Don’t know
about you, but I’d say it was a dog. The hands are ok, the background seems to
me to be lifeless, the faces look as if death was a couple of weeks in the
past. There’s no richness of detail anywhere in the painting, except perhaps on
the bread.
Next
picture:
Would
anybody think that they were painted by the same artist?
I once read
a curious fact—most forgeries expose themselves after a generation or two.
Collectively, we keep changing the way we see things—the way your grandmother
looked and saw the Mona Lisa was completely different from the way you see the
Mona Lisa. Odd, but true; one painting is and will be hundreds of paintings
over the course of centuries.
And however
odd the fact is, there’s no doubt that everyone in the art world in the late
1930’s was convinced that van Meegeren’s painting of the
supper at Emmaus was actually a Vermeer, which the
second painting is.
It’s about
cite and setting. Joshua
Bell, a famous violinist, once took his Strad out of the case in a dreary
New York subway. He was wearing casual clothes, tennis shoes. He began playing
Bach—and guess what? No
one stopped, no one stood there and listened, mouth agape. Look, New
Yorkers are sophisticated—a lot of them probably had recordings of Bell.
Conceivably, somebody was actually listening to a digital Bell as the person
was rushing past the carnate Bell. (Right—if Sarah can do it, so can I. Carnate
is now a word, at least on my computer….)
Well, you
can hear the story in the first video below. A talented painter earns initial
recognition, but then the critics cool. A temperament that is nervy, bitter,
unable to handle criticism. Brooding, perhaps. A desire for revenge.
The
millions of guilders aren’t the point, at least in the beginning. Nobody likes
him as van Meegeren, but as Vermeer, a star shining very brightly in the art
firmament? Hah—they like him then! Fools!
He goes on
painting the fakes, and selling them; he gives world seven new Vermeers over
the course of a decade or two. Astonishing, really, since there are only less
than forty Vermeers in the world to begin with.
Then came
the problem—he had sold a Vermeer (he thinks of it as real) to Hermann Göring, and
a fine work it was.
At the end
of the war, Göring’s paintings were seized, and they traced the sale of this
masterwork to van Meegeren. Sophie’s choice: confess to the forgery or go to
jail for collaboration.
He
confessed, agreed to make another Vermeer for the judges, and he does,
meticulously scrapping paint off an old canvass, to get the craquelure, baking the canvas to
give the hardness, putting in ink to resemble the dust of an old picture. In
short, he uses the technology of his time.
Van
Meegeren was convicted to a year in jail. He died shortly after the verdict,
never served time in jail, and became the most popular man in The Netherlands.
Why?
He had
tricked Göring into giving some 200 real paintings in exchange for a fake
Vermeer! He had saved the world 200 paintings then in jeopardy, and gotten rich
in the process. The public was roaring.
There’s
something about a scam that everybody loves—and the story of Joyce Hatto is curiously
similar to that of van Meegeren. She too had early success followed by
rejection; she too withdraws from the music world—she was a pianist—and broods.
She’s unseen and especially unheard for decades, and then, very late in life,
she puts out an extraordinary number
of recordings. The critics went into summersaults of praise.
Then, a guy in
Manhattan looked down at his iPod, as he was walking to work, listening to
Hatto play Liszt. And the iPod,
querying Gracenote, listed Simon Lazlo
as the pianist.
Hatto was
married to a charming English gentleman, William
Barrington-Coupe, a recording engineer and her personal Svengali. The story was that
she was old, very old, nearing death but that each day she went down and
recorded in her study—in the back of her garden, as it should be, for a lady
English pianist.
And so
eager were we to be duped that we bought it. Though it was funny that no one
had heard of the orchestras she had played with, or the halls she had recorded
in. Oh, and also the conductors.
Hatto died
while at the height of her fame—all England mourned the death of one of the
century’s greatest pianists.
The
Manhattan guy contacted a British critic—and the game was soon up.
Here’s the
thing—Barrington-Coupe, like van Meegeren, had used technology extremely well.
He could slow down or speed up the music, he could add colors to the sound, he
could bring out or soften down instruments or sections in the orchestra.
Several of the actual pianists that Hatto had stolen from didn’t recognize that
they were the ones playing….
Van
Meegeran’s works are periodically on display. Hatto’s works?
You can’t
buy them; eBay actually pulled them from the site when they learned they were
fakes.
Here’s the
problem—I’m not sure that they were, or are. I would say that van Meegeran is a
fakester, but Barrington-Coupe may be a fellow musician, playing audio files
just as his wife, or Simon Lazlo, played the piano….
