Faking it in Amsterdam

In “Bamboozling Ourselves,” Errol Morris asks, “Why do people believe in imaginary returns, frauds and fakes? Bernard Madoff, A.I.G. , W.M.D.’s … How did this happen? Do we believe things because it is in our self-interest? Or is it because we can be manipulated by others? And, if so, under what circumstances?”

To explore these questions, Morris writes about Han van Meegeren, “arguably the most successful art forger of all time.” Van Meegeren, “a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring – essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis.” Van Meegeren, however, claimed he had forged the Vermeer, as well as several others. As Morris concludes:

Han van Meegeren forged 11 Vermeers, a Frans Hals, a couple of de Hoochs and a Terborch. But . . . Van Meegeren’s greatest forgery was not any of his paintings. It was his biography. It was his success in convincing Joseph Piller, the Jewish agent of the Dutch Resistance who arrested him, and eventually the rest of the world that he was a folk-hero – a gifted artist who conned Göring – not a Nazi-sympathizer or collaborator. As such, forgery is similar to sleight of hand. You misdirect attention, emphasize certain details and suppress others. 

If you scam a villain, maybe you’re a hero.

Han van Meegeren is known as the boldest modern forger of Old Masters. In the current issue of the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldal reviews two books about van Meegeren. Among other points, Schjeldal points out that art forgeries are far more expressive of the times in which they are created than of the times of the artists they imitate: “The art historian Max Friedländer . . . said, ‘Forgeries must be served hot,’ and “promulgated a forty-year rule—four decades or so being how long it takes for the modern nuances of a forgery to date themselves as clichés of the period in which they were painted.”

One of the most remarkable things about van Meergeren is that among his customers for forged Vermeers (van Meergeren’s specialty) was Herman Göring. As Schjeldal explains:

This small point is notable because, in time, the fact that van Meegeren had scammed Göring helped him not only to evade charges of collaboration but to become a folk hero. Lopez demonstrates how evidence of the painter’s coziness with the Occupation regime got buried by the single question of whether he had sold Göring a patrimonial cynosure (potentially a capital offense) or a worthless fake. Early in 1947, a newspaper poll found van Meegeren to be the second most popular man in the Netherlands, after the newly elected Prime Minister.

I can’t help but take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite all-time novels, The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. As explained on the Gaddis Annotations website (a project with which I have been lucky enough to have had an insignificant role), Gaddis’s novel can be “summarized” as follows:

In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favor of the call of the artist. His quest is to make sense of contemporary reality, to find significance and some form of order in the world. Through the pursuit of art he hopes to find truth. His initial “failure” as an artist leads him not to copy but to paint in the style of the past masters, those who had found in their own time and in their own style the kind of order and beauty for which Wyatt is looking. His talent for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous art critics and businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original old masters. As the novel develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific, religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt wrenches something authentic from what Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturbs simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faiths and fakes.