Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers

This summer I'll be in Rotterdam visiting the exhibition on Van Meegeren's forgeries. This is a truely fascination one, not to be missed. Musea tend to stow away their fakes once they are unmasked. The works are condemned to a life in the museum depot, some art experts cannot live with the shame the art has brought upon their reputation and that of the museum.

We wouldn't be fooled anymore by the ghostly, sickly looking figures Van Meegeren painted. But I always take Van Meegeren as a good example and a warning for my own budding research.
- Always take a sceptical stance on everything. Never take anything for granted!
- Even people who are experts in the field make mistakes (in this case one worth 540,00 guilders)
- Science does not provide a 100% conclusive answer (but it sure helps).
Paul Coremans summed it up rather nicely.

From the exhibition press release:
The exhibition ‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers’ includes approximately ten forgeries by Han van Meegeren (1889-1947). Most are in the style of Johannes Vermeer, but the works also include forgeries of Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch. Van Meegeren’s life as a forger is further illuminated through a documentary film and objects from his studio.

A masterpiece
In 1937 the director of Museum Boymans, Dirk Hannema, purchased ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ for 540,000 guilders. There was great interest in the painting, which most experts believed to be an early masterpiece by Vermeer. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam even offered Vermeer’s ‘The Love Letter’ in exchange for the painting, but Hannema rejected the offer. Museum Boymans exhibited the work as one of the highlights of its collection and art experts praised the work’s high quality.

Exposure
At the end of the Second World War a painting from the Netherlands was found in the collection of the Nazi minister, Hermann Göring. The painting was traced back to Han van Meegeren, who was immediately arrested on suspicion of collaboration. Van Meegeren admitted to having sold the work, but also claimed to have made the painting himself. He had sold Göring a forgery. Van Meegeren’s confession became worldwide news and he was hailed as a hero as ‘the man who swindled Göring’. Meanwhile the art world was thrown into disarray. Van Meegeren demonstrated his forgery techniques to an expert panel and during his trial his forgeries were hung in the courtroom, as can be seen in the documentary film included in the exhibition.

Reassessment
Van Meegeren’s technique remains exceptional. For his masterpiece ‘The Supper at Emmaus’, Van Meegeren used a genuine seventeenth-century canvas and historical pigments. He bound the pigments with bakelite, which hardened when heated to produce a surface very similar to that of a seventeenth-century painting. This technique, combined with Van Meegeren’s choice of subject matter and composition, was an important factor in convincing so many people of the authenticity of his works. Van Meegeren created the missing link between Vermeer’s early and late works. The exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen sheds new light on Van Meegeren’s technique, resulting from new technical research undertaken by the Rijksmuseum.

Again, as I have done earlier, I suggest reading Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century and the 1949 book Van Meegeren's faked Vermeers and De Hooghs written by Paul Coremans, who was involved in Van Meegeren's trial and gave evidence as an expert witness. I still haven't been able to pick up Jonathan Lopez' The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren. I hope it will be on sale in the bookshop at the exhibition.