I would like to thank the Times readers who posted more than 700 comments to my seven-part essay on the forgeries of Han van Meegeren, “Bamboozling Ourselves.” The responses raised many questions with respect to the historical presentation of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, and to the aesthetic value of Van Meegeren’s forgeries. I found them interesting and thought-provoking. There have been a number of repeated themes that I will try to respond to. I was worried that this essay was much too long already – I’m sure that there are many who would agree – but if I could beg the readers’ indulgence, I also would like to bring up some new information.
Several readers commented on the research in this and other essays, which would not be possible without Homi Bhabha, the Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard. I would like to thank him for his encouragement, support and for providing access to one of the best libraries in the world (which fortunately happens to be just down the street from where I live). I would also like to stress that my essay was intended not as a replacement for Edward Dolnick’s and Jonathan Lopez’s books but rather as an inducement to read them.
I have included a Van Meegeren comic book by Ton van Tast from 1946. It was published after Van Meegeren’s confession but before his trial. It was kindly sent to me and partially translated by Jonathan Lopez.
Good Art or Bad Art?
There was disagreement on whether Van Meegeren’s forgeries (or his work in general) was good or bad. The very first comment concerned the obvious awfulness of Van Meegeren’s Vermeers. Of course, the awfulness only became obvious after Van Meegeren confessed to having forged them...
A sumptuous urban palace, Herengracht 458 was built at the time Vermeer was painting real Vermeers. The building was acquired by Jacques Goudstikker in 1927 and outfitted with period rooms – furniture, decorative arts, textiles, sculptures and, most significantly, paintings – Gothic, Italian Renaissance and Old Dutch. It became an amazing museum-like showcase for art. The Goudstikker family had been shaping the art world of Amsterdam for three generations. Goudstikker’s grandfather, Jacob, his father, Eduard, and then Jacques, who joined the firm as a young man in 1919.
He was one of the first dealers to have a thorough education in art history. From the moment he entered the family business, Jacques Goudstikker combined serious scholarship with a keen sense of how to market and promote art. This was reflected in his elaborate catalogues – his were some of the first to use photography extensively. They became the authoritative sources for art historical knowledge in Holland. He provided an entire discourse on why people living in modern homes should include at least one Dutch master: “It’s craziness to believe that a modern human being should live between bicycle tubes and dental instruments.”
At his country estate, Nyenrode, he created tableaux vivants with his wife and other guests, a living version of the paintings in his collections. For Jacques Goudstikker, his art collections were very much alive.
Left, Amsterdam City Archives; right, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
There is a photograph of Goudstikker and Queen Wilhelmina in 1929 at an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In the next few years, he would mount shows in major cities throughout Europe and America. Despite the decline of the Dutch economy, Goudstikker’s business continued to thrive.
Amsterdam City Archives: Goudstikker and Queen Wilhelmina.
And then, in 1940, at the age of 43, Jacques Goudstikker was dead. In many ways, the story is very simple. He was a victim of the Nazis, though he was not killed in a Nazi concentration camp.
When I first read the details of Goudstikker’s death, I suspected some sort of foul play. But the story seems even worse. Bad luck, an absurd sequence of events that no single individual could ever hope to control – his desperate attempts to flee Amsterdam; the bombing of the cargo ship that was taking him, his wife and infant son across the English Channel to safety; the refusal of the authorities to allow them (or any of the other Jewish émigrés) to disembark at Dover; and his accidental death in the middle of the night en route to Liverpool. The family was crowded together with many refugees in the hold of the ship. The baby was crying, and Goudstikker went up on deck. The rest is conjecture. The deck listing in heavy seas, the black night, the open hatch. . .
On May 10, 1940, the Nazis marched into Holland. Shortly afterwards, they asked the Dutch authorities to survey the Jewish population of Amsterdam. “This map (100 x 100 cm) was made by Amsterdam officials in January 1941 on the instructions of the occupiers. Each dot represents ten Jewish inhabitants. Of the 140,000 Dutch Jews, about 80,000 lived in Amsterdam.” [32]
The sequence of events leading to the destruction of the Jews of Holland follows what is now a well-known pattern. In October 1940 Jewish enterprises were required to register with the German occupiers; a month later Jewish public servants, including teachers and professors were dismissed from their jobs; in July 1941 special identity cards for Jews were issued. And on and on and on. The rounding up of Jews, their imprisonment at various transit camps, principally Westerbork, and ultimately, their deportation by train to the extermination camps in the east. But there is a larger point to be made about Dutch complicity in the Holocaust and their collaboration with the Nazis. The Dutch were among the worst... Read the rest of this installment at the NYTimes.com>
Jonathan Lopez and I resumed our discussion of Van Meegeren. I was still in search of an answer to the question of whether Van Meegeren was an apolitical huckster or a Nazi. Perhaps there were some additional clues in Teekeningen 1.
