Book Review: The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Edward Dolnick

Reader #82 wrote: THE FORGER'S SPELL: A TRUE STORY OF VERMEER, NAZIS, AND THE GREATEST ART HOAX OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Edward Dolnick
(ISBN-13 978-0-06-082541-6, ISBN-10 0-06-082541-3) is primarily about Han van Meegeren, a painter who forged several Vermeers which fooled even the leading art critics of the day. Dolnick goes into a lot of technical detail of how van Meegeren did this, and even more on the psychology of convincing people that forgeries are real. He also explains how critics in the 1930s were fooled but we can tell immediately these are fakes. One reason, he says, is that van Meegeren's women have features that were considered beautiful in the 1930s when he painted them, but not now. So while his audience saw beauty, we do not. He actually makes a science fiction connection, saying, "science fiction always tells as much about the era when it was created as about the era it tries to imagine. In the future as it was
portrayed in the fifties, for instance, husbands commuted to work in personal rockets and wives stayed home and cooked up meals in a pill. For a decade or two, readers found it all quite plausible." (page 221)

One might compare this to films. We can look at a film made about Troy for example, and be able to tell whether it was made in the 1930s, the 1950s, the 1980s, or the 2000s. Even if someone tries to make a film now that looks old, there are often things that give it away. Some are technical, but others are harder to define. The Timothy Hines version of WAR OF THE WORLDS was made to look Edwardian--though obviously no one was making color sound films then--but it is clearly a product of the 2000s rather than, say, the 1950s.

I have two quibbles with THE FORGER'S SPELL. One is that the book is told in a strange order. For the first hundred pages Dolnick talks about Nazi art looting and thefts, then he jumps back to the creation and selling of forged Vermeers in the 1920s and 1930s. As each major character is introduced Dolnick has to jump back in time again to give the background of that character, which gives the narrative a "stop-and-start" quality. Then he finishes with the discovery of the forgeries, after the war. So Dolnick tells the middle chapter of the story, then the beginning, and then the end.

It is not until the epilogue that Dolnick addresses why a painting thought to be by painter X is worth millions, but whenit turns out to be by painter Y, it is worth $1.98. (Actually, good forgeries are worth more than that, but as curiosities rather than as art.) We have this idea that art should be valued as art, but it seems that much of it is valued as relic. Van Meegeren asked, "Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it from free. But the picture has not changed. What has?"

Dolnick's answer is three-fold. First, "the world was full of people who thought of themselves as art lovers but were in fact merely snobs." Second, he quotes Alfred Lessing, who said that Vermeer was great because "he painted certain pictures in a certain manner at a certain time in the history and development of art." And lastly, Dolnick says, "When we praise a work of art, we have in mind not only the finished product but the way that product was made. ... [The] forger has the unfair advantage of working from someone else's model." (page 291) Grade: B.