The Sunday Gentleman (46 page)

A zealous Dutch expert, assigned to one of the Allied investigating teams, stumbled upon the fact while glancing curiously through Herr Goering’s private papers and documents. The Dutch expert found a receipt, made out to Goering from Amsterdam, marked “Paid.” It was a receipt for the Vermeer. It proved, conclusively, that someone in the Netherlands had coldly sold the great painting to Goering’s art procurer, Walther Hofer, in 1943 for 1,600,000 gulden. Someone had carried on a business collaboration with the number-two Nazi.

The Dutch expert, studying his evidence, was profoundly shocked. The audacity of it made his outraged patriotic and aesthetic sensibilities swim. For the sale of a Vermeer to an enemy was not an ordinary act of collaboration. Thousands of Dutchmen had cooperated with the Germans, and been caught, and duly blotted out. But if collaboration was a run-of-the-mill crime, the mishandling of a Jan Vermeer was a warped and horrible act. Jan Vermeer, born at Delft in 1632, was and is, like Rembrandt, a Dutch national hero. There have been few internationally great Dutchmen, and of these few, a great percentage were painters. Vermeer is among the foremost of these. Numerous streets and public squares in Holland bear his name. His statue decorates public buildings, and his three dozen authentic works are carefully reproduced and hung in even the poorest homes. His obscure personal history is studied religiously in Dutch classrooms, even as General George Washington is studied in American classrooms. Each of Vermeer’s yellow-and-blue oils is a state treasure—and the sale of one to an enemy is a crime of treason comparable only to the possible kidnapping and sale to an enemy of that other more bulky state treasure, Queen Wilhelmina.

Enraged at his find, the Dutch expert collected the Vermeer painting, the available evidence and scurried back to his government in The Hague. There was a brief meeting, a discussion, and then swiftly the wheels of justice began turning.

The Dutch authorities went directly to the home of the man in Amsterdam who had sold the picture to Goering’s agent. This man was Aloys Miedl, a Bavarian, who had moved to Holland from Germany after marrying a Jewish girl. He had been an old friend of Goering’s, and during the war had sold the Nazi many lesser Dutch objets d’art. But the Dutch authorities did not find Miedl at home. He had fled, weeks before, to Spain. The Dutch then learned that Miedl had acquired the picture from an art dealer in Amsterdam. They hurried to this art dealer. He insisted that he was not to blame. He had only handled the picture on commission for another. And who was the other? A little man named Reinstra. The authorities went after Reinstra. He was a professional go-between, a man who lived by his wits, often persuading artists to permit him to sell their works through dealers on commission. He vehemently disclaimed any knowledge of collaboration. He had obtained the picture from someone else. The authorities were becoming impatient. From whom had Reinstra obtained the Vermeer? From van Meegeren, he said. Hans van Meegeren, an artist in Amsterdam, The authorities went to van Meegeren. He proved to be a gray little man, high-strung, childish, with a half-foxy, half-humorous face. He dwelt, with the unhappy second wife whom he had divorced the year before, in a huge, glittering marble-hailed mansion that squatted on a canal. He was wealthy, owned fifty houses, two nightclubs, and two original old masters (one a Franz Hals). He had made his grubstake, three million dollars, by selling his collection of six Vermeer. Five he had sold to great museums in The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. The sixth Vermeer had been
Christ and the Adultress
. The authorities were curious about only the sixth, the one that had been sold to Goering, Where had he got it? From a collection he had bought in Italy. The authorities jumped at this. He had bought from Italian Fascists? And sold to German Nazis? He was promptly arrested.

Van Meegeren spent three weeks in jail. These weeks were a torment. He was not permitted his bottles of gin. He was not brought his sleeping pills. He became hysterical. He sank into melancholia. He suffered epileptic fits. Then, without being given a reason, he was released. A few days later, just as he was beginning to recover from the experience, the Dutch police reappeared. They arrested him again, and took him to the central station in Amsterdam. There, they began to bombard him with questions. Through midnight into the morning, they grilled him. They wanted him to admit he was a collaborator, to admit he had sold a sacred Vermeer knowingly to the Nazis. He refused. They hammered. Then, as dawn broke, van Meegeren cracked.

