“It is ironic, I guess, but art is ambiguous,” curator Friso Lammertse said of the exhibition, which runs until August 12. “Of course, forgery is wrong. But Van Meegeren was a master of his craft, that of forgery.”

Museum to showcase the work of art forger

RTE News - A Dutch museum is to host an exhibition focusing on the work of an art forger who famously conned the same museum out of a small fortune seven decades ago.
The Boijmans van Beuningen museum in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam is to showcase the tricks and tools of Han van Meegeren. read on>>

One of van Meegeren’s greatest achievements came in 1937 when he persuaded the museum to part with 540,000 guilders, about €4.5m today, for what it believed was a previously unknown work by the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer.

‘It is ironic, I guess, but art is ambiguous,’ curator Friso Lammertse said of the exhibition, which runs until August 12.

‘Of course, forgery is wrong. But Mr van Meegeren was a master of his craft, that of forgery.’

Enjoying pride of place in the exhibition is the fake Vermeer, ‘The Supper at Emmaus,’ which drew huge crowds at the time. ‘People stood in silent reverence before this painting,’ said Mr Lammertse.

Entitled ‘Van Meegeren’s Fake Vermeers,’ the exhibition includes some of the forgeries he sold before he died in 1947, test canvasses found in his studio and some of his forging methods.

There is a painting ‘Woman playing the lute’ in the style of Vermeer, torn and damaged so as to appear old, a wine glass van Meegeren duplicated in some paintings, and tubes of pigments found at his villa in Nice, France.

Also on display is a book of poetry he gave to the former museum director Dirk Hannema, signed: ‘In admiration of his work.’

Mr Hannema had bought ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ for the museum.

Painted by van Meegeren around 1937, it was described by the renowned art publication The Burlington Magazine as ‘The masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer’.

The canvas was widely accepted as a rare example of the Dutch painter’s earlier work.

‘The art world found what it was looking for,’ Mr Lammertse said. ‘That tends to diminish critical judgment.’

Born in 1889, van Meegeren never received the critical acclaim he sought as an artist in his own right, the museum says.

On trial for forgery in 1947, he said he had entered the dubious craft ‘to put the experts, who control the art trade, to the test’.

‘Like most people, he wanted ever-lasting fame,’ said Mr Lammertse. ‘In a way, he did become world famous though nobody knew then that it was his work. That must have given him some degree of satisfaction.’

Van Meegeren started out painting works in the style of Frans Hals, later switching to Vermeer after the success of ‘The Supper at Emmaus’.

He painted his fakes on original 17th century canvasses. He scraped off the old paint, used natural pigments common at the time of Vermeer, cracked the dried surfaces, and smeared Indian ink into the cracks to make the works look authentic.

He also used Bakelite, a synthetic resin developed in the first half of the 20th century, heating the finished product in an oven to harden the surface.

This allowed his canvasses to withstand the so-called ‘alcohol test’ of the time, which would see a drop of alcohol wiped over the paint surface to check that it did not dissolve - a sign of a modern painting or a fake.

At the height of a successful forging career, van Meegeren was arrested in May 1945 on suspicion of collaboration after selling a fake Vermeer to Nazi air force chief Hermann Goering.

The arrest came after the sale of ‘Christ and the woman taken in adultery,’ for 1.65m gilder was traced back to him.

To avoid going to jail for selling Dutch cultural heritage to the Nazis, he soon admitted he had painted that canvas and others, including ‘The Supper at Emmaus’.

Many of the items now on display were exhibits at the subsequent trial, at the end of which he was found guilty of forgery and sentenced to one year in jail.

He died of a heart attack shortly after the verdict aged 58.

This entry was posted on dinsdag, mei 25th, 2010 at 5:12 am and is filed under Misdaad, Geld, Kunst, World on the Dutch, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.