The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren

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Portret van een man - Het Geheugen van Nederland - Online beeldbank van Archieven, Musea en Bibliotheken". Geheugenvannederland.nl. Archived from the original on 2015-10-16 . Retrieved 2013-12-29. Indeed, as The Man Who Made Vermeers relates in detail, the schemes that Van Meegeren employed to get himself out of trouble during the summer of 1945 -- manipulating not only public opinion and the news media, but also specific officials within the postwar Dutch government -- suggest that the famed forger's powers of deception extended far beyond the realm of painting. Past master at matching what people wanted to hear with what he wanted them to believe, Van Meegeren was a dangerous man in any context. But to give him his due, he was surely one of the most brilliant charlatans the world has ever known.

What Lopez really does bring out with his biographical spotlight is van Meegeren’s early shift from fashionable society painter in The Hague to specialist forger of Golden Age Dutch paintings, including Peter de Hoochs as well as Vermeers. Some of van Meegeren’s earlier forgeries cannot be proved to be his, though Lopez as connoisseur surely makes a strong case to link up some of the early Vermeer fakes bought in the mid 1920s by Mellon from Duveen (and later donated to the National Gallery). 3 Lopez illuminates the early collaboration of van Meegeren with the disreputable “restorer” and forger in The Hague, Theo van Wijngaarden, who really launched this star pupil into independence and surpassing success as a master forger, and Lopez shows clearly that these fakes of Dutch masters extended through most of two decades. a b c d e f g Peter, Schjeldahl (October 27, 2008). "Dutch Master". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 28 February 2009 . Retrieved 20 July 2009. Kreuger, Frederik H. (2005). The Deception. Novel and His Real Life. The Netherlands: Quantes Uitgeverij. ISBN 90-5959-031-7. Arend Hendrik Huussen Jr.: Henricus (Han) Antonius van Meegeren (1889 - 1945). Documenten, supplement. (Cahiers uit het noorden 21), Zoetermeer, Huussen 2010. No - not for a homework assignment or a sudden budding interest in art history research. I read it because the author is a member of a Book Group here on GR that I belong to and his book was one of many selected to be read during the year. Thought I'd give it a go. It sounded intriguing after all - not a biography about a master Dutch painter, but the re-telling of the legend of a master Forger of the master painter, who collaborated with Nazis and lived (for a while) to tell about it.What remains inexplicable to most current viewers of van Meegern forgeries is how they could have duped connoisseurs familiar with authentic Vermeers. Lopez gamely attempts to evoke period preoccupations, whether for the “Greta Garbo” hat in one fake sold to the Thyssens or for the evocations in the Emmaus of Teutonic character: the facial features of Jesus echo Dürer’s renowned 1500 Self-Portrait, and the communal meal among the apostles suggests volkisch sentiment. 4 To my taste, Lopez is a little too pat about his explanation of a Nazified sentimentality of that familial gathering, a period eye that finds contemporary parallels in American Regionalism. At least as important for its authentication is the search by Bredius for both Caravaggist and Catholic influences in the putative “lost early works” of Vermeer, akin to his rare surviving early religious works. 5 Van Meegeren intuited how Vermeer would have made more religious works.

Gaddis, William (1955). The Recognitions. William H. Gass (Introduction). Penguin Classics (1993-reprint). ISBN 3-442-44878-6. If you only wanted to read one book about Han van Meegreren, then this is probably the one. It covers his life in all phases (however briefly at points), his art, his fakes, and how he was perceived by the world of art lovers and by the Dutch (before and after his arrest). If you want a deeper look at his early life and his painting methods, then I recommend also reading “I Was Vermeer”. It is a much more romantic look at the man and while it may be based on not-always-reliable facts, it has color reproductions of the paintings both real and faked. Together they offer a pretty complete look at the man. so sayeth the ginat ghost haunting the spectral glades of long vanished pmanuscripts of unknown authors, tthoseVan Brandhof, Marijke (1979). Early Vermeer 1937. Contexts of life and work of the painter/falsifier Han van Meegeren. (Catalogue of Han van Meegeren work pp. 153–163, with numerous illustrations of the pictures with the signature H. van Meegeren.) Dissertation. Utrecht: The Spectrum. Perhaps the most insightful and extended analysis provided by Lopez of how van Meegeren infused his paintings with consistency and sincerity concerns his Catholic upbringing and discomfort with modernist art in Holland since van Gogh. Such cultural conservatism could lead the artist to reactionary sympathies, expressed, for instance, in an obscure tract of the late 1920s. But van Meegeren also dedicated and sent to Hitler in 1942 a signed book of drawings. This work was found just before his trial in 1945, but was neglected, as Lopez makes clear, in the enthusiasm for the artist as sympathetic counter-cultural figure. The postwar Dutch public surely wanted to enjoy how the forger had fooled the arch-Nazi in his obsessive collecting (currently being catalogued by Nancy Yeide), in addition to fooling the “experts” in paintings acquired by both Rotterdam and Amsterdam museums. Roth, Toni (1971). "Methods to determine identity and authenticity". The art and the beautiful home 83:81–85. The white lead in the painting The Supper at Emmaus had polonium-210 values of 8.5±1.4 and radium-226 (part of the uranium-238 radioactive decay series) values of 0.8±0.3. In contrast, the white lead found in Dutch paintings from 1600 to 1660 had polonium-210 values of 0.23±0.27 and radium-226 values of 0.40±0.47. [65]