[MSN] Frank Wynne tells the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch artist whose 'Vermeer' made him a folk hero

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The forger who fooled the world


(Filed: 05/08/2006)



Frank Wynne tells the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch
artist whose ‘Vermeer' made him a folk hero

I've always loved a forger. It's difficult not to feel a surge of joy at the
thought of an eminent critic waxing lyrical over the glories of a
"17th-century masterpiece" on which the paint is barely dry. If the pinnacle
of Western art is arguably Leonardo da Vinci, his shadow self in the
pantheon of forgers is Han van Meegeren.

 
Han van Meegeren's The last supper (1940-1941) 

In May 1945, shortly after the liberation of Holland, two officers arrived
at the studio of van Meegeren, then just a little-known Dutch painter and
art dealer. The officers, from the Allied Art Commission, were responsible
for repatriating works of art looted by the Nazis. They had come about a
painting discovered among the collection of Hermann Göring: a hitherto
unknown canvas by the great Johannes Vermeer, entitled The Supper at Emmaus.

Since the Nazis had kept detailed records, it had been easy to trace the
sale of the painting back to van Meegeren. Now, they wanted only the name of
the original owner so that they might return his priceless masterpiece. When
van Meegeren refused to name the owner, they arrested him and charged him
with treason. If found guilty, he faced the death penalty.

The artist was entirely innocent of the charges against him, a fact he could
easily have proved. But in doing so, he would have to confess to a series of
crimes which he had plotted for decades and which, in five short years had
earned him the equivalent of $60 million. Han van Meegeren was a forger.

He loathed modern art - he thought it childish and decadent, a passing fad
for ugliness which would soon fade. For years he had eked out a living
painting gloomy portraits of rich patrons in a faux-Rembrandt style and had
winced as he heard his work ridiculed by his peers. A prominent critic
reviewing van Meegeren's second solo exhibition wrote, "A gifted technician
who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school, he has
every virtue except originality."

The time had come, van Meegeren felt, to revenge himself on his critics. He
devised a plan to paint a perfect Vermeer - neither a copy, nor a pastiche,
but an original work - and, when it had been authenticated by leading art
experts, acquired by a major museum, exhibited and acclaimed, he would
announce his hoax to the world.

His first step was concocting an ingenious mixture of pigments that "would
pass the five tests which any genuine 17th-century painting must pass". Now
he had only to paint a masterpiece.

The Supper at Emmaus was unlike any acknowledged Vermeer. Van Meegeren, true
to his perversely moral scheme, painted it in his own style, adding only
subtle allusions to works by the Dutch master, before signing it with the
requisite flourish. He had it submitted to Abraham Bredius, the most eminent
authority on Dutch baroque art of his day, and the critic took the bait.

   
Writing in the Burlington magazine, Bredius opined: "It is a wonderful
moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly
confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master
 And what a
picture! We have here a - I am inclined to say the - masterpiece of Johannes
Vermeer of Delft."

Suddenly the world was at van Meegeren's feet. The Supper at Emmaus was
bought by the prestigious Boijmans Gallery in Rotterdam for the equivalent
of $6 million. More importantly for van Meegeren, it was advertised as the
centrepiece, the crowning glory of the gallery's exhibition, 400 Years of
European Art.

During the exhibition, van Meegeren would loudly proclaim the painting a
forgery, a crude pastiche, and listen as the finest minds of his generation
persuaded him that his painting was a genuine Vermeer. His triumph was now
complete. He had only to do what he had promised himself: to stand up and
claim the work for himself, thereby making fools of his critics. Instead,
within a month, he was working on a new forgery.

In less than six years, van Meegeren would paint a further six "Vermeers",
earning the equivalent of $60 million. With money, came vice - he revelled
in fine champagne, became addicted to morphine and was compulsively
unfaithful to his wife.

He bought dozens of houses and hotels, but even then he could not exhaust
his wealth, so he hid hundreds of thousands of guilders in gardens, heating
ducts and under the floorboards of his many properties. Often he would
forget where he had hidden the money, and 30 years after his death, the
Dutch were still turning up cashboxes stuffed with pre-war notes.

As van Meegeren's addictions to alcohol and morphine took hold, and the
standard of his forgeries plummeted, still experts accepted them as genuine.
He discovered that, regardless of how incompetent his painting, how crude
his anatomy, how uncertain the provenance, the most erudite Vermeer critics
were prepared to sanctify his work. His one mistake had been to allow one of
his paintings to fall into enemy hands.

No expert eye discovered van Meegeren's forgery. He was unmasked only
because, after six weeks in prison, he cracked: "‘Fools!" he roared at his
jailers. "You think I sold a priceless Vermeer to Göring? There was no
Vermeer - I painted it myself."

There was one thing van Meegeren had not counted on: no one believed his
confession. It was one of the officers who naively suggested that if van
Meegeren had painted Göring's Vermeer, he could paint a copy from memory.
Van Meegeren arrogantly refused. "To paint a copy is no proof of artistic
talent. In all my career I have never painted a copy! But I shall paint you
a new Vermeer. I shall paint you a masterpiece."

And so, surrounded by reporters and court-appointed witnesses, and supplied
with liberal quantities of alcohol and morphine, he worked for six weeks
painting one final "Vermeer", in a desperate attempt to prove himself
guilty.

Having been denounced by the press as a traitor, a "Dutch Nazi artist", van
Meegeren was now a folk hero - the man who had swindled Göring. The
Reichsmarschall was told that his beloved Vermeer was a forgery while
awaiting execution in Nuremberg. According to a contemporary account:
"[Göring] looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil
in the world."

In the wake of his confession and the scandal it caused, van Meegeren truly
knew the fame he had craved. The trial, when it came, was a three-ring
circus. Experts tripped over each other to exculpate themselves. Van
Meegeren - more than the prosecuting counsel - was determined that he should
be found guilty of committing these "masterpieces", but even now, experts
conspired against him, arguing that at least one of his forgeries might be
genuine.

In the end, however, van Meegeren got his wish: on November 12, 1947 he was
found guilty of obtaining money by deception and sentenced to one year's
imprisonment.

But he would never serve a day of his sentence. While prosecution and
defence wrangled to secure a full public pardon from the Queen, the forger -
long a consummate hypochondriac - finally succumbed to angina. He was
hospitalised on the day before he was scheduled to serve his sentence and
died some weeks later.

Han van Meegeren's greatest gift to the art world is doubt. If forgers
throughout the ages have taught us anything, it is to re-examine why we love
what we love, to overcome our obsession with simple authenticity and
appreciate the work for itself. Is a minor Rothko truly worth more than the
finest Ellsworth Kelly? Are we captivated by the serenity and light of a
Corot watercolour, or simply the signature?

"Perhaps," as the art critic Emily Genauer wrote, "we are almost at the
point of sophistication where we are able to enjoy a work of art for what it
is."

Perhaps. Then again, as Theodore Rousseau pointed out, "We should all
realise that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have
been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls."

Frank Wynne is the author of 'I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger Who
Swindled the Nazis', published by Bloomsbury (£14.99) on Mon.