THE FORGER’S SPELL A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieths Century EDWARD DOLNICK For Lynn It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown. —Anatole France We have here a—I am inclined to say the—masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer. —Abraham Bredius CONTENTS Epigraph iii Preface ix Part One OCCUPIED HOLLAND 1 A Knock on the Door 3 2 Looted Art 6 3 The Outbreak of War 9 4 Quasimodo 14 5 The End of Forgery? 18 6 Forgery 101 22 7 Occupied Holland 26 8 The War Against the Jews 30 9 The Forger’s Challenge 33 10 Bargaining with Vultures 40 11 Van Meegeren’s Tears 44 Part Two HERMANN GOERING AND JOHANNES VERMEER 12 Hermann Goering 51 13 Adolf Hitler 55 vi con t e n t s 14 Chasing Vermeer 57 15 Goering’s Art Collection 62 16 Insights from a Forger 66 17 The Amiable Psychopath 77 18 Goering’s Prize 82 19 Vermeer 85 20 Johannes Vermeer, Superstar 88 21 A Ghost’s Fingerprints 93 Part Three THE SELLING OF CHRIST AT EMM AUS 22 Two Forged Vermeers 105 23 The Expert’s Eye 109 24 A Forger’s Lessons 115 25 Bredius 121 26 “Without Any Doubt!” 127 27 The Uncanny Valley 132 28 Betting the Farm 137 29 Lady and Gentleman at the Harpsichord 139 30 Dirk Hannema 145 31 The Choice 150 32 The Caravaggio Connection 163 33 In the Forger’s Studio 167 34 Christ at Emmaus 170 35 Underground Tremors 173 con t e n t s vii Photographic Insert 36 The Summer of 1937 179 37 The Lamb at the Bank 186 38 “Every Inch a Vermeer” 192 39 Two Weeks and Counting 198 40 Too Late! 201 41 The Last Hurdle 203 42 The Unveiling 207 Part Four ANATOMY OF A HOAX 43 Scandal in the Archives 213 44 All in the Timing 218 45 Believing Is Seeing 223 46 The Men Who Knew Too Much 227 47 Blue Monday 234 48 He Who Hesitates 239 49 The Great Changeover 243 Part Five THE CHASE 50 The Secret in the Salt Mine 249 51 The Dentist’s Tale 252 52 Goering on the Run 256 53 The Nest Egg 260 54 Trapped! 262 viii con t e n t s 55 “I Painted It Myself!” 265 56 Command Per for mance 272 57 The Evidence Piles Up 276 58 The Trial 280 59 The Players Make Their Exits 288 Epilogue 291 Notes 295 Bibliography 325 A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s 331 Index 333 About the Author Other Books by Edward Dolnick Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher PR EFACE A NOT E TO T H E R EA DER his is the true story of a colossal hoax. The con man was the most suc­ T cessful art forger of the twentieth century, his most prominent victim the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. The time was World War II. The place, occupied Holland. Everything about the case was larger than life. The sums that changed hands soared into the millions; the artist who inspired that frenzy of buy­ ing was one of the best-loved painters who ever lived, Johannes Vermeer; the collectors vying for masterpieces included both Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. But the outsize scale and the extravagant color were only the beginning. The story differs in key ways from most true tales of crime. Usually we are presented with a crime, and we set out to find the criminal. Here, no one even knew that a crime had been committed. Where there was no crime, it stood to reason there was no criminal. For a villain who craved recognition, that made for a vicious dilemma. Keep his crime secret, and he would live rich and safe but unknown. Confess what he had done, on the other hand, and though he would find himself condemned to a prison cell, his genius would be proclaimed worldwide. A second, even stranger feature made this case of art fraud different from any other. What made the fraud succeed was the very thing that should in­ stantly have revealed it. In this mystery, then, the usual questions do not apply. For us, the central question is not whodunit but, instead, howdunit? Part One s Occupied Holland s1 A K NOCK ON THE DOOR Amsterdam May 1945 ntil almost the very end, Han van Meegeren thought he had committed Uthe perfect crime. He had pocketed more than $3 million—the equiva­ lent of about $30 million today—and scarcely a trace of scandal clung to his name. Why should it, when his dupes never even knew that someone had played them for fools and taken them for a fortune? Even now, with two uniformed strangers at his door saying something about an investigation, he thought he might get away with it. The two men seemed polite, not belligerent. No doubt they had been impressed by the grandeur of 321 Keizersgracht.