Two Scams, or Not?

OK—check out this painting:

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….