Video: Jonathan Lopez on The Man Who Made Vermeers

Jonathan Lopez discusses Vermeer and Old Master forgery -

recorded at the Cleveland Museum of Art on November 11, 2009.

Houston Chronicle Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez

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Fascist forger’s bio a great flashlight read
Douglas Britt / Houston Chronicle

The electricity came back on in my house last night, which means today I’m transitioning away from directing pious glares of disapproval at the power haves to offering cringeing, apologetic gazes to the power have-nots. If it’s any consolation, I’ll tell them, knowing full well that it’s not, we still don’t have cable or Internet access. I’ll miss the badge of martyrdom, but I’d rather have the A/C.

However, my time as a have-not gave me a new litmus test to apply when recommending books to friends, and I can say with authority that Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren makes for a terrific read, even by flashlight as you lay on top of sweat-soaked sheets wishing you’d thought to buy a battery-operated fan before Hurricane Ike struck.

Any reasonably capable writer could have made the story of Van Meegeren, who got rich forging and selling fake Old Master paintings — including a Vermeer to Hermann Goering — a page turner, and Lopez certainly does that.

But he also digs deeper, showing that what made Van Meegern’s fake Vermeer’s successful was not so much their similarity to the real things — which, in fact, declined as his career progressed — as his ability to make the paintings resonate with the zeitgeist of the period between the two world wars, when fascism was on the rise. He also effectively “reclaimed” (i.e., invented) a “lost” period of religious paintings from Vermeer’s career that lent itself to the subtle symbolic coding that allowed art-world experts to see what they wanted to see in paintings that today, even in black-and-white reproduction, look unbelievably kitschy.

And Lopez shows how Van Meegeren duped Lt. Joseph Piller, the young Jewish Dutchman who first arrested him for trading with the Nazis, into turning a blind eye to the crook’s history of support for fascism and helping create the popular image of the forger as an artist driven by the contempt of unfair modernist critics to show the world, including the Nazis, what he was capable of. In fact, Lopez writes, Van Meegeren’s early work as an artist in his own right, while stylistically conservative, was fairly well received and declined, along with critics’ opinions of it, only after he steeped himself in forgery and forever muddled his own artistic voice even as his technical mastery grew.

If Lopez’s book is that compelling by flashlight, I can only imagine what reading it with the lights on is like.

Errol Morris: More Bamboozling

By Errol Morris / New York Times

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...

Read the rest of this installment at the NYTimes.com>