RE: [F_minor] Han van Meegeren Syndrome

["Robert Merkin" <bobmerk@earthlink.net>]

In the John leCarre novel and BBC TV series "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," old master spy George Smiley (Alec Guinness on TV) asks a colleague if he ever bought a counterfeit painting.

The odd thing about buying counterfeit art, Smiley explains, is that the more you pay for it, the less inclined you are to believe it could possibly be a forgery.

Museums are particularly vulnerable to this. I've been told that if you ask, and the museum is in the mood, you can be admitted to a basement room in the Riijksmuseum to see van Meegeren's counterfeit Old Masters. For a decade or too, they used to be prominently displayed upstairs. I don't know about his most famous forgery -- the one he painted in his jail cell in full view of an audience to prove he'd painted the Old Masters he sold to the Nazis.

About 20 years after van Meegeren's death, radioactive dating had finally reached a sophistication that allowed a team of physicists and chemists -- I think from Carnegie University in Pittsburgh -- to analyze lead-based paint from one of the most controversial of vM's Old Masters (to that moment, half the experts were still insisting it was the McCoy), and conclude with perfect certainty that it couldn't possibly have been painted before the 19th Century. The explanation takes about four pages of a wonderfully rich and thrilling textbook on differential equations (and they're ain't a lot of those).

I think we find the ancient and rich history of art and text forgery so disturbing because it puts a banana peel directly underneath our most educated and expert lifelong notions of What We Know to Be Absolutely True.

Bob


> [Original Message]
> From: MJ Watts <mj.accounts@gmail.com>
> To: <f_minor@email.rutgers.edu>
> Date: 8/30/2006 1:06:04 PM
> Subject: [F_minor] Han van Meegeren Syndrome
>
> Seems GG's old friend Han van Meegeren has made news again:
>
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/08/05/bavermeer.xml
>
> *Frank Wynne tells the extraordinary story of Han van Meegeren, the Dutch
> > artist whose 'Vermeer' made him a folk hero*
> >
> > I've always loved a forger. It's difficult not to feel a surge of joy at
> > the thought of an eminent critic waxing lyrical over the glories of a
> > "17th-century masterpiece" on which the paint is barely dry. If the pinnacle
> > of Western art is arguably Leonardo da Vinci, his shadow self in the
> > pantheon of forgers is Han van Meegeren.
> >
> So is it art if it is "fake"?  And is it art if it is out of the style of
> its time?  Can someone now create a 17th century masterpiece and be hailed
> as genius or do you really have to be "original" to be "great"?
>
> Gould made his case in -- what was the essay?  The Prospects of Recording?
> I'd like to hear everyone make theirs!
>
> -MJ
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