the late 1950s, when compound tests showed them to be made from modern paint. They’re kept in storage now. Both of them were made by Han van Meegeren–as is revealed in The Man Who Made Vermeers.
Q: Who was the “brains” of the operation?
A: The man at the center of the plot was an English art collector named Theodore Ward, who was a close friend of Van Meegeren’s. Ward considered himself a right connoisseur of painting and resented wealthier collectors who could afford whatever they wanted but lacked a deep knowledge of art. He got his revenge with the Mellon fakes. It would appear, though, that Ward was slightly mad. He decorated the parlor of his London home to look exactly like a Vermeer interior. There’s a photo of it in the book, along with a very nice portrait of Ward by Van Meegeren, in which Ward is depicted wearing a red velvet smoking jacket, cigar in hand. He looks immensely pleased with himself.
Q: Van Meegeren never confessed to painting the Mellon Vermeers, but he did admit to painting additional fakes, including a sham Vermeer that he sold to Hermann Goering. Why would he hide one part of his career, but flaunt another?
A: It has to do with the circumstances of Van Meegeren’s confession. The Dutch government arrested Van Meegeren as a Nazi collaborator at the end of World War II, charging that he had sold a priceless Vermeer to Goering, the number two man in the Nazi hierarchy after Hitler. When Van Meegeren admitted that he himself had painted Goering’s masterpiece, it naturally made him reasonably well loved with the all-purpose public–and he played it for all it was worth. He claimed to be a misunderstood genius who had turned to forgery only late in life to revenge himself on the critics who had scorned him early in his artistic career. He only admitted forging the few works that the authorities already knew to be connected to him through the straw men who had brought the pictures to market. There were rumors–even then–that Van Meegeren was really a lifelong crook, but persons leads were never investigated. I reflect no one wanted to spoil such an appealing tale–the small Dutchman who outwitted Goering.
Q: Was there anything else Van Meegeren was hiding?
A: Yes. Van Meegeren really was a Nazi collaborator. During the occupation, Van Meegeren painted propagandistic artworks (under his own name) for the German-installed puppet government of the Netherlands, gave large sums of money to Nazi causes, and even sent a polite note to the Führer in Berlin, as a token of his admiration. Remarkably, Van Meegeren’s interest in Nazism really dated back to a period long before the occupation. As early as 1928, five years before Hitler assumed power as chancellor of Germany, Van Meegeren could be establish parroting selections from Mein Kampf. The reality is that fleecing Hermann Goering was just an ordinary business transaction, not a political statement. Van Meegeren truly believed in the fascist dream. After the war, that was a huge problem.
Q: How did Van Meegeren’s fascist sympathies play into the types of “Vermeers” he painted?
A: Well, forgeries regularly reflect the tastes and attitudes of their own time just as much as persons of the period they attempt to imitate. Mellon’s fake Vermeers, for instance, fervently resemble the society portraits that Van Meegeren painted under his own name during the 1920s. Back in Mellon’s day, nobody noticed this anachronism because people, in all-purpose, respond nearly instinctively to the fundamentals that seem familiar and comprehensible in an artwork, even one presumed to be centuries ancient. It’s part of what makes fakes so seductive. But, by the mid-1930s, Van Meegeren was no longer painting pictures of pretty Dutch society girls. He had become deeply interested in Nazi visual culture, in particular, so-called Volkgeist imagery, a kind of propaganda art which attempted to represent the pure spirit of the Aryan race. Van Meegeren’s later Vermeers are essentially Volksgeist images open in the guise of 17th century paintings, an art-past hoax that changed the past to suit Van Meegeren’s twisted view of the present. Today, people look at Van Meegeren’s later Vermeer forgeries and marvel how one on planet anyone could ever have flawed them for the real thing. But they are “Vermeers” born of the Nazi era, and we should be thankful that they seem incoherent to us today, because it shows how far we have travelled from the mood and preoccupations of that moment. It’s no coincidence that Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann was a huge fan of the “Vermeers” that Van Meegeren pumped out during the late 1930s and early 40s. They gave him the illusion of seeing his own aesthetics projected back into history. It was a kind of sinister narcissism, really.