ERROL MORRIS: So is Van Meegeren’s success, success in pandering? Finding out what Nazi collectors want, and then giving it to them?
JONATHAN LOPEZ: To some extent, yes. Although, that’s only part of it. He really was an artist, and he did have to become involved in the aesthetics of what he was doing and making things that he himself found appealing.
ERROL MORRIS: He had to incorporate something of himself in his painting — even the forgeries. By the way, many of the images in your book are just amazing, the Van Meegeren drawings. They’re so strange. “Creepy” is the right word.
JONATHAN LOPEZ: Oh, the Nazi drawings?
ERROL MORRIS: Yeah.
JONATHAN LOPEZ: Yeah, the one with the snake and the deer. That’s pretty horrendous. And the one with the soap bubble, “The Devil’s Orb” ["Grain, Petroleum, Cotton"]—
ERROL MORRIS: The soap bubble is utterly amazing.
Teekeningen 1“Grain, Petroleum, Cotton” by Van Meegeren.
JONATHAN LOPEZ: That horrendous scary-looking book. My wife makes me keep it behind a door in my office so that nobody knows that we own the thing. Because you look at it — Jesus Christ what is this? It’s this sinister-looking book. It’s just creepy-looking. It’s enormous; it’s black. It’s got this gold Gothic script on it. It looks like an evil book.
Getty Images“Mealtime at the Farm,” Han van Meegeren.
JONATHAN LOPEZ: Take a look at some of the books from the German Reich art exhibitions every year during the 1930s and flip through them. You’ll see a lot of paintings in there that may, in fact, remind you of “The Supper at Emmaus,” these scenes of people in humble Bavarian dwellings gathering around a table to have a simple meal. “The Supper at Emmaus” was not just a picture, it was a type of picture. And you could find modern equivalents of it if you went to the great Nazi art exhibitions. And during the war, when Van Meegeren revitalized his career under his own name, he openly painted pictures like these, so-called Volksgeist paintings, and exhibited them in occupied Holland and also in Germany. One of them, he even dedicated publicly to Hitler. A lot of this art looks like kitsch to us today. Some of it looked like kitsch to people then, too. But it was a living style of art. And it was vital in a way that it isn’t today. And I think unless you understand some of the visual culture of the time, you’re never going to get to the point of understanding why any of these really strange looking pictures could ever have been accepted as Vermeers. Read more at NYTimes.com…
ERROL MORRIS: I’m fascinated by your use of “The Uncanny Valley.”
EDWARD DOLNICK: That’s one of my favorite parts of the book. But I wasn’t sure whether it should be included in the book. I was on the fence about it. I thought it might be too indulgent.
ERROL MORRIS: Indulgent?
EDWARD DOLNICK: Well, it’s a digression. You’re talking about paintings and forgery and what oil paintings look like, and then you say: let me tell you a cool thing about robots! Before this new spate of Van Meegeren books, they always squeezed him into a frame that I don’t think fits, that he was like other forgers, that he did these close copies, that he tried to make his forged Vermeers look like real Vermeers. If you really looked at Van Meegeren’s Vermeers, you would see that Van Meegeren’s story couldn’t be that story, even though people told it that way. [1]
ERROL MORRIS: Could you explain to me the concept of “The Uncanny Valley,” as you use it in your book? Read more…
This is the first of seven installments of “Bamboozling Ourselves.” Read the rest of the series.
Oh World — the Devil’s Orb — Your vanity shall lead you to hell. — Martien Berversluis, Teekeningen 1
1.
A GRUDGE
Museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen, Rotterdam “The Supper at Emmaus” by Han van Meegeren.
Why do people believe in imaginary returns, frauds and fakes?
Bernard Madoff, A.I.G. , W.M.D.’s … How did this happen? Do we believe things because it is in our self-interest? Or is it because we can be manipulated by others? And, if so, under what circumstances?
Last year, two different books on that subject appeared within months of each other. Not only did both tackle the question of fakery, they were both about the same man: Han van Meegeren, arguably the most successful art forger of all time. Edward Dolnick’s “The Forger’s Spell” was released first (Edward Dolnick’s wife is on the board of The New York Times Company), followed by Jonathan Lopez’s “The Man Who Made Vermeers.” The titles provide a clue to the different goals of the authors — Dolnick’s interest in the nature of the trickery, the spell that Van Meegeren cast; Lopez’s interest in the nature of the man who did the tricking, the man who cast the spell.
