On books.(ANTIQUES)(The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren)(Book review)

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez. Harcourt, Orlando, Florida, 2008

A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime," wrote Edgar Degas. "Paint falsely, and then add the accent of nature."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Maybe Han Van Meegeren knew this sardonic piece of advice. In any case he followed it, more literally than Degas intended. He had a spectacular career in the genre of pictorial knavery, trickery, and deceit. No one ever painted falsely so successfully. The Dutchman was the greatest art forger of all time. An accomplished society portrait artist in The Hague during the 1920s and 1930s, he led a secret life counterfeiting paintings by Johannes Vermeer, his specialty, as well as a few attributed to Frans Hals and other seventeenth-century Dutch masters, becoming in the process one of the richest artists in Europe. He fooled just about everybody, including eminent art connoisseurs and museum curators.

Then just after World War II he did something even more astonishing. He forged himself. He was forced to confess his fabrications while under interrogation by a Dutch Resistance officer about his murky involvement in the sale of a "Vermeer" to Hermann Goering, which the officer had assumed to be a legitimate painting looted from victims of the Nazis. But Van Meegeren claimed to have deliberately duped Goering with a fake and maintained that he had only become a forger in the first place to exact revenge on the critics who had disparaged the nostalgic paintings he exhibited under his own name.

As Jonathan Lopez shows in his new biography, Van Meegeren's story painted over several inconvenient facts. He was already making his lucrative fakes to support a luxurious lifestyle in the early 1920s, before he began fighting with critics. And while he was not an active collaborator with the German occupiers of the Netherlands during the war, he had been a fascist sympathizer since the early 1930s.

But the fictitious Van Meegeren worked as well as the fictitious Vermeers. In the postwar mood of the Netherlands, the trickster who had fooled both Nazis and art experts became a folk hero. A quick-witted, affable man with a conspicuous fondness for drink and women, Van Meegeren was celebrated in Holland and elsewhere as the "genial forger." And with exquisite timing, he died of heart failure before anyone saw through all the illusions of his life.