Total Page : 352
Publisher : Mariner Books
Publication Date : 2009 07 15
>> A Fortune in Forgeries
The Man Who Made Vermeers examines the forgery career of Han van Meegeren who amassed a fortune by littering the world with fake Old Masters paintings from the 1920s through the end of World War II It is an amazing tale that has also been chronicled recently in Edward Dolnick s The Forger s Spell
The Man Who Painted Vermeers focuses on the forger his lifestyle his counterfeiting associates his pro fascist activities and his lengthy career in forgery This book is an interesting look at a turbulent time in history that allowed strange things to happen in the art world
>> What Makes Van Meegeren Interesting
I could not put it down The strength of this book is Van Meegeren himself
The book races by trying to cover as much of the whirlwind as possible the art the forgery the lies the lifestyle the marriages the Nazis and the aftermath The story of a consummate con artist in every sense The book does a wonderful job covering certain details of art forgery for that time period though I should state I am neither an art expert nor an art historian
I wish the book went greater into depth regarding the wheeling of all the dealing but perhaps it is lost in history Names of friends and rivals fly by and money and fake masterpieces change hands and countries eventually lose their governments You want to know more about these people but the author feels the need to get it all in
Even the aftermath is quite a spectacle The book makes you want to know more about Lt Joseph Piller and if records could be found what the experts really thought when they discovered their own hoodwinking It is remarkable to see a man like Van Meegeren snake through every danger coming out some sort of cultural hero while he left behind him so many ruined reputations
As the author appropriately recites from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance When the legend becomes fact print the legend The author wrote down the facts too
>> Reads like a detective story with interesting political insights
I thought this book would tell the story of an amiable rogue who fooled the art establishment and even top Nazi Hermann Goering by faking Vermeers It turned out to be much more than that It s the tale of a creepy fascist with a specific political agenda who used his fakes to advance a form of art that glorified the Nazi view of the world
Han van Meegeren seems to have been a puffed up creep from the start He had some talent as shown by the illustrations of some of his portraits reproduced in this book but his conservative bent and limited imagination meant he was never destined for greatness
Instead he began painting fake Vermeers His early efforts were genre interior scenes similar to those of the master himself But then he hit another vein entirely manufacturing a new and entirelu false chapter of the artist s career during which Vermeer allegedly devoted himself to painting somber Biblical scenes
You look at the reproductions of these pictures and you wonder how they fooled anyone at all They are dull lifeless full of lugurious piety of the worst kind the very antithesis of the glowing work of Vermeer Yet these crude daubings took in most of the Dutch art establishment of the time Once he had established the first fake of this kind it became progressively easier to continue fooling everyone since each subsequent painting was clearly the work of the same artist
The author explains how some of the coded and subliminal messages in these images appealed to something in the air during the 1930s when Nazi ideology loomed larger and larger in Europe For the first time he unveils the depth of van Meegeren s Nazi sympathies and decodes his evil messages The amount of research that went into this book is prodigious but the writing is always clear
Van Meegeren fooled the art experts of his time he fooled Goering and he fooled his interrogators after the war He fooled the world press he fooled the judge and jury during his trial and he fooled the Dutch public He died unexpectedly without ever paying for his actions But thanks to this great book he will not fool posterity
