Errol Morris' New York Times essays about film, art, and photography are always astounding. He just let me know that he's posted the first in a seven-part series about frauds and fakes for the New York Times' ZOOM blog. This one is about the Vermeers forger Han van Meegeren, who is the subject of two recent books: Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell and Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers.
Over two years after Van Meegeren’s arrest, he was put on trial in Amsterdam. On Oct. 29, 1947, The Times reported the following:(UPDATE: Part 2 is up, which is an interview with Edward Dolnick about how the "Uncanny Valley" applies to forgeries.)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.”
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My deceased Grandfather's book (Otto Kurtz-Fakes, 1967)certainly added a lot of fun into the typical art museum trip. He covered almost every medium from antiquity to the 20th century. After reading, you realize that so much on display is of dubious origins. Of course, many fakes were never originally designed to deceive, only over time have their provenances become deliberately or accidentally manipulated. The collector of old who couldn't afford a work would often had someone replicate it without thought of deception, merely as an object to decorate.
Frank Wynne's I Was Vermeer, published in 2006, is another engaging take on the Han van Meegeren story (Amazon). It was Radio 4 Book of the Week. Before Frank wrote the book, it was going to be a film project by my ex, himself a fraudster.
Thanks - absolutely enraptured! The New Yorker had a great piece on these books as well back in November. An excellent companion piece!
Keep the art forgery posts coming!
#3 Gnosis: That was xlnt. van Meegeren suckering Goering, I think. Thomas Hoving, former Met curator, also wrote a good book on art fakes: False Impressions.
Thanks Teller! Also, for a great documentary on a traditional art forger (The kind that copies masterpieces), see Orson Welles' "F FOR FAKE". It's a piece of art (and meta-commentary on forgery) in it's own right.
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/21/fool-all-of-the-peop.html
And dear Jesus God! It's bad enough that in every BB story about robots someone thinks it's clever to mention the uncanny valley, now we have to read about it in art stories too?
The series continues to go deeper and become more and more fascinating. It all makes me think of Borge’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.