What made him do it?

An author struggles to understand the motivations of a master art forger.

By ELAINE MARGOLIN
Vermeer book 88 248 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Vermeer book 88 248
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren By Jonathan Lopez Harcourt 352 pages; $26 Somehow author Jonathan Lopez manages to pull off an intriguing literary feat; his new book is a compelling portrait of master art forger and Nazi sympathizer Han Van Meegeren. The young Dutch artist began his career with promise but quickly abandoned the pursuit of his own artistic legacy and slipped seamlessly into a life of high crimes and misdemeanors. He began painting brilliantly rendered forgeries of 17th-century masters, focusing much of his attention on Johannes Vermeer, Frans Hals and Pieter de Hooch. Lopez discovers that by almost all accounts, Meegeren was an ace con man, full of wit and charm and the ability to switch identities as the situation demanded seemingly undeterred by any callings of conscience. Lopez's driving force, which propels his narrative, explores the author's own conflicted feelings of repulsion and attraction for his subject. He seems seduced by Meegeren, amazed and enamored by his capacity for deception and impressed with his business savvy. He traces the history of Meegeren's relationships with a series of front men whom he hired to sell his fake oil paintings to the upper echelons of the Nazi elite during the occupation of Holland. Lopez can't figure Meegeren out. Why would someone with so much talent relinquish his own artistic aspirations? What drew Meegeren to embrace Nazi ideology? Why was he so threatened by the new modernist painters? And most significantly, how could this man spend so many decades studying and admiring the works of the great master painters of centuries past with a paintbrush in one hand and his own poisoned heart in his other one? The Dutch government arrested Meegeren after the war and charged him with collaboration with the Nazis, which included selling a fake Vermeer to Joseph Goebbels. During his trial, he remained guarded, confessing only what he had to, and attempted to convince his prosecutors that he was merely a misunderstood artist who had turned to forgery out of bitterness at the lukewarm reception he received from the art world. He was lying again. Lopez brilliantly explains to us his theory regarding Meegeren's extraordinary success. He claims the artist understood that what makes a good fake painting is far more complex than the mere reproduction of the painter's style. An accomplished forger intuitively grasps the idea that his painting "doesn't necessarily succeed or fail according to the fidelity with which it replicates the distant past but on the basis of its power to sway the contemporary mind." This was the source of Meegeren's magic. The artist began to produce a series of phony Vermeers, beginning in 1937 with The Supper at Emmaus, that were all biblical in nature and meant to flatter "the intellectual vanity of art historians who had theorized that the great 17th-century master, known to have painted one biblical scene in his youth, might well have produced more." Lopez adds that in addition to capturing Vermeer's unique style, the paintings also contained subliminal imagery that suggested "the volkisch Aryan propaganda" that was growing in Germany. So, in a sense, Meegeren's work succeeded on two levels; he was able to merge biblically themed Vermeers with a blatant volksgeist that represented the perverted values of Nazism. This made them incredibly appealing to the middlebrow reactionary strains exploding throughout the region. But Lopez can't seem to catch up with Meegeren; he struggles to understand him but never seems to get inside his head. We learn that as early as 1928 Meegeren founded a reactionary art magazine called De Kemphaan that was littered with anti-Semitic jargon and imagery. We hear about his problems with alcohol, his womanizing and his increasingly erratic behavior as he aged. We find out that his father was a teacher of French and history at a specialized academy for boys seeking careers in education. We discover how he duped so many of the top art dealers and collectors throughout Europe by using Bakelite mixed with his oil pigments which allowed his canvasses to dry in a manner that precisely replicated a piece of work from the 17th century. We witness in horror how many professionals were willing to collaborate with him and with the Nazis, cashing in on the graves of millions. But we never really learn what inner forces made Meegeren do it.