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The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the…
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The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren (edition 2008)

by Jonathan Lopez

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
24413108,969 (3.81)8
Another small part of history that crosses so many areas and is so unknown.
Fascinating is the best word I can use to describe these types of books.
Fascinating.
Read in 2011. ( )
  CasaBooks | Apr 28, 2013 |
Showing 13 of 13
Hmmm. This turned out to be a very interesting book, especially about the immediate post-war period in Europe. My quibble is that there are many characters who appear only very briefly and various organizations (in Dutch- not my language) which are piled on in the setting of the stage at the beginning of the book that the details overwhelm the purpose. As the story progresses, it gets more interesting and more compelling. Maybe it did not have to be told in strict chronological order. Overall, it is certainly worthwhile for both the forgery aspects and the historical aspects. I would have liked to know much more about the young Dutch grad student who uncovered the true story- the one which turned van Meegeren from forger/hero to forger/Nazi sympathizer through her diligent research. In all fairness, Lopez does give her credit, but I wanted more information. ( )
  PattyLee | Dec 14, 2021 |
Intersting & extremely wel-researched story of Han van Meegeren who became famous for forging Vermeers and selling them to the Nazis during World War II ( )
  etxgardener | Apr 25, 2017 |
Another small part of history that crosses so many areas and is so unknown.
Fascinating is the best word I can use to describe these types of books.
Fascinating.
Read in 2011. ( )
  CasaBooks | Apr 28, 2013 |
Fascinating account of a master forger, Nazi collaborator, and all around evil man. Yet, he captivated people with his charm and wit and was a folk hero for many years. ( )
  Marzia22 | Apr 3, 2013 |
An intriguing story, a compelling if not particularly likeable subject, crisp writing, elegant language and an author who explains details and concepts without talking down to his reader all made this a wonderful reading experience. ( )
  Jammies | Mar 31, 2013 |
When we think of WWII, we think of concentration camps, Hitler, and the invasion. The war crimes that happened were so brutal, so enormous that they obscure almost everything else. This book does an amazingly good job of showing one such crime and one such criminal and how the war aided and abetted his crimes. It was a fascinating look inside art forgery and the innovation the forgers went to in order to pass off fakes as authentic. I often find art history books to be to dry and textbook like but this one was engaging and entertaining. ( )
  Irishcontessa | Mar 30, 2013 |
Reading Jonathan Lopez's book about the master forger Han van Meegeren, The Man who made Vermeers, I was reminded of the opening sequence of the 70s T.V. series Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy; this featured a doll that contained other versions of itself with slightly different expressions, until we get to the last one which has a blank face. Van Meegeren seems to have been like that. I bet that you could never pin down the real McCoy; he seems to have been skilful at manufacturing different versions of himself just as much as imitations of his favourite, Jan Vermeer. "Made" in this sense was not solely about faking paintings, but also creating bogus identities, mythologizing one's achievements, leaving a trail of false clues. So many roles: embittered forger producing fake Vermeers to spite the critics; millionaire decadent organizing parties for prostitutes in Amsterdam; Dutch folk hero playing to his fans at his trail in 1947, while surrounded by his own art; Nazi sympathizer writing inscriptions to Adolf Hitler in books embellished by fascist hieroglyphs.

It's the focus on the Nazi dimension that makes Lopez's book so distinctive and compelling. He's really sharp- and persuasive- on van Meegeren's association with the Nazi aesthetic. In a probing analysis, the author shows how the forger's most infamous work, the Supper at Emmaus, an expressionist re-imagining of early Vermeer with spectral forms with ghoulish faces, approaches the Volkgeist, or the spirit of the people tied to Germanic customs. A comparison between a later painting, Mealtime at the Farm of 1942- a kind of Louis Le Nain peasant meal meets the spirit of Mein Kampf- and the Supper at Emmaus, makes that Nazi connection very convincing.

