The art forger who duped the Nazis

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Madrid

Updated:11/11/2020 19: 36h

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The Last Vermeer (El útimo Vermeer) tells the true story of “Christ and the adulterous woman”, a fake work of the Dutch master, painted in 1942 by the famous art forger Han van Meegeren. Guy Pearce takes on the role of the famous art dealer and hedonist in this film, which opens in the United States on the 20th. To make the film, 50 false forgeries were needed, more than the works that Johannes painted in his entire life. Vermeer.

Allied forces found Göring’s fake Vermeer the film focuses on in an Austrian salt mine

The work was sold in 1942 to the Nazi banker and art dealer Alois miedl and he later sold it to mariscal Hermann Göring for 1.65 million florins (about $ 7 million today). At the time it was believed that only 34 authentic works by the painter existed, but Göring did not know that the work was actually painted by Van Meegeren himself. Allied forces found the false Vermeer of Göring in a salt mine in Austria after the war and traced its provenance to Van Meegeren in Amsterdam. Van Meeregen was arrested on May 29, 1945 as a collaborator of the Nazis, because they thought he had sold them a work that was Dutch heritage. The forger then had two options: surrender to a death sentence as a Nazi collaborator who sold a Dutch masterpiece to Hitler’s second, or confess, and become something of a national hero in the process. Van Meegeren chose the latter, admitting that he cheated on the Nazi for a shamefully exorbitant sum. On November 12, 1947 it was convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to only one year in prison, which he never served because before being incarcerated suffered a heart attack and died on December 30, 1947. It is estimated that Van Meeregen scammed out of several million dollars.

Fotograma de «The Last Vermeer» – SONY

Henricus Antonius van Meegeren (Deventer, Overijssel, 1889-Ámsterdam, 1947), better known as Han van Meegeren, was a Dutch painter and portraitist, considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. When art critics despised his work, Van Meegeren decided to demonstrate his talent by forging paintings by some of the most famous Dutch artists: Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Gerard ter Borch, and especially Johannes Vermeer. Experts and art critics believed that his paintings were authentic. His most successful forgery was “The Supper at Emmaus”, created in 1937, in the manner of Vermeer. It was based on “The Supper at Emmaus” by Caravaggio, from the Pinacoteca de Brera. The work was acquired by the Rembrandt Society for 520,000 florins (about $ 4 million today), with the help of shipping magnate Willem van der Vorm, and donated to the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam.

Fotograma de «The Last Vermeer» – SONY

“Not everything is black or white,” he told Artnet News. Dan Friedkin, director of «The Last Vermeer». James Gemmill (whose previous projects include “The Da Vinci Code”) painted Van Meegerens’ works from photographs and then coated the artworks with a white chalk-based paint to make them look like blank canvases. In the movie, when Pearce appears to be painting, he is actually applying an oily medium over the layer of chalk to expose the underlying paint. “We were able to film the brush strokes and actually see the impression that a painting is being painted.”

Han van Meegeren, during the trial in 1947

Information was obtained from midcentury court documents, which record that Van Meegeren was asked to fake a Vermeer during the trial. The film recreates this episode, in which the forger painted a fake Vermeer from a preliminary sketch. James Gemmill and Arthur Max (“Gladiator” and “American Gangster”) modified the forger’s fraudulent works. Gemmill insisted that some were so bad that audiences would not be as easily fooled as Göring. Some hands and faces were enhanced with anatomical precision and were even included in the works other than the cast of the film. This insertion of contemporary characters in Baroque paintings is a nod to Van Meegeren, who used his lover as a model in a forgery that resembles the famous “Young with the pearl” by Vermeer.

“The Supper at Emmaus”, painted by Van Meegeren

Van Meegeren also felt that quality was the most important. “Yesterday this painting was worth millions of guilders and experts and art lovers came from all over the world and paid money to see it,” he said at his famous trial in 1947. “Today it is worth nothing and no one would cross the street to see it for free.” There are currently at least two versions of “Christ and the adulterous woman” by Van Meegeren. One is in the House of European History in Brussels, as part of an exhibition on the history of counterfeiting. The other is in Friedkin’s office.

Elmyr de Hory

Elmyr de Hory, the great lie of art

Born in Budapest in 1906, Elmyr de Hory, one of the greatest art forgers in history, seems like a character from the most twisted and brilliant mind in Hollywood. His life and work are worthy of a script that would well deserve an Oscar. Nobody knows how much truth there is in his biography, just as nobody really knows how many of his paintings are hanging in the great museums of the world, being worshiped, like golden calves, as authentic masterpieces of Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Modigliani, Matisse … It is believed that he painted more than a thousand. Cold sweats enter the directors of the most prestigious art galleries when they hear his name. Which, by the way, there were many. He used up to 60 aliases to avoid being tracked: Cassou, Raynal, Nassau, Herzog or Boutin are some of them. His was a life of deception, fraud, kidnapping, scams. Life told by his friend Clifford Irving, another famous con man, author of a false biography of Howard Hughes that landed him in prison.

He posed as the son of wealthy Jewish aristocrats, who died in a concentration camp in World War II. His last partner and heir, Mark Forgy, was in charge of denying it: his father was a middle-class merchant and the family survived the war. Irving tells in his biography that the Gestapo subjected him to a harsh interrogation in which they broke his leg and he escaped to Paris, that he was persecuted by the FBI … True or false? Who knows … What does seem certain is that his meteoric career (a cum laude graduate in Forgery of Works of Art) started that day in 1946 when his millionaire friend Malcom Campbell saw a drawing of him in his studio. It’s a Picasso, right? Would you sell it? He said yes to everything. In that instant he realized how easy it would be to earn money painting “the way of,” which is a fancy way of referring to plagiarism and forgery.

“I paint in the style of other painters, but I never copy from them,” he said. I do not copy, but I interpret other painters. And that is nothing new in the history of painting. That interpretation is to capture the soul of the artist, the spirit of his art. The falsification pretends to be the pure technical reproduction of a work, the interpretation goes much further. I have the talent, perhaps a bit diabolical, of being able to enter the soul of painters ». He rubbed shoulders with Lana Turner, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ursula Andress … Those who knew him portray him as a cultured, elegant, good host, fascinating actor … He made gold by selling them fake works by Matisse, Degas, Renoir, Picasso or Braque to the nouveau riche in Texas who made their fortune off oil. Prestigious museums fell into his trap: Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum acquired a Matisse that was not. And the great collector Algur Hurtle Meadows came to treasure 41 fake works in his collection. But the big business came when he teamed up with two big scammers: Fernand Legros and Réal Lessard.

His last 16 years were spent in Ibiza. He was investigated and submitted to the Court of Vagos and Maligners. He went to jail not for forgering but for homosexuality, living with criminals and lacking demonstrable means of subsistence. Claimed by the French Justice, Elmyr de Hory feared that, if he was extradited, Legros and Lessard would kill him. He committed suicide in 1976. Although the curator of the sample explains that it was not such, but a fatal miscalculation with barbiturates. Even the way he died raises doubts of certainty. To curl the curl, works that were listed as made by De Hory that were not his were found on the market. The forged forger. “If my paintings were hung in a museum long enough, they would become authentic,” he said. What a great truth. Perhaps, one of the few truths of his false life.

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