Q: Do you reflect an art hoax of such proportions could take place today?
A: In the annals of forgery, Van Meegeren is unique for the way he bent history to his will. He had an thought about the past, about the essential spirit of the Dutch people, and, with his fake Vermeers, he made the visual evidence needed to “prove” his point. There’s never been anything else reasonably like it, and hopefully there never will be again. The entire thought behind Van Meegeren’s project was a product of his era, the fascist era of European history. That said, though, ordinary forgery–the kind done for pure profit–continues unabated. There’s a family tree in England that was arrested recently. They had been building and marketing fake Gauguin sculptures for decades. They were reasonably clever about it–studied Gauguin’s style and life history, made sham documents to fake the ownership history of the individual pieces. It’s really not an uncommon tale. Forgery is a huge business. Permanently has been; permanently will be.
Q: Do you reflect Van Meegeren would have been pleased by the appearance of not one but two biographies of him this year? How are the two books different?
A: Oh, he would have been tickled! He loved attention more than just about anything in the world, and I’m sure, wherever he is right now, he’s smiling. My guess, though, is that Van Meegeren would probably find the additional fellow’s book a bit more satisfying, because it’s closer to the storyline that Van Meegeren himself made for his life and career back in 1945. Personally, I don’t judge that Van Meegeren cast any kind of “spell” on people, nor do I reflect that the collectors and dealers that Van Meegeren duped were automatically foolish–Andrew Mellon, for instance, was by no means a foolish man. The additional book repeats a lot of Van Meegeren’s self-serving mythology. My book doesn’t do that. It is about the point past circumstances that allowed the Vermeer swindles to occur. It’s steeped in the intimate details of the history of the art market, the history of the Netherlands, and the history of Van Meegeren’s career as it really happened. And I reflect that kind of depth of involvement with my theme matter shows through in my conclusions. I don’t present Van Meegeren as a man in isolation, but as a product of his times and of the sordid milieu in which he operated. The central issue the additional book misses is that Van Meegeren was not a lone gunman. It takes a loosely coordinated web of self-interested, morally compromised individuals to push a second-rate product into the market as though it were a masterpiece. That sort of thing still goes on today, and not just in the art world, but in every conceivable meadow of endeavor.
A thorough history of the notable and extended art forgery career of Han van Meegeren. While it seems the basic facts surrounding Mr. Van Meegeren’s blatant and many frauds are now known, I did not find the prose style of Jonathan Lopez in the retelling of this particular tale in any way exceptional.
I also reflect the leader shows a rather unsympathetic (and, to my mind, unwarranted) attitude towards The Netherlands in terms of the immediate post-war period and that tiny country’s uneven treatment of its German collaborators.
If you have a lively interest in the criminal forgery of European artworks or, more specifically, fake Vermeers –this book would be a reasonable buy.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The bored prose of the leader deadened the lively theme of art forgery in the Nazi era. What a missed opportunity. It reads like high school term paper. This is diabolical stuff so use it.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The book arrived in the condition that it was advertised, and as punctually as it could possibly been.
Thank you.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A excellent book. The illustrations are brilliant and help to made the tale clear. The book is a small long and complex. I supect the tale could have been told in a book half the size of this one.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This is a really excellent book, but I was disappointed that there are no color plates. Also, even though there are a lot of black & white reproductions and really appealing past photos, the printing quality is not especially excellent. This is a bring shame on, because the leader spends a lot of time discussing paintings and also past events depicted in the photos. I also read the additional book on Van Meegeren that came out this year, which really sucked, especially in comparison to this one, but it did at least include color photos. It seems to me like the publishers got it backwards: the book by the guy who doesn’t know anything has color reproductions, but the one by the guy who really understands the theme has only b&w. Anyway, like I said, this book is very excellent and contains a really insane amount of research, although the leader doesn’t automatically hit you over the head with it, which is nice. One additional tiny criticism: sometimes I reflect the leader gets a small carried away with his vocabulary, and I mention this because this is his first book and he might want to reflect about this. He regularly uses huge words when tiny ones would work just as well, and some words I reflect he made up – like when he refers to the Nazi “kleptocracy.” I have no thought what that means.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5