“You idiots!” he shrieked at the police. “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 rapidly dictated his confession. He had faked six Vermeer between 1937 and 1943. The first he had sold, as an original Vermeer, to the Boyman’s Museum of Rotterdam. The last he had sold, as an original Vermeer, to Hermann Goering. He had received eight million Dutch gulden, $3,200,000, for these hoaxes. He ranted on that he had fooled respected museum heads who had purchased the paintings, the art historians and scientists who had tested and expertized them, and above all, dozens of European and American art critics who had written glowing reviews of the spurious Vermeer. He had proved, he boasted, that he was as good as the old masters and that the critics who had so long harassed him were asses. He could not be a collaborator, because he had sold no state treasure to the Nazis, only one of his own forgeries.

His police confession was blazoned in print throughout the Netherlands the next morning, and thereafter in newspapers throughout the world. His confession began:

“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-century painting.”

The Dutch police were confused. If the man’s confession was correct, and he was simply a forger, then certainly he could not be a collaborationist. One way or the other, he was guilty of a crime. But the crimes were leagues apart. If he had sold original Vermeer, and was a collaborator, then the case was open and shut, a local affair. On the other hand, if he had painted his oils in the manner of Vermeer, signed the master’s name, and palmed them off as genuine, he was not a collaborator but a faker whose act had international implications. The Dutch police decided to summon the leading Dutch art experts. The police did not have to go far. The art experts were already on hand, at once anxious and indignant. The police asked their opinion. The Vermeer that they had once judged and accepted, they insisted, were still absolutely authentic. Their reputations and livelihoods were based on the authenticity of these Vermeer. They dared not be made fools of now. Van Meegeren, they chorused, was a drunken scoundrel for claiming the authorship of such classics. He had not forged and sold fake Vermeer. He had obtained and resold authentic Vermeer. Their opinion was unanimous, and they were stuck with it.

The controversy raged in the press, the cafes, the homes of Holland. It fanned out into London, Paris, Rome. It trickled into New York and Chicago. One way or the other, Hans van Meegeren was a criminal. That was clear. But again that was not the important point. The important point was that the oft-debated question of the absolute knowledge and integrity of experts, upon whose judgments museums and private collectors were dependent, and of critics, upon whose opinions the layman was dependent, stood on trial. For if van Meegeren was a forger, he had proved that, while there were numerous honest and competent men in the world of art, there were also those who judged too hurriedly and impulsively, those who praised too often according to signature and not merit, those who did not know what was true and what was false. To make this point against his own critics, a point which he claimed provoked his gigantic hoax, van Meegeren begged to be declared guilty of forgery. And on the other side, his rivals, the dealers, essayists, museum heads, art detectives, the whole camp intimately involved and committed, fought bitterly to have him proved not guilty of this charge.

Were the six Vermeer, hanging in great museums and galleries, were they by Jan Vermeer (1632-1675) or by Hans van Meegeren (1889-?)?

The Netherlands authorities debated. Then one minor official, inheritor of the mantle of Solomon, made a suggestion. Why not let Hans van Meegeren paint, under police supervision and in full view of all concerned, a new forgery in the manner of Vermeer? This seventh portrait might prove, once and forever, whether he was capable of forging an old master so magnificently or whether he was merely trying to save himself from collaborationist charges. The proposition was made. Van Meegeren happily agreed. The experts unhappily agreed. The newspapers, elated, printed banner headlines—ARTIST PAINTS FOR HIS LIFE!

Less than a year ago, van Meegeren began his peculiar labor of defense. The authorities requisitioned a large studio, but barred its windows like a prison. The authorities permitted him to acquire all the necessary canvas, oils, other materials, but refused to allow him the months of planning and study he claimed he had found necessary in the past. The authorities presented him with a daily ration of Burgundy wine, extra packs of scarce cigarettes, a bottle of sleeping tablets, but they left insensitive police guards to hover in his studio night and day.

“I’m enjoying it,” he told a friend who visited him at work. “But it is difficult. I do not have the exact oils and I do not have the time to think. They rush me. And they look over my shoulder when I work. Still, I believe it will be beautiful. But outside, they are against me. They’ve already judged this work. They will stare at it, and knowing it is not a Vermeer, they will cluck their tongues and say well done, well done, but really, it is not Vermeer. They will find tiny flaws now to prove this is not a seventeenth-century work, and they will say that a madman could not forge an old master.”

