By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: December 31, 2013 Source NY Times
A 24-hour escort is not an unusual requirement for valuable
international museum loans. What makes the security arrangements —
estimated to cost more than $31,000 — notable in this case is that the
painting is a fake.
And it is not just any fake, but an imitation Vermeer by the most notorious forger of all: Han van Meegeren, the World War II-era
painter whose counterfeits were so convincing that, after the war, he
had to create one for witnesses to avoid harsh punishment for selling a
national treasure to the Nazi leader Hermann Göring.
Clearly, some forgeries are more equal than others. In New York, buyers
of some of the dozens of multimillion-dollar fakes sold through the Knoedler & Company gallery, now shuttered, have filed lawsuits, complaining that their vaunted Modern masterpieces are now “worthless.”
But the Boijmans loan, “The Head of Christ,” and other famous fakes with
which it is being exhibited in a traveling show retain a valuable
mystique. “They’re not original artworks, but they’re so prestigious
that they require the same security measures as an authentic work,” said
Julia Courtney, Springfield Museums’ curator of art.
Citing security concerns, the lending and borrowing museums all declined
to reveal the works’ estimated worth or insurance information. But the
paintings are being treated like the real thing. “The requirements for
security are not different than other works we give on loan,” said Friso
Lammertse, the curator of old master paintings at the Boijmans. Never
mind that the accustomed home of “The Head of Christ” is a Boijmans
storage room.
So, in addition to a personal escort, van Meegeren’s “Christ,” for
example, will have an outside conservator scrutinize every inch of the
canvas and frame when it leaves a museum and after it arrives, to report
on its condition.
“The Head of Christ” is part of the exhibition “Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World,” which includes two other van Meegerens,
“The Girl With the Blue Bow,” once credited to Vermeer, from the Hyde
Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y., and “The Procuress,” from the Courtauld
Gallery in London.
The show will travel to the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.;
the Canton Museum of Art in Ohio; and the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Other forgeries in the show are by celebrated con men like Elmyr de
Hory, a Hungarian who said he sold a thousand fakes; John Myatt, whose
collaborator infiltrated archives at the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and
Albert Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, to plant
fake provenance documents; and Mark A. Landis,
a former gallery owner who dressed as a Jesuit priest during the
quarter-century he spent trying to donate his forgeries to more than 40
American museums.
What links these men, said Colette Loll, the exhibition’s curator and an
art investigator, are “frustrated artistic ambitions, chaotic personal
lives and a contempt for the art market and its experts.”
Ms. Loll, who organized the exhibition with the nonprofit group
International Arts & Artists, said she was shocked when she heard
the $31,000 estimate for the security arrangements demanded by just the
Boijmans.
That sum is close to the $39,500 that “Christ and the Scribes in the
Temple” — the painting van Meegeren created in 1945 to prove he was a
forger rather than a collaborator — fetched at Christie’s auction house
in 1996.
Forgeries invariably raise knotty questions about the value of art and
faith in the market, and fuel cynicism about art experts.
In November, a spirited debate about the value of forgeries played out
on the website and pages of The New York Times after the art critic Blake Gopnik declared that forgers could be “an art lover’s friend.”
And last year, Jonathon Keats,
who wrote “Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age,” argued that
“forgeries are more real than the real artworks they fake” because
“they genuinely manipulate society rather than merely illustrating
alternate points of view.”
Interest in counterfeits may have less lofty roots, however. Everybody
loves a juicy scandal. The van Meegerens can also draw on the continuing
fascination with World War II and the Nazis’ looting of Europe. Hailed
as a kind of folk hero during his 1947 trial for having duped Göring,
van Meegeren was later shown to be a Nazi sympathizer and inveterate
rogue who swindled buyers out of the equivalent of $106 million.
One of his facsimiles, “The Supper at Emmaus,” cited by the dean of Vermeer scholars as a, perhaps the,
“masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer” was bought in 1938 by the Rembrandt
Society of Rotterdam for the Boijmans for 520,000 guilders, the
equivalent of about $6.4 million today. “The Head of Christ,” sold for
475,000 guilders in 1941 ($4.4 million today), was thought to be a study
for “The Supper at Emmaus.”
Part of the enduring lure of the van Meegerens, undoubtedly, is the
satisfaction of knowing that the most rarefied connoisseurs were duped
by what now look to be ham-handed fakes.
As Jonathan Lopez wrote in his 2008 book about van Meegeren, “The Man
Who Made Vermeers,” “Although the best forgeries may mimic the style of a
long-dead artist, they tend to reflect the taste and attitudes of their
own period.” Biblical scenes tapped into a sentimental and pastoral
Germanic tradition, he notes, while the portraits of girls resembled
1920s flappers.
The works in “Intent to Deceive” are less art than artifacts; they have
genuine historical significance. In that sense, these fakes underscore
the persistent appeal of the real thing. Copies of a van Meegeren fake
would not command such costly security precautions or draw visitors.
“The Head of Christ” and its traveling companions are being exhibited
precisely because they are authentic — authentic forgeries.
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