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.)