Failure™ Magazine

The Man Who Made Vermeers

The life and crimes of master forger Han van Meegeren.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, History

What role did your knowledge of Dutch play in your research?
There have been many books about Van Meegeren over the years, but none gets at the issues that interest me most. I wanted to present the story with a deep sense of history. I spent several years sifting through documents—correspondence, investigation reports, and trial testimony, for instance—in a variety of Dutch archives. At the same time, I immersed myself in the literature of the period. There would have been no way to do this without knowing the language.

I also conducted interviews with descendents of Van Meegeren’s friends, patrons, and partners-in-crime. These people all speak perfect English—as does almost everyone in the Netherlands—but they seemed to find it endearing when I tried to communicate in Dutch. It gave me a measure of credibility, I think. Also, I often say things in Dutch that are inadvertently comical.

Can you paint a picture of Van Meegeren?
If you look at photos of Van Meegeren from his trial in 1947, you’ll see that he looks a bit like [Academy-Award winning actor] David Niven—silver hair brushed back from his forehead, impeccably tailored suit—all very soigné. He predated Ian Fleming’s novels, but he cultivated the kind of amused disdain that we might associate with a James Bond villain. In fact, I think he would have liked people to imagine him that way—as a dangerous, impressive character with whom one would fear to bandy words. But no one took him that seriously because he was so over the top, especially in his cynicism, which tended to become quite voluble when he was drunk, which he was more often than not. Also, he was extremely short and spent a great deal of time chasing after very tall women, and inevitably made him seem like a bit of a sight gag—an amorous, overdressed pipsqueak. He was definitely more Dr. Evil than Dr. No.

Why didn’t Van Meegeren find success as an original artist?
It’s often said that he had no talent. Personally, I think that’s a bit too harsh. Van Meegeren actually did have some ability, and he enjoyed a measure of success as a society portraitist during the 1920s. But as he became involved with forgery, he lost his way artistically and never made good on the promise he had shown in his early work. Easy money from the sale of fake old masters left him a bit lazy with regard to his legitimate career, and once the imitative logic of forgery took over his creative thinking, it became very difficult for him to refine a truly personal artistic vision. In his review of my book in The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl had a wonderful line about this: “The state of being oneself dies when set aside.”

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