The Man Who Made Vermeers
By Jonathan Lopez
Harcourt, $26

In the August issue of Art & Antiques, I reviewed Edward Dolnick’s The Forger’s Spell, about Han van Meegeren, whose fake Vermeers sold for millions and duped the top experts in the 1930s and ’40s. Dolnick’s book is very good, but I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the fact that a better one came out afterward. Artist and journalist Jonathan Lopez delved deeper into primary sources than Dolnick did, and has therefore produced a subtler, more nuanced account that adds significant detail to the story. Lopez’s achievement is due in no small part to his ability to read Dutch.

That Van Meegeren was an antifascist Dutch patriot who took delight in swindling the Nazis by selling them fakes is a myth that got started at the forger’s trial in 1947 and stuck. Dolnick took pains to dispel it; in his account, Van Meegeren was an amoral con artist who cared only about himself and making money, and was glad to collaborate with the invaders if need be. Lopez goes further; in his account, Van Meegeren is revealed as a fascist sympathizer, and the circles he ran in were right-wing nationalist ones. Politics and aesthetics were intertwined in those days, and Van Meegeren’s churlish attitude toward modernism was shared by a group of like-minded Dutchmen, mainly Catholic traditionalists, who yearned for a return to what they imagined was Holland’s Golden Age greatness. This blood-and-soil ideology drew inspiration from Nazism, and Lopez shows how the schmaltzy, overdramatic style with which Van Meegeren, the former society portraitist, imbued his pseudo-Vermeers is akin to the Nazi aesthetic. By placing Van Meegeren more firmly in his cultural context than he has yet been, this book adds much to our understanding of how he succeeded in his crimes and of how wrong and evil ideas can corrupt art and artists.