There is something compelling about two people writing about the same man at the same time, as if the authors themselves might be doppelgangers, or at least mirrored two aspects of Van Meegeren’s biography.
Both books begin on May 29, 1945. Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.
On July 21, 1945, The Times weighed in on the story: “Authenticity of Several Paintings Sold as Vermeers Is Questioned” (pdf).
The authenticity of several paintings introduced to the public as newly discovered works of Jan Vermeer, seventeenth century Dutch master, is in question and the case has become a national sensation in England. Originally many of these paintings were introduced to the public by Hans van Meegeren (sic), modern Dutch painter. Soon after the liberation of the Netherlands Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration with the Germans and is now in prison awaiting trial. The press agency Anepaneta, which operates as a government mouthpiece, asserted a few days ago that Van Meegeren had made a statement that he himself painted the supposed Vermeers… Art experts say they are not convinced that the statements attributed to Van Meegeren are true. The director of the Rotterdam Museum said the prisoner was a fantasist who had a grudge against museums and similar institutions. A painting restorer in The Hague said that if one of the disputed works which he transferred to new canvas recently, “Pilgrims to Emmaus” [“Supper at Emmaus”] was indeed a forgery, then the painter must be considered a genius in that particular line.
“A genius in that particular line.” But what “particular line” is this? If the painting was indeed a forgery, then must the painter be considered a genius? Incredulity followed by skepticism. The Times article continued:
“If the rumors prove to be true,” the newspaper ["Volkskrant"] said, “then the best experts and completely reputable persons have been the dupes of a deception which was fashioned with unparalleled skill and in which, besides the forger himself, many middlemen must have taken part…” Van Meegeren and other major figures in the Netherlands charged with collaboration have yet to be brought to trial.
Van Meegeren was one of the “major figures in the Netherlands charged with collaboration.”
Time magazine was more forthright in their appraisal. In an account dated just 10 days after the Times article (Time, July 30, 1945), Van Meegeren is unambiguously described as a “Dutch Nazi.”
When the exquisite Christ at Emmaus was found in the linen closet of a Paris house (TIME, Sept. 19, 1938) it was one of the big art stories of the decade… Last week, a Dutch Nazi confessed that he had painted the “Vermeer” himself — and, what’s more, had knocked off six others, plus two Pieter de Hooches for good measure… The master picture-forger was one Hans van Meegeren, a little-known Dutch artist. Although he worshiped Adolf Hitler, he felt no compunction about unloading a fake on fellow Nazi Hermann Göring. Göring got Christ and the Adulteress in a trade for 173 paintings… Some Dutch art experts, who stand to lose considerable prestige over the affair, just plain don’t believe a word of Van Meegeren’s story.
But just what was it that they didn’t believe? Presumably, that he had really painted these “masterpieces” himself. They wanted him to prove it. And so, Van Meegeren was asked to paint yet one more forgery, “Christ in the Temple.” But of course, it really wasn’t a forgery. This time the authorities knew that Van Meegeren was the painter.
Getty ImagesVan Meegeren paints “Christ in the Temple.”
Over two years after Van Meegeren’s arrest, he was put on trial in Amsterdam. On Oct. 29, 1947, The Times reported the following:
Hans van Meegeren (sic), the Dutch painter who shocked the art world by foisting a series of false Vermeers, Pieter de Hoghs and other old masters on experts, finally was placed on trial in District Court here today. He pleaded guilty and the state demanded a sentence of two years’ imprisonment. The charge on which Van Meegeren was arraigned specified that he sold works bearing the spurious signatures of famous artists. It was not a simple case of forgery, inasmuch as the defendant created the works after the style of the seventeenth century masters, without actually copying any of their canvases…
And then on Nov. 12, The Times reported that Van Meegeren had been sentenced to a year in prison. Asked outside the courtroom for his reaction to the sentence, Van Meegeren simply said, “I think I must take it as a good sport.”
Getty Images: Van Meegeren on trial.
How did he do it? Why did he do it? Newspapers reveal the thinking and confusions of their time, but they don’t necessarily provide answers. Was Van Meegeren a collaborator or an artist? Or both? And if he was a genius, what was his genius? His ability to trick people? Or was he able to trick people because he was an artist of genius? Who was Van Meegeren? A con man or Nazi? Did he forge paintings solely for monetary reward or was something more sinister involved?
To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more. ..
