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

How did Van Meegeren come to forge paintings?
He was recruited during the ’20s by a colorful art-world character named Theo van Wijngaarden, who was a legitimate picture restorer in addition to being a promoter of fakes and a minor art forger in his own right. Van Wijngaarden developed a slew of technical refinements that allowed him to produce fakes that could evade most of the tests routinely deployed in the unmasking of forgeries at that time, but his artistic ability was somewhat limited, particularly when it came to depicting the human figure at close quarters. As a result, he needed to employ a more talented painter to produce high quality forgeries. That painter was Van Meegeren.

What does it take for a forger to succeed at his craft?
The technical hurdles are not insignificant, but Van Meegeren was lucky to have Van Wijngaarden to look after that side of things for him, particularly in the early days. Van Meegeren’s special talent lay in the aesthetic, or what one might call the mental side of forgery. A fake 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. The best fakes may imitate the style of a long-dead artist, but they also tend to reflect the tastes, attitudes, and visual culture of their own period. Most people can’t perceive this: they respond intuitively to that which seems familiar and comprehensible in an artwork, even one presumed to be hundreds of years old. It’s part of what makes fakes so seductive.

Was this sense of contemporary appeal especially relevant to forging Vermeer?
I think so. In Van Meegeren’s day, scholars were still attempting to sort out who Vermeer was as an artist. Very few authentic paintings by him were known to exist, and most of those had been identified only recently. So the Vermeer forgeries that came on the market during the ’20s and ’30s played up to this atmosphere of inquiry and investigation. They fit a fictional narrative of Vermeer’s career, thereby answering the implied question, “What else did Vermeer do?” For instance, did he do portraits? Did he do religious scenes? And so on.

From today’s vantage point, these forgeries now seem astonishingly anachronistic, because they weren’t really about Vermeer per se; they were about the way that the seventeenth century was perceived in the 1920s. Van Meegeren’s earliest Vermeer forgeries have more in common with his society portraits than with any work by Vermeer. At the time, this went unnoticed, and probably made the fakes all the more appealing on a subconscious level. They seemed both authentically old and hauntingly up-to-date.

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