Man Who Made Vermeers (Lopez) - Book Reviews

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