A mediocre Dutch artist cast 'the forger's spell' (2008)
npr.org
npr.org
The art world is not a meritocracy, excellent artists can languish because their ideas are out of fashion or too far ahead of the public's taste (van Gogh being the most famous example). The condescending tone of this article is an irritating distraction from the interesting-sounding book it promotes.
Unfortunately I cannot remember the specifics of the critique of his original paintings but it revolved around him being overly focused on classical technique and applying it to trite contemporary still lifes which were not considered of interest at the time.
I remember a lot more about what was said on his forgeries, which were described as genius on 2 counts:
1. He utilized cutting edge technology (bakelite plastic) to emulate the hardening process of centuries old oil paint. This defeated all the standard tests for aging oil paint.
2. He tapped into the desires of the art historical community. Vermeer's paintings fall into two distinct styles without a clear transition between the two. This was a hot topic at the time and art historians were hoping to find a painting (or paintings) which showed a clear transition between Vermeer's early and late work. Van Meegeren intentionally created paintings to fit this transition phase.
The book also reveals in great detail how the forgeries were not actually executed very well from a technical painting perspective. There are images in the book and they show really badly proportioned figures, broken use of perspective, etc. The quality of the earlier forgeries is definitely better then the later ones but they all have issues.
People wanted these paintings to be real so badly that he didn't need to work hard to trick them.
Doesn't that also describe half of the work of "great artists"? When they were painted they were just "some lady I know" or "some guys standing in a room".
It's the same with the talk about modern AI art. Does it devalue art because it's not made by people? The same image made by AI, a modern artist, or an old master, has a completely different value because of who made it.
So Van Meegeren's style not interesting when he painted it, because it's old fashioned, but it is interesting when people think it's painted by Vermeer. It wasn't old fashioned then; it was revolutionary. The historic context is really different. It's clearly not about the picture itself, it's about the history, the cultural significance, the context.
I'm super pessimistic about the art world and I agree with you to some extent but I think what you are missing is that art/art history is a conversation amongst a bunch of stakeholders (artists, galleries, museums, critics, viewers, etc) and what is considered important art at any given moment changes as this conversation progresses.
Someone making a perfect classical oil painting today (without doing something to make it engage with the current conversation) is akin to coming up with the perfect come-back to an argument you had a week ago and then trying to bringing it up in an unrelated conversation today.
My mother used to be an artisan in a theatre and she had to come up with creative ways to make incompatible materials work together on a daily basis.
Still, that wasn't art.
The movie notably includes this brilliant quote by Elmyr de Hory: “Guilty? Of what? Making masterpieces?”.
He forged art, made money by selling it to literal Nazis, and blew the money on hookers and palatial houses. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the guy?
I do have complicated thoughts on the same piece of art being valued completely differently depending on if it's signed by person X or person Y, but for better or worse this is very much a thing.
Could be re-written as “via deception/trickery, deprived Nazis of monetary resources and increased the wealth of working ladies and tradespersons he associated with.”
He gave Nazis something with zero practical use in exchange for huge amounts of money. This is a bad thing?
That doesn't make taking them from Nazis bad. It would be better if he took cash from them, but again he only gave the guy a painting, he didn't help the Nazis. And better he have the paintings then a major Nazi, even as stolen property. The absolute worst option would be the Nazis selling the pile of art for cash.
He imitated a wide variety of painters and even got one of them (Karel Appel) to authenticate a forgery as real.
He later opened a gallery where he now sells paintings signed under his own name in the style of several famous painters with very different styles. He's made quite a nice career doing that since he got caught.
When he was still forging, he sold lots of paintings and drawings via auction houses all over Europe and it is suspected that there were quite a few that were never found out or where the owner decided to not press charges for financial reasons. So, there are likely to still be some of his forgeries in private collections.
What the article doesn’t say is that he originally was charged with selling Dutch cultural property to the Nazis, for which he could have gotten the death penalty.
That made him confess that he sold a forgery. They didn’t believe it, so he “painted his last forgery between July and December 1945 in the presence of reporters and court-appointed witnesses: Jesus among the Doctors, also called Young Christ in the Temple in the style of Vermeer.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#Trial_and_pri...)
That got him of the hook for the death penalty, but also, of course, 100% unmasked him as a forgerer.
Not to mention how selling undetectable forgeries to Nazis turns two wrongs into a right. Possibly an accidental one; he doesn't sound like the kind of guy who was in it to fight fascism; it's just that the people he defrauded happened to be the worst kind of bad guys, turning him into an accidental hero.
A "mediocre" artist is able to make "masterpieces" if he pretends they were done by somebody else.
Somehow, one is acceptable, while the other is quite obviously nonsense, absurd fetishization due to bias.
What makes art so special? Especially when it is generally said that what makes a master is not simply technique, but their unique 'eye', perception of the world, way to express things in a certain harmony with technique and the zeitgeist. The profound feelings that people have in connection with art depend on what the opinion of others actually is, despite the apparent universality of the art language. The crime of forgery, within the art world, is similar to forbid anyone to express wrong theorems or false mathematical statements because of course, you wouldn't be able to distinguish that from the real mathematics of Gauss.