Epilogue

Framing the Fake

ASIDE FROM THE immediate postwar era, the period of greatest interest in Van Meegeren’s case was surely the mid-1960s. Twenty-year anniversaries tend to prompt reappraisals and retellings of past events, and a spate of books appeared on Van Meegeren in English, Dutch, and German as the milestone approached. Although these second-go-around histories were generally much better written than the earlier versions of the story, they were actually far more adamant in presenting Van Meegeren as completely anti-Nazi. In these books, Van Meegeren cleverly promotes his biblical Vermeer forgeries while the Second World War looms in the background, almost as a distraction. Back in 1947, the Saturday Evening Post had at least alluded to some of the rumors about Van Meegeren’s dark leanings. But the charming narratives found in Maurice Moiseiwitsch’s Van Meegeren Mystery of 1964, Lord Kilbracken’s Van Meegeren: Master Forger of 1967, and Marie Louise Doudart de la Gréé’s No Monument for Van Meegeren of 1968 grippingly depict the forger as a loyal Dutchman through and through.

Significantly, though, these authors could no longer plausibly claim that Van Meegeren had proved himself the equal of Vermeer with The Supper at Emmaus. No one believed that anymore. With the passage of time, Van Meegeren’s masterpiece had come to look, even to his own biographers, not merely implausible as a work of Vermeer but baffling in and of itself. Chalking up the forgery’s onetime success to the gullibility of Dirk Hannema and Abraham Bredius, everyone still had a good laugh. But by this point, Van Meegeren had come to be seen more as a master of deception and intrigue than of painting—a sensitive, misguided soul motivated by the unfeeling cruelty of the world around him.

 

Marijke van den Brandhof in 1979

 

It was not until 1979 that the flaws in this version of events began to show. That year saw the publication of Een vroege Vermeer uit 1937—“An early Vermeer from 1937”—the dissertation of a young Dutch doctoral student by the name of Marijke van den Brandhof. Combing through the Dutch state archives, Van den Brandhof had discovered, initially to her great dismay, extensive documentary evidence of Van Meegeren’s wartime collaborationist activities. It was she who first revealed that Van Meegeren had received direct commissions from the occupation government, that he had given money to Nazi causes, and that he had sought out the patronage of the odious Ed Gerdes. An adept researcher, Van den Brandhof was able to reconstruct and evoke much of the reactionary milieu in which Van Meegeren operated, yet some details of the story eluded even her. Perhaps most notably, the nature and extent of Van Meegeren’s early career in forgery and the volkisch background to his biblical Vermeers remained uncharted territory. Although never translated, Een vroege Vermeer is a truly outstanding book, by far the best and most rigorous one ever written on Van Meegeren. Had its author not died at a tragically early age, she would undoubtedly have continued to make original and important contributions to the field.

In 1979, though, it would still have been extremely difficult for anyone to perceive or understand the specific trends in visual culture that had suffused Van Meegeren’s biblical Vermeers. For reasons of custom and propriety, the display of Nazi imagery, even in an educational context, was strenuously discouraged for decades after the war, more or less throughout the world. In Germany, due to de-Nazification decrees, it was actually illegal. But mostly, this wasn’t the sort of ban that required laws to enforce it. The postwar healing process naturally meant that old copies of Heinrich Hoffmann’s picture books on Hitler, as well other similar pieces of ephemera, got stowed away in the attic, where they could be forgotten along with the painful memories that went along with them.

Even today, it remains quite unlikely that any museum or gallery would wish to mount a retrospective exhibition of a middlebrow Nazi artist like Hans Schachinger, for instance. Little studied, the mode of Volksgeist painting practiced by Schachinger and his peers remains a lost and unlamented episode in art history. In consequence, The Supper at Emmaus, stripped of its frame of reference, is now like a road sign pointing to a town that got wiped off the face of the earth. When confronted with the great forgery at the Boijmans Museum, present-day visitors tend to come away bewildered. Clearly, this picture doesn’t look at all like the work of Vermeer to us anymore, but what does it look like? The widespread praise that The Supper at Emmaus once garnered now seems completely incomprehensible, and the work itself, on a very basic level, simply does not compute.

Not only do we lack the arcane pictorial knowledge required to decipher coded Nazi imagery, but the entire atmosphere that shaped the emotional appeal of The Supper at Emmaus has faded away to the farthest reaches of living memory. Only the very elderly can still recall how the Axis dictators, during their dramatic rise to power, began to weigh on the minds and affect the thinking even of entirely reasonable people—including those who did not necessarily share the fascist viewpoint. With their hectoring agenda, the strongmen of Europe hijacked the world stage and, in doing so, distorted the very realm of perception itself, both inspiring and allowing the fraud of Emmaus. To imagine a scenario in which this picture might still be accepted as a seventeenth-century masterpiece, one would have to conjure up an alternate universe where European fascism lived on and flourished; where the grandiose mythology of authoritarian culture achieved a venerable old age; where the imagery of Emmaus, with its puffed up sentimentality and faux Counter-Reformation drama, could have continued to pass for sheer genius. For that is the only place where this particular fake could still have cast its spell after the war—a nightmare world where Hitler won.

With that nightmare kept safely at bay, however, Van Meegeren’s career has, over the years, frequently been conceived as a story of the Hogan’s Heroes variety, one that transforms the tragedy of the Nazi era into light comedy. For instance, an anecdote, much repeated, holds that Hermann Goering, while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, was transfixed with horror when he learned that his prized Vermeer had turned out to be a fake, “as though it were the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world.” Like so many other tales that have cropped up around Van Meegeren, this one appears to be apocryphal, invented long after Goering’s death.

Goering’s innermost thoughts on the subject of Han van Meegeren are lost to history, but we do know a bit about Goering’s ideas on deception and the twisted joys to be found in its use. During his time at Nuremberg, Goering was interviewed extensively by a psychologist named Gustave Gilbert, who was given access to the major Nazi defendants by the Allies. Hoping to gain insight into the mental processes of these individuals, who had caused pain and suffering on a truly staggering scale, Gilbert tried to draw them out on the big questions of the day—war and peace, right and wrong, innocence and guilt. On April 18, 1946, Gilbert elicited Goering’s opinions about all of these subjects simultaneously, simply by making a single provocative statement. Most people, Gilbert observed, don’t want war or the destruction that it causes and are not grateful to leaders who bring such things to pass. Goering, surprisingly, nodded in agreement and said that this was all quite true: most people don’t want war, and moreover, they have nothing to gain from it. But, Goering added, there are those who know how to control the minds of men.

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders,” Goering said. “That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and then denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

As a prisoner at Nuremberg with the prospect of the gallows looming in his future, Goering, as he himself knew, had no real influence over world events anymore. His big talk, although quite chilling, was now just empty bravado. His power, his position, his place in the scheme of things had all been based on lies, doomed, sooner or later, to fail. And in that regard, the former head of the Luftwaffe resembled no one quite so much as his Dutch doppelganger, his victimizer, the creator of the ever-so-costly painting that had once adorned the walls of Carinhall—Han van Meegeren, the man who made Vermeers.