* Maybe they really did have only a few routine questions to sort out. Van Meegeren decided to keep his secrets to himself. Van Meegeren was a small, dapper man of fifty- five with a tidy mustache and gray hair swept back from his forehead. His house was one of the most luxurious in Amsterdam, on one of the city’s poshest streets, a neighborhood of bankers and merchant kings. Imposing but not showy, in keeping with the Dutch style, the house rose four stories high and looked out on a postcard ca­ nal. Most impressive of all in space-starved Amsterdam, where every staircase rises as steeply as a ladder, the house was nearly as wide as it was tall. The front * Throughout this book I have given addresses in the American style, with the house number first. The Dutch put the number last. 4 a knock on the door hall was tiled in marble, and envious rumors had it—falsely—that the hall was so big that guests at Van Meegeren’s parties raced their bicycles around it. On the other hand, the rumors about indoor skating were true. Van Meegeren had found a way to convert his basement to an ice rink so that jaded partygoers could skate in style. Joop Piller, the lead investigator on this spring day, would not have been a guest at those parties. A Jew in Holland—and Holland lost a greater propor­ tion of Jews in World War II than any other Western European nation— Piller had fought in the Dutch resis tance from 1940 to 1945. In years to come, many would embellish their wartime credentials, but Piller was the real thing. His last mission had been to set up a network to rescue Allied pilots after the Battle of Arnhem and smuggle them to safety. Piller had only begun to learn about Van Meegeren. Holland in 1945 was short of everything but rumors, and Piller had picked up some of the gossip swirling around Amsterdam. Van Meegeren had friends in all the worst— which was to say, pro-German—circles; he was a painter and an art collector; he was a connoisseur of old masters and young women; he had lived in France and had won that country’s national lottery. Skeptical by nature, Piller was inclined to wave all the talk aside. Still, it was easy to see why the rumors flew. What kind of artist lived like this? Rem­ brandt, perhaps, but Van Meegeren was no Rembrandt. He was, according to all that Piller had heard, a middling painter of old-fashioned taste and no special distinction. He was apparently an art dealer as well, but he seemed to have made no more of a splash as a dealer than as a painter. He supposedly had a taste for hookers and high living and a reputation as a host who never let a glass stay unfilled. Other tales hinted at a kind of self-indulgent posturing. He had brought his guitar to a friend’s funeral because “it might get boring.” The bare facts of the artist’s biography, as Piller would begin to assemble them over the next few days, only deepened the mystery. Van Meegeren was a Dutchman born in the provincial town of Deventer. He had studied art and architecture in Delft, the hometown of the great Johannes Vermeer. He had won prizes for his art, but he was as out of tune with the current age as his favorite teacher, who had taught Van Meegeren to prepare his own paints like his pre de cessors of three centuries before. Despite the occasional triumph, Van Meegeren hardly seemed marked for greatness. In college he got his girlfriend pregnant, married her at twenty- two, occupied holland 5 and settled down uneasily near Delft. There he tried, without much success, to support his family with his art. Van Meegeren spent the 1920s in The Hague, where life improved. He gained a reputation as a playboy and a portrait painter whose skill was per­ fectly adequate but whose client list was positively dazzling. In 1932 (by this time, with a new wife), he left Holland for the French Riviera. In the small town of Roquebrune, he moved into a spacious and isolated villa perched high on a cliff above the sun-dappled Mediterranean. As the Great Depression strengthened its grip, Van Meegeren somehow continued to thrive. In 1937, after five years in Roquebrune, he moved to even more imposing quarters, purchasing a mansion with a dozen bedrooms and a vineyard in Nice.