[UA] My new hero.

[Chris Cooper]

I must admit that this has way more relevance to me
but I think it is cool and highly UA-able nonetheless.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/08/05/bavermeer.xml&site=6&page=0

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The forger who fooled the world

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.

 
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. 
 


Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the
copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be
reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full
copyright statement see Copyright 


I have a damn blog. Happy now?

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