Artful Dodger: Edward Dolnick on 'The Forger's Spell'

HANS VAN MEEGEREN didn't grow rich off his own name. The master forger became wealthy because of Johannes Vermeer, the great 17th century Dutch painter.

Van Meegeren painted before and during World War II, ingeniously mixing science — the key ingredient in his paintings was plastic — skill, determination, psychological insight, cunning and vast reservoirs of bile to cheat his way to the top. After he was finally caught, he painted one final "Vermeer" in prison to demonstrate his style. Somewhat ironically, he was eventually was seen as a hero throughout Holland for swindling a galaxy of art snobs and the likes of Nazi swine Hermann Goering, even though van Meegeren had no problem befriending the Germans for his own benefit.

This is a great tale, and lauded author Edward Dolnick's new book, "The Forger's Spell," makes it even better. Subtitled "A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century," the work is an accessible, engrossing and erudite examination of art, commerce and history.

A recent e-mail from Dolnick discussed a particularly compelling aspect of Van Meegeren's career.

"Han van Meegeren was different from every forger I'd ever heard of," Dolnick wrote. "He made forgeries that didn't look at all like the real thing. ... Vermeer's men and women overflow with life. The people in Van Meegeren's fakes look like zombies, and they have raccoon eyes.

"The second surprise was that the people he fooled were experts, not novices," Dolnick continued. "The more people knew about art, the harder they fell for Van Meegeren's fakes. ... When one modern-day expert looked back at Van Meegeren's career, he called it 'literally incredible' that Van Meegeren got away with it. My goal was to explain that mystery. The trail led to forgers talking shop, magicians spilling their secrets and spymasters explaining the art of the double agent. We see what is in front of our eyes, sometimes. But we also see what we hope to see, or what we expect to see. It's the job of con men and swindlers to manipulate those expectations."

Dolnick will discuss the extraordinary career of Hans van Meegeren at the Corcoran on Sept. 24. Express asked him about Van Meegeren's talents, why scientific tests were never done on his paintings and what advice he could offer an aspiring forger.

» EXPRESS: Who is the most compelling character in this tale?
» DOLNICK: Much of the fun of this book is that the story is bursting with larger-than-life characters. Van Meegeren, the forger, fooled the world and made tens of millions while he was at it; his most prominent victim, Hermann Goering, was the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and a swaggering, murderous blowhard; the connoisseur who proclaimed to the world that Van Meegeren's fakes were the real thing was a vain and pompous know-it-all who was secretly terrified that he'd made a career-ending blunder.

I might go for the connoisseur, Abraham Bredius, because he was caught in such a predicament. He was an old man with a huge reputation desperate to cap his career with one last triumph. He knew more about Vermeer than anyone else, and he had told the world that he had just discovered the greatest Vermeer of them all. And he secretly feared that the painting was no good, and he'd made a colossal blunder.

» EXPRESS: What are the most important lessons to be learned from this story?
» DOLNICK: This is a story with an important moral. We can never discount psychology. When people are desperate to believe — that the painting they have spent a fortune on is genuine, that their lover is loyal and true, that the battlefield news is good — they can ignore or explain away evidence that doesn't fit their preconception.

» EXPRESS: How did Van Meegeren view the Nazi occupation?
» DOLNICK: Most of the action in "The Forger's Spell" takes place in occupied Amsterdam during World War II. The Dutch suffered desperately — Anne Frank and Han van Meegeren were neighbors — but the Nazis lived in luxury. Unlike nearly all their countrymen, those Dutch men and women who collaborated with the conquerors did quite nicely.

Van Meegeren thrived. Immoral or amoral, he had friends in the worst circles. While most of the Dutch cowered and starved, he hopped from nightclub to nightclub with his German and pro-German pals.

» EXPRESS: Your book shows that both scientists and art experts can be fooled while attempting to authenticate art. Is either group more reliable? Why weren't scientists called in to authenticate Van Meegeren's forgeries?
» DOLNICK: Both groups have extensive and genuine knowledge, but both bump up against limits. Scientific tests can prove that a painting isn't genuinely old, for instance, but the tests can't prove that it is genuinely by Vermeer. Judgments like that depend on connoisseurs, and the connoisseurs are vulnerable, too. They have spent years acquiring an "eye" — they can identify a Rembrandt or a Vermeer with the same speed and certainty with which you or I can recognize our mother's voice on the phone — but they always have to fear that they have run into a brilliant impersonator. Perhaps Meryl Streep could pick up the phone and pass herself off to me as my mother.

Van Meegeren spent years playing cat-and-mouse games designed to fool any scientists who tested his pictures. But in the end, his fake "Vermeers" looked so convincingly old, and their buyers wanted so eagerly to believe, that no one ever called on the scientists.

» EXPRESS: Do you see Van Meegeren as a mediocre painter?
» DOLNICK: Van Meegeren was a perfectly competent artist. As a well-known society painter in Holland, he made a fine living painting portraits of prominent lawyers and adorable children and suchlike. He believed all his life that he was a misunderstood genius. He was not. In comparison with his peers, he was capable. In comparison with titans like Vermeer, he was nowhere. He found a way to make that not matter. Van Meegeren was a good businessman, an excellent technician and a brilliant psychologist.

» EXPRESS: What advice would you offer aspiring forgers?
» DOLNICK: Forgery is a booming business and it's likely to thrive as long as people covet brand names. The best strategy for a forger is not to aim at the very top of the market, because works by the most famous artists draw too much scrutiny. Far better to fake the works of a painter just below the household names. That way you still bring in a hefty paycheck and you dodge the biggest risks.

» EXPRESS: Does Veermer deserve his reputation?
» DOLNICK: One great pleasure of working on a book about masterpieces was spending hours in the company of magnificent paintings. Vermeer repays endless attention.

» EXPRESS: Why didn't the "raccoon eyes" in Van Meegeren's paintings attract suspicion?
» DOLNICK: Vermeer's men and women overflow with life. The people in Van Meegeren's fakes look like zombies, and they do have raccoon eyes. Why didn't anyone object? Because Van Meegeren's Dutch audiences in the sad, anxious 1930s and '40s saw these dark-eyed figures as soulful and compelling. They looked at waxworks and saw fellow sufferers, and hailed these as the greatest Vermeers of all.

» Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW; Wed., Sept. 24, 7 p.m., $20; 202-639-1700. (Farragut West, Farragut North)

Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Author photo by Jerry Bauer; other images courtesy HarperCollins