As van Meegeren’s oil took shape, it proved to be a depiction of the Child Christ in the Temple of the Elders. Six figures on a broad canvas. All the famed Vermeer trademarks were in it—the exquisite rich yellows and blues, the refinement of technique, the pointillé touch. Physically, the work was foolproof—seventeenth-century linen used for the canvas, the paint overheated exactly as Vermeer and Rembrandt had overheated their paints, the brushes made of badger hair the same as the brushes wielded by artists of the 1600’s.

At last, the job. Exhibit A, was done. The Dutch authorities appointed a special jury of international art experts, including authorities from Oxford University, Harvard University, and the Rijks Museum of Amsterdam to study it. Van Meegeren’s fate would depend entirely on the jury’s report. A decision would be reached in May, 1946. But the month of May came and went, and the jury reached no conclusion. A new date was announced. A decision would be made public in September, 1946. This month came and passed. Still, the jury studied, meditated, debated, wrangled. Few who followed the case were surprised at the delay. They pointed out that determining the origin of a really well-done oil, which stood on trial for forgery, was often as difficult as deciding the guilt of a defendant, on circumstantial evidence, in a nearly perfect murder. Many remembered the bitter battle, seventeen years before, surrounding the authenticity of a second
La Belle Ferronnière
by Leonardo da Vinci. On that occasion, a Mrs. Andrée Hahn, who’d had the da Vinci in her family for years, was frustrated in her effort to sell it to the Kansas City Art Institute for $250,000 because the English expert. Sir Joseph Duveen, judged it a fraud, a mere student’s copy of the alleged da Vinci original that hung in the Louvre. Mrs. Hahn haled the English expert into court. For almost three weeks, expert argued against expert. Sir Joseph contended that the da Vinci in the Louvre had been in the possession of France for four hundred years and was unquestionably by the master’s hand and that Mrs. Hahn’s painting was a copy. Mrs. Hahn’s rebuttal was spearheaded by George Sortais, who arrived from Paris to insist that the da Vinci in the Louvre was an inferior copy made by Beltraffio and that unquestionably Mrs. Hahn’s was the original. In the end, no conclusive decision was reached on which da Vinci was the original and which the copy, although it was announced in print that Mrs. Hahn withdrew her suit against Duveen “in return for an indemnity of $60,-000.”

Today, as in the case of many such precedents, the van Meegeren controversy is, understandably, still at a stalemate behind locked doors. A special gallery in Amsterdam, with all of van Meegeren’s six Vermeer and his fateful seventh decorating the walls, is the headquarters of the jury. Some members, befuddled, have withdrawn. New experts are promptly appointed when this happens. Constantly, from all over Europe, fresh critics and art detectives are brought in as consultants. Meanwhile, Dutch authorities have announced they do not expect any final decision before the spring of 1947. Amsterdam reporters, who have long covered the case, feel there will never be a clear-cut decision. “There can’t be,” said one, “because all the judges now know the works are fakes, that they were all fooled for ten years, yet they just can’t bring themselves to admit it.”

Meanwhile, fifty-eight-year-old Hans van Meegeren is permitted limited freedom. He lives at home, but is not allowed to discuss the case with outsiders. He goes to his favorite bar daily and drinks steadily. In one recent afternoon, he gulped down fifty-two shots of straight gin in six hours. A short time ago, a close friend of his, a Dutch journalist working for Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau, was able to see him alone. They had lunch, and at last the journalist said to him, “Hans, we have walked, dined, drunk together dozens of times, we have been friends for years, and for all that, I still don’t know if you did or did not paint those Vermeer.” Van Meegeren stared at his friend, then said quietly, “I painted them.” The subject was not discussed again.

The Netherlands government’s official information service agreed with van Meegeren’s confession from the outset. “There can be no doubt,” it stated, “that this mad genius did paint the pictures attributed to Vermeer.” Of eight art authorities consulted by this author in Holland, most of them disinterested in van Meegeren as a person, all eight agreed, separately—several reluctantly, several under the condition that their names not be used—that van Meegeren had certainly forged the Vermeer.