Artist of the week: Han van Meegeren
In 1937, a Dutch artist called Han van Meegeren made a sensational claim, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. While searching through the collection of a Dutch family living in Italy, he said, he had discovered a previously unknown painting by the 17th century master Johannes Vermeer entitled Supper at
Emmaus. Not much was known about Vermeer’s life, but the quality and scarcity of his paintings – only around 34 of which are known to survive – meant that in art historical terms, the discovery could hardly have been bigger news. Experts hailed the work as a masterpiece and it was acquired by a prestigious Rotterdam museum, making van Meegeren a fortune. Yet there was a catch: it was “a fake, and not even a very good one”. Van Meegeren (1889-1947) would produce many more counterfeit Vermeers, culminating in an extraordinary story that is now the subject of a new Hollywood film released online this week. The Last Vermeer, starring Guy Pearce, explains how he “perpetrated arguably the greatest art hoax of the 20th century”.
Van Meegeren was a “mediocre” artist, said Alex Greenberger on Artnews: a society portraitist and a painter of landscapes, who stubbornly cleaved to styles of the past. He loathed the modernist art then in the ascendant, and as his own work became increasingly outmoded, critical opinion turned against him. He thus turned to forgery, partially to finance a lavish lifestyle – he owned an astonishing 57 properties at one point, and spent wildly on wine, women, drugs and art – but also to embarrass his critics. Using an ingenious technique that made canvases appear much older than they were, he produced six new “Vermeers” in as many years, constructing elaborate backstories to provide the ring of authenticity. They needed it: the faces in van Meegeren’s fakes were “ill-defined” and his compositions “sloppy”. Indeed, it now seems improbable that “anyone with even a cursory knowledge of art history” was taken in. Yet eminent art historians were fooled, enabling van Meegeren to peddle his fakes to some of the world’s richest collectors – notably Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe, who had an obsessive passion for art.
Van Meegeren himself had “fascist inclinations”, and was happy to deal with the Nazis, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. In 1942, Göring bought one of his Vermeer forgeries for “an exorbitant 1.65 million guilders”, making it possibly the most expensive work of art sold to that date. This triumph, however, would be the forger’s undoing. On liberation in 1945, the Resistance put him on trial, accusing him of selling a national treasure to the Germans. To save himself, he confessed to his fraud – but claimed he had painted the work specifically to outwit the Nazis. His story was “snapped up by the public”, who turned him into “a folk hero”; he was even “voted the second most popular figure in the Netherlands”. Van Meegeren died, bathed in patriotic adulation, his ill health meaning he did not serve any of his light prison sentence for forgery. It was 20 years before the full extent of his hoaxes became clear, as museums began to realise their “Vermeers” were nothing of the sort. Embarrassing as they were, the revelations ultimately gave us “a far better understanding” of Vermeer. Göring found out that his painting was fake while awaiting trial at Nuremberg. One observer reportedly said that he looked appalled, “as though for the first time he had discovered that there was evil in the world”.