The Man Who Made Vermeers: UnVarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren
Jonathan Lopez, 2008
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547247847
Summary
t's a story that made Dutch painter Han van Meegeren famous 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 in mockery of the Nazis. And it's a story that's been believed ever since. Too bad it isn't true.
Jonathan Lopez has drawn on never-before-seen documents from dozens of archives to write a revelatory new biography of the world’s most famous 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 famous 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 story of deceit in the art world. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—Harvard University
• Currently—lives in New York City
Jonathan Lopez is an American writer and art historian. Born in 1969 in New York City, he was educated there and at Harvard.
He writes a monthly column for Art & Antiques called "Talking Pictures" and is a frequent contributor to London-based Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts. His noted December 2007 Apollo article "Gross False Pretences" related the details of an acrimonious 1908 dispute between the art dealer Leo Nardus and the wealthy industrialist P. A. B. Widener of Philadelphia.
Lopez has also written for ARTnews, the Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and Dutch newsweekly De Groene Amsterdammer. His book, The Man Who Made Vermeers is a biography of the Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren.
Lopez has written extensively on Van Meegeren in both Dutch and English, including an Apollo article entitled "Han van Meegeren's Early Vermeers," which revealed that Van Meegeren was behind three Vermeer forgeries of the 1920s that had been floated on the international market by an organized ring of art swindlers based in London and Berlin. Two of the three forgeries in question were purchased by the art dealer Joseph Duveen who then sold them in good faith to the great Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon.
At the time, Mellon was serving as secretary of the Treasury in the administration of President Calvin Coolidge. Unaware of his error, Mellon ultimately donated these two "Vermeers" as part of his founding gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. They hung there through the 1960s as genuine works by Johannes Vermeer, until technical analysis revealed them to be modern forgeries.
These works are now kept in storage, and although rumors have existed about their true origins for many years, they have never before been traced back definitively to Van Meegeren, a figure far better known for his later exploits, which included selling a fake Vermeer to Hermann Göring at the height of World War II. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Profoundly researched, focussed, absorbing...The Man Who Made Vermeers brings hard light to van Meegeren's machinations and (very bad) characgter.
New Yorker
Lpez's work...will draw in even the well informed with its new details. His pioneering research on van Meegeren's early life gives us further insight into what motivates deception, a subject that will never cease to fascinate as long as art is bought and sold.
Art News
In this engaging study, art historian Lopez examines—as did Edward Dolnick's Forger's Spell, published in June—the fascinating case of Han van Meegeren, a notorious Dutch art forger. Van Meegeren, who sold Hermann Goering a fake Vermeer, was convicted of collaboration; he became a folk hero for duping the Nazi leader. But according to Lopez, Van Meegeren was a successful forger long before WWII, and contrary to Van Meegeren's claim that he was avenging himself on the art critics who had scorned his own work, Lopez says he was motivated by financial gain and Nazi sympathies: "What is a forger if not a closeted Übermensch, an artist who secretly takes history itself for his canvas?" Lopez asks provocatively. The author gives a vivid portrait of the 1920s Hague, a stylish place of "mischief and artifice" where Van Meegeren learned his trade, and brilliantly examines the influence of Nazi Volksgeist imagery on Van Meegeren's The Supper at Emmaus, part of his forged biblical Vermeer series. Lopez's writing is witty, crisp and vigorous, his research scrupulous and his pacing dynamic.
Publishers Weekly
Lopez's astute portrait of forger Han van Meegeren...detects the vocabulary of fascistic artwork in certain of van Meegeren’s bogus Old Masters, which relates his political sympathies and connections with functionaries of the Nazi art-looting operation. While duping Hermann Göring with an imitation Vermeer has its comedic aspect, Lopez shows how dangerous the swindle was. —Gilbert Taylor
Booklist
Art journalist Lopez shows a Dutch painter who enriched himself by faking Old Masters emerging as a folk hero at the end of World War II. Not much of a hero, the author convincingly demonstrates in his closely argued and generously illustrated debut. Han van Meegeren was a sorely sullied character at best, a perfidious crypto-fascist and Nazi collaborator at worst. A longtime art forger (he'd begun with fakes of Franz Hals), he married twice, dallied often, lived like a prince in occupied Amsterdam while his fellow citizens starved in the streets, sent felicitations to Hitler, painted pro-Aryan images, lied, manipulated old friends and betrayed both calling and country. Lopez meticulously reconstructs the edifice of Van Meegeren's life. We learn about his parents, his education and training, his early leftist leanings and his eventual relationship with the right. Because his portrait paintings didn't enable him to live in the style to which he hoped to become accustomed, he soon embraced forgery, inventing new techniques that fooled experts (chemists included) and employing to his advantage a lacuna in Johannes Vermeer's biography. Van Meegeren knew that Vermeer had done some early paintings with religious themes, so he decided to plug the gap with more. For a few years he fooled the art establishment. Collectors and museums bought his Vermeers and displayed them proudly and prominently; rapacious art lover Hermann Goering ponied up mega-guilders for the bogus Christ and the Adulteress. Although Van Meegeren was quickly nabbed after the war, he convinced arresting officer Joseph Piller that he'd been duping the Nazis, not collaborating with them. Piller became a friend and advocate; the press loved the story. Van Meegeren eventually was convicted of forgery and sentenced to a year in prison, but he died before serving a day. First-rate research and narrative skill propel this tale of greed, war and skillful manipulation of the popular imagination. For more, see also Edward Dolnick's authoritative The Forger's Spell (2008).
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Man Who Made Vermeers:
1. Is Van Meegeren a sympathetic character? How did he explain his motivation to become a forger? Is his explanation reliable? Take a look at the book's 1918 photograph of Van Meegeren. Does it affect how you think of him?
2. In what way did Van Meegeren's forgeries capture the attitudes of the time? How did he bend history in his paintings to reflect his personal ideological beliefs? What were his beliefs?
3. Lopez writes that "slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development." What does he mean by that statement?
4. What about Van Meergeren's patron, the man who backed him—British art collector Theodore Ward? What kind of character was he, and what was his motivation?
5. Is there a sort of Robin Hood quality to Van Meergeren's forgeries, on the parts of both Ward and Van Meegeren?
6. After his arrest, when he revealed that the masterpieces he had sold to Hermann Goering were fake, Van Meegeren became a folk hero for having duped the villains of Europe. Did he deserve this new found reputation?
7. Why did Van Meegeren not reveal the true extent of his forgeries to the authorities?
8. What questions does this book reveal about the definition of "art"? Is it possible for Van Meegeren's works to stand on their own as actual works of art? If the paintings appeared to be real and fooled so many authoritative art experts, why can't Van Meegeren's work be valued on its creativity, competency, and beauty?
9. How did Van Meegeren get away with his scam for so long?
10. Follow-up to Question 9: In what way was Van Meergeren a product of his era? In other words, how does the author present the specific cultural environment that allowed the Vermeer swindles to occur?
11. What finally precipitated the discovery of the Vermeer forgeries?
12. What suprised...or intrigued you most about Lopez's book?
13. Have you read Edward Dolnick's book, The Forger's Spell, on the same subject? If so, how do these two books compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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