I Was Vermeer: Review

I’m not a visual artist, but I’ve always found art interesting. I enjoy knowing the backstory to works of art, and I enjoy visiting art galleries. So I helped myself to “I was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger” when I found it in the little free library nearby.

Art forgery: I’ve never given it much thought, although I remember my Italian penpal telling me when I visited her in the 1990s about an incident in Italy where someone had forged several modern paintings there, which had been accepted as “real” at first. I guess I’d assumed that forgers would copy an existing work, for instance, trying to replicate the Mona Lisa.

That’s not what happened with Han van Meegeren, the forger profiled in this book. Han’s father was very harsh with his young son, making the 10-year-old once write “I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing” 100 times after a fairly minor offense. Born in 1889, Han loved art and wanted to become an artist, but then as now, it was a rough profession to break into. He began by trying to paint and sell portraits, but he like to paint realistically, and this was often not appreciated (“My husband is not paying you to paint me as I am, but as I ought to be!”). It reminded me of the uproar over the latest portrait of Prince Charles. Van Meegeren tried other artistic ways of earning a living, and was disillusioned when his most successful artwork was a 10-minute sketch he’d made of a deer. The money came in not due to his skill, but because he labeled the deer as belonging to Dutch Queen Juliana. Han preferred classic works of the Masters to modern art, but realized he’d been “born out of time, a realistic artist in an age of surrealism and abstractionism … he had only one option open to him: he would become a forger.”

Han liked the 17th century Dutch artist Vermeer. You may know Vermeer from his most famous painting, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” He decided to forge some Vermeer paintings, meaning that he would paint in Vermeer’s style and attempt to pass off these paintings as being done by Vermeer. He wished to “expose the hypocrisy and venality of the art world.” To do this, he faced four challenges:

• He had to use only pigments and paints Vermeer would have used 250 years ago (no running to Michael’s!) so that a chemical analysis would not reveal his modern paints.
• He purchased 17th century canvases, and had to remove all paint from them so that nothing could be detected by X-ray.
• He had to devise a way to harden the paint so that alcohol testing wouldn’t reveal his forgery (apparently it was common for someone testing a painting to rub an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over the paint and see if any came off. If it did, this indicated a new painting/forgery).
• He had to produce craquelure which indicates an old painting (these are the tiny cracks seen in paintings if you look up close).

Reading about how he accomplished all this was really interesting! In many ways what Han did was more impressive than even what the original artists did. Imagine writing a book, vs writing a book in the style of Jane Austen that was such a good version that even experts would not detect that she hadn’t written it. Wow — quite a feat.

Han did get away with his forgeries for a while. His most famous was “The Supper at Emmaus.” He became insanely rich, but this was a problem because, due to his earnings coming from forgeries, he was unable to deposit his earnings at banks because of questions that would be raised. He bought much land and several houses in cash, and buried other amounts of money in various places on his properties.

With WWII happening, the Nazis were fans of classic great art and Nazi official Hermann Göring bought a Vermeer (actually a van Meegeren) which he prominently displayed in his home. Van Meegeren was arrested after the war for selling art treasures to the Nazi, but during the trial he attempted to prove that what he’d actually sold Göring was a forgery. This proved pretty difficult and was interesting to read about as well. He was sentenced to a year in prison, but before he could serve that, he died (in his 50s) of a heart attack.

The book raised many interesting topics. Apparently it’s still very common for “experts” to mistake “real” paintings with forgeries. There is much disagreement among art experts as to whether certain paintings are real or not. And, who decides what constitutes “real” art? Should it even matter, if the owner likes the art? “Once in a gallery, there is little chance that the forger will be unmasked: we should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls.” At Van Meegeren’s trial, it was noted that none of the “victims” who’d purchased his forgeries were willing to sell them. So was there a real injury to them, or not?

I found this book fascinating although it was a bit difficult to read. There were (understandably) many Dutch names. I wondered at one point if the book might be a translation, but the author is Irish and lives in London, so probably not. But prepare yourself for chapter titles like “A Dirigible Arbitrament” and dig in 🙂