The Man Who Made Vermeers -- Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez, Harcourt '08, 340 pages, ISBN #0151013411. Index, bibliography, picture credits, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.
How like prizefighting presidential politics is. Those who have followed America's two-year campaign have witnessed knockdowns, knockouts, and clinches in the marathon bout that, blessedly, ends tomorrow. Who would think a counterpart would exist in the civilized world of literary art books?
Several months ago, we brought you in these pages Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell, the spellbinding tale of Han van Meegeren, a master forger who made a fortune pawning off fraudulent takeoffs on Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer to a gullible public. Dolnick's book was still on the "new nonfiction" shelves when Jonathan Lopez made his appearance with The Man Who Made Vermeers.
Collectors and art historians aside, most readers won't want two books on the same narrow subject. So Lopez's publisher could simply ignore Golnick's book, pretending it didn't exist. Instead, it is upfront about the fact that two new van Meegeren biographies are competing for holiday gift-giving and leads off its publicity material by arguing forcefully why Lopez's is the better choice. Good strategy, of course, because Golnick can't respond, at least on the bookstore shelves.
The Man Who Made Vermeers, the publicists say, alone is based on "deep primary source research" and is the only one that reveals "for the first time that two 'Vermeers' donated by Andrew Mellon to the National Gallery in Washington (where they hung for years) were fakes painted by Van Meegeren himself, a shocking new discovery that will make art history."
In his own criticism of Dolnick's book, Lopez argues that it misses the fact that, in his duplicitous ventures, "Van Meegeren was not a lone gunman. It takes a loosely coordinated web of self-interested, morally compromised individuals to push a second-rate product into the marketplace as though it were a masterpiece. That sort of thing still goes on today, and not just in the art world, but in every conceivable field of endeavor (emphasis supplied)." Shades of the current credit crisis, perhaps?