In his time van Meegeren fooled not only leading players like Hermann Goering who owned one of his Vermeer forgeries, The Woman taken in Adultery, but also eminent art historians. None were more elevated and acclaimed than Abraham Bredius, one of the architects of Rembrandt scholarship- his paintings have Bredius numbers- and a man responsible for helping to purchase an uncontested Vermeer, the Allegory of Faith. Bredius has suffered the eternal humiliation of declaring the Supper at Emmaus a true Vermeer; he wrote an article in the bible of connoisseurship, The Burlington Magazine, in 1937, proclaiming its autograph status. As Lopez says, history and art history has been very rough on Bredius because he was conned by a clever psychologist who knew how to exploit the great Dutch art historian's weakness. Van Meegeren knew that Bredius expected religious pictures to emerge from Vermeer's early career, the one period of his career where pictures were scarce. And there was a lot riding on that "Vermeer"; not only an end-of-career coup for Bredius, but the making of the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam and its new Director Dirk Hannema, who eventually bought the painting on Bredius's advice for what would be the equivalent of $4 million today. When everything unraveled, Bredius saw his world crumble to dust around him; I suspect that his major gaffe was partly why the Rembrandt Research project was set up, because some of his attributions must have been doubted in the light of his mistake in 1937. To be fair to Bredius though, he was responsible in the 1930s for cutting Rembrandt's hyper inflated oeuvre, a sad irony.

There's something about art history set against World War II that makes books like this read like thrillers at times. This is a world not only of curators and dealers but murderers, thieves and the military police. There are hairbreath scrapes like the time van Meegeren arouses Goering's suspicions about the provenance of the Adulteress. Who doesn't feel the same chill as van Meegeren when he is ordered by the Reichsmarschall to write a letter detailing the picture's history of ownership? How does one invent a provenance of a picture one has forged recently? Characteristically, van Meegeren hits on a brilliant solution: he writes Goering a letter saying that he will reveal the name of the owner within two year's time from the date of purchase. This is a masterstroke because it will confirm Goering's suspicions about the criminal origins of the Adulteress, while giving him an out with the letter; but it will draw attention away from the picture as a fake. This is a typical van Meegeren ploy betraying his attitude to life- an inveterate optimist sure of his ability to escape from the worst of all possible predicaments by guile and sense of the moment opportunism.

The forger's luck ran out when the Allies apprehended Goering's picture dealer Alois Miedl, whose confession allowed the Adulteress to be traced back to van Meegeren. Miedl, quite a character himself, lived out the rest of life in sunny Spain bolstered by the proceeds accumulated through his dodgy wartime dealing. Others who had done the same were not so fortunate. Hannema was punished for collaborating with the Nazis and for sending art directly to them from Holland, his part was a revelation to me. Soon everybody was running for cover, collaborators, morally bankrupt dealers, women who had literally slept with the enemy, against a Holland of vengeful cruelty gradually ceding to leniency, a mood brilliantly evoked by Lopez with his sympathetic summary of the situation and use of harrowing photos of traitors suffering at the hands of the wrathful Dutch. This is one of the best descriptions of the war time Dutch art scene since parts of Lynne Nicholas's indispensable The Rape of Europa.

I've read a few books on van Meegeren, mainly for a current course I'm teaching on art crime, but I still can't really fathom how he succeeded beyond the dreams of most forgers. His Supper at Emmaus looks nothing like a Vermeer, but the forger managed to fool Bredius into believing it was. You'll find some possible reasons by another van Meegeren scholar, Errol Morris here, and lots more besides, including more from Jonathan Lopez. There's also a humorous and insightful film by the Boyman's Museum here.

Van Meegeren's fabrications now inhabit a curious world of tainted celebrity. Pictures like the Lacemaker, one of his earliest forgeries from 1926, are immensely appealing; and in such pictures perhaps we can detect an honest desire to emulate Vermeer to the best of the forger's abilities. It is a tragedy that van Meegeren could only discover his artistic ability through forgeries- his paintings under his own name hardly quicken the pulse. Lopez pulls no punches here, but he is impartial and objective. Yet, at the end of his book, we seem to encounter the blank face of the final TTSS doll, not somebody with a face or real identity. Van Meegeren's most successful forgery was the portrait of himself he presented to the world. ( )
  ArtHistoryToday1 | Jan 20, 2012 |
A brief, concise history of the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren who made a fortune in the 20 years leading up to the Second World War by painting and selling bogus works attributed to Vermeer and Franz Hals to galleries and museums throughout Europe and America.

In hindsight it is reasonable to declare that the paintings are not in the same league as genuine Vermeers. In fact they are often not even good paintings. Awkward compositions, imperfect modeling, it seems hard to imagine anyone accepting their attribution as works by the master.

