When Goering went Dutch

I read first of this episode in Irving Wallace's book - The Sunday Gentleman.

After the Allied had won WW-II, and had got their hands on Field Marshall Hermann Goering's large private art collection, there surfaced the curious case of a Vermeer. Vermeer was a famous Dutch artist, who, like most artists was not popular in his time but later became popular

This always reminds me of what Abhishek N Singh said in the Art and Tech class to Sanil...

"Sir, if I paint some rubbish today, no-one will like it, but 200 years from now, everyone will say that the rubbish I made is very good and N Singh was a great man."

Anyway, Vermeer had a tiff with the Dutch historian Houbraken, (Vermeer was a 17th century artist), because of which Houbraken did not mention him in his book The Great Theatre of Dutch Painters. Since this was the bible of all art critics, no one even considered Vermeer.

Then, in 1865, a Frenchman named Burger-Thore became interested in Vermeer, bought some of his works, and showed it to the rest of the world, and Vermeer became very popular...

Now, a certain Dutch expert was interested in knowing how Goering got the Vermeer, and so sedulously examined all of Goering's papers and files, and found a receipt marked paid in Amsterdam... this meant that the painting was sold to Goering by a Dutch!! Somebody was doing business with the Nazi No. 2. Outrageous!!

So the Dutch police and govt got involved, and looked here, high and low, and through a series of arrests and interrogations, found that the ultimate source was Hans van Meegeren, an artist in Amsterdam. So they arrested van Meegeren, and found that he had actually sold six Vermeers in his life so far, the last of which went to Goering. He also claimed to have got the Vermeers from a collection in Italy. This thus could possible mean from the Italian fascists, and hence van Meegeren got arrested.

After a long questioning and interrogation, which lasted weeks, van Meegeren finally broke down... and confessed... (this is the twist in the tale)

"You idiots! You fools! I sold no national treasure to the Germans. I sold no Vermeer. I sold a van Meegeren! I sold a Vermeer forged with my own hands!"

Van Meegeren confessed that from 1937 to 1943, he had faked six Vermeers. His paintings were different kinds of forgeries, he did not make copies of masterpieces, he copied the style of the old masters to make his own paintings, and passed them off as newly found paintings of the old masters.

His confession started as follows:

"Driven by the psychological effect of being disappointed in not being acknowledged by my fellow artists and critics, on a fatal day in 1936 I decided upon proving to the world my value as a painter and resolved to make a perfect seventeenth-centure painting."

So, if van Meegeren was lying (which implied that he had sold a real Vermeer to Goering), he stood of being tried as a traitor. If, however, he was saying the truth, this implied that the remaining 5 Vermeers that he had sold (which were now in museums across the world), were fakes... a crime but of a different degree, of a global degree.

The Dutch police so summoned Dutch Art Critics, who all dismissed van Meegeren's confession as words of a raving lunatic (they would, else it would mean that they were wrong!!). In the end, the Dutch authorities came to a conclusion... why not let ven Meegeren paint a painting now, and let this seventh portrait decide. The fourth estate had a field day, with headlines of the order of

"Artist paints for his life"

Van Meegeren finished his painting, and a team of international art experts from Oxford, Harvard, etc. studied this painting. They were to report by May 1946... they could not come to a decision. So the date was postponed to September 1946, and still there was no decision.

Van Meegeren also said that he had made the first Vermeer just to show that he was very good, and had shown this painting to a former leading Dutch critic - Dr. Abraham Bredius. Dr. Bredius was 90, and was delighted that someone still valued his advice... and needless to say, gave it his seal of authenticity. He also wrote:

"It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas and without restoration, just as it left the painter's studio!... We have here a - I am inclined to say the - masterpiece of Jan Vermeer of Delft."

Van Meegeren was delighted at fooling his mortal enemies (since they had rejected his own works of art, they were too classical...), and hence made more forgeries, selling them for an equivalent amount of more than 2 million dollors. However, his final painting went to Goering (even though he had specifically asked his dealer to ensure that it did not go to a Nazi... the dealer also thought that it was an original Vermeer, not eve van Meegeren's wife knew of the forgeries), and on hearing this, van Meegeren quit.

In return, van Meegeren got $250,000 and also a huge load of old Dutch paintings, which led to him claiming at his trial and confession that he was in reality a Dutch national hero... which he had anyway become in the eyes of the public by showing that the art critics were a bunch of senile idiots.

Finally, it was proved that Van Meegeren was right, the paintings were forgeries (a resin was found in the paintings that was not discovered when Vermeer had made them). But van Meegeren was dead by then... but the Dutch public still loved him. Further details of the story can be found here.

So, many of the Vermeer's were fakes, in fact, a few reals were also labeled a fake (see here, for example) since, how can you ever trust a crook.

But this does beg the question of not only if other masterpieces are real, but if not being painted by Vermeer actually lessen the value of the paintings. Do art critics actually know of what they are talking about? And since van Meegeren actually did all this just to show to critics that he was smarter than them, does this still make those paintings as works of art as we understand the word. Does motivation on the artist's side towards production of a work of art have anything to do with it being labeled a work of art (particularly in cases when the artist is dead, and thus we cannot know his motivations).

I will deal with a couple of other more interesting questions later.