Fake, Fortune, and Bakelite: Part one

If you have not yet discovered Fake or Fortune? on YouTube, you have a pleasurable few evenings ahead of you. The program is a BBC production hosted by art journalist Fiona Bruce and art dealer Philip Mould, and the premise is simple enough: someone owns a painting that might be very valuable, might be historically significant, and might be neither, but usually there is something wrong with it, which may or may not be fatal to its owner’s fortune, for example it is not signed by the artist, or it has suddenly appeared out of nowhere, or it was supposedly once gifted by the painter to a Russian ballet dancer whom nobody has ever been able to identify. In the show, Bruce and Mould rigorously investigate the claim, deploying art historians, laboratory scientists, and the occasionally terrifying gatekeepers of official artist catalogs, and the whole thing moves along with enough tension to justify the question mark in the title. The show started in 2011 and the YouTube archives contain more than 30 episodes. It is, by some distance, the most entertaining thing the BBC has produced about the art market, which admittedly is not a crowded field. The most interesting aspect, however, is not really about art at all. It is all about human greed and vanity. After watching a number of episodes involving dusty landscapes, disappointed widows, and men in cravats arguing over brushstrokes, I stumbled upon the extraordinary story of Hans van Meegeren, the Dutch forger who managed to fool not only the entire international art world, but also senior Nazi art collectors during the Second World War. At that point the program stopped feeling like a pleasant BBC arts documentary and started resembling a Graham Greene novel written after too much sherry. Van Meegeren was not some backstreet con man painting fake Monets on wrapping paper in a garden shed with an art store paintbox. He was a super-intelligent, knowledgeable, and technically gifted artist who became embittered after critics dismissed his own paintings as mediocre. Instead of arguing with the experts, he decided upon a more entertaining strategy: he would humiliate them. And that is what he did. The really ingenious thing was that he understood something fundamental about experts. Specialists do not merely authenticate objects. They also authenticate stories and storytellers. The art establishment of the 1930s desperately wanted to discover previously unknown religious paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, because relatively few Vermeers existed and scholars had long believed there might be missing early works still waiting to be found. Vermeer left us only thirty-four or thirty-five confirmed paintings. His known output was tiny, and his reputation so immense, that any discovery of a lost Vermeer would have been the art-world equivalent of finding a previously unknown Shakespeare play tucked inside a box in the Ann Hathaway house, museum, and gift shop in Stratford-upon-Avon. So van Meegeren composed and executed paintings that were exactly what the experts had always hoped and wanted to find. His forged Vermeers were not copies of existing paintings. Oh, no, that would have been far too easy to expose. Instead, he created plausible new Vermeers painted during an earlier supposedly religious period of the artist’s life. In other words, he forged not merely the paintings but an entire missing chapter of Vermeer’s professional life. That took some cojones. The experts adored his paintings, and the Rijksmuseum, the premier art museum of the Netherlands, paid a world record price for one of his homemade Vermeer masterpieces. In the later years of World War II, one of van Meegeren’s paintings even found its way into the collection of Nazi leader Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which is where the story becomes seriously strange. After the war, Dutch authorities initially accused van Meegeren of collaborating with the Nazis by selling prized Dutch cultural treasures to Göring. Faced with potentially severe punishment up to and including the death penalty, he defended himself with one of the greatest legal arguments in art history: no, he had not sold Göring a Vermeer. As a Dutch patriot, he had sold the Nazi leader a fake. The authorities did not believe him, so he put on a demonstration of his technique. Then they believed him, and sentenced him to prison anyway. That story, and the extraordinary chemistry behind the forgeries, continues in the next installment. The post Fake, Fortune, and Bakelite: Part one appeared first on CuencaHighLife.