It is easy to imagine that many of the art crimes that are portrayed in this book are still being carried out today. The rewards for dealing in forgery, false attribution and theft are just as compelling now as then. As Lopez writes, “...by the time a forgery has raised enough questions to prompt scientific analysis, it has already been bought and paid for.” ( )
  abealy | Dec 1, 2011 |
From a recommendation by saraht. Written with a light touch, this is the story of a forger who fooled people for a long time, including Goering, and ended up a folk hero for having sold a forgery to Goering even though he was a Nazi sympathizer who was just trying to screw everyone. Lopez argues that forgery was consistent with facism because of its demonstration of a will to power over the past, and that it was also destructive of van Meegeren’s actual artistic talents. “Slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development in which artistic role playing—completely divorced from its legitimate purpose as a tool for growth—became an end in itself. The more adept Van Meegeren grew at imagining his way into the creative concerns of long-dead painters, the more his work as a ‘real’ artist in the contemporary world began to appear eccentrically derivative and shallow.” I was most interested in Lopez’s argument that the fakes looked real to people at the time, but not to us now, because they both borrowed from Vermeer but also were consistent with then current visual codes (in particular, Germanic celebrations of the volk). ( )
  rivkat | May 11, 2011 |
A fascinating look at Han van Meegeren and his forgeries of "lost" Vermeers. Not content to merely forge works, van Meegeren created a whole body of work, a religious period, if you will. Seen in the cold light of day now, these forgeries look increasingly unlikely, and they set off alarm bells even in the 1940s when first offered for sale. But, one having been accepted as a legitimate Vermeer, the rest were clearly from the same hand, which facilitated the con. A well researched book, it looks at the style, technology and psychology behind the fakes, and why people were so keen to accept them. The book also looks at van Meegeren's Nazi sympathizer history, which is an uncomfortable truth for many Dutch, even today. Not the hero he made himself out to be, van Meegeren was, at the end, merely a crook. ( )
  Meggo | Jan 31, 2010 |
Author Jonathan Lopez tells of the story of one of the world's greatest forgers (that we know of....) Han van Meegeren. Van Meegeren produced a seemingly endless stream of faked paintings (many supposedly by Vermeer) during the period leading up to, and into, World War II.

Looking at his forgeries now, one can't help but ask how anyone could have been fooled by his ghastly imitations of Vermeers' extraordinary work. Lopez provides an intriguing answer. The key to a great forgery is giving what people what they want to see. That changes over the years, so a forger must be unerringly attuned to his time and place.

Han van Meegeren was able to create "lost" Vermeers that gave the art world (and the Nazis) just what they wanted -- a phase of the great artist's career when he focused on religious subjects. Religious subjects that "just happened" to reinforce the Nazi's belief in a pure and superior European stock.

Forgeries don't have to stand for centuries (and usually they don't), they only need to fool people during the course of the forger's lifetime. Thanks to some nifty and determined detective work at the end of war, van Meegeren's ruse didn't last as long as that.

Lopez covers much other ground in this wonderful book, but I'll close here and refer you to bruchu's excellent LibraryThing review if you'd like to learn more. ( )
1 vote ElizabethChapman | Nov 15, 2009 |
Great portrait of an artist turned forger who gave people what they wanted to believe in -- a missing period of Vermeer. Dutch speaking author, Lopez, uses original sources, tells a well-paced story of Han van Meegeren among the art dealers in Netherlands and doing what ever it might take, evencynically using a childhood friend, to make his millions, one fake at a time. Also an interesting story of wartime and post-war Netherlands; HvM convicted of minor crimes, died before serving a single day.
  grheault | Jan 3, 2009 |
A Real Talented Mr. Ripley

This is the story of Han van Meegeren, a Dutch artist who made a living producing art as forgeries in the name of Vermeer during the interwar and World War II period. Writing this popular history is Jonathan Lopez, an art historian and writer by trade.

I never heard of van Meegeren before I picked up this book. The story seems so fantastical, about an obscure Dutch painter passing off his forgeries as Vermeer and fooling everyone doing it. Though mostly a biographical recount, the book is revisionist. Lopez dispels the myth that van Meegeren was a simple man who forged Vermeer as a way to avenge the critics who looked down on his own work and that he was not a Nazi collaborator because he tried to swindle one. Lopez argues rather that van Meegeren was a mastermind who made an elaborate career out of forgery and his Nazi connections went beyond simple collaboration including painting Nazi literature.

A couple of other interesting points that Lopez makes is that forgeries succeed not merely on their technical merits but on the "basis of its power to sway the contemporary mind" (p. 6). And van Meegeren's evil genius to pull off the greatest deceptions was not technical prowess as a visual artist but rather his "use and misuse of history" (p. 10).

Overall, the book is well-written and extremely well-researched including 50-plus pages worth of endnotes. Lopez's narrative is very fluid, easy to read and simply a joy to read. No prior art history knowledge is required to thoroughly enjoy this great text. ( )
1 vote bruchu | Oct 21, 2008 |
Showing 13 of 13

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