Han van Meegeren
Henricus Antonius "Han" van Meegeren (born October 10, 1889 in Deventer in the Dutch province of Overijssel , † December 30, 1947 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch painter , restorer , art dealer and art forger . Although he was not one of the most important painters in the Netherlands, he is considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century.
Life
Han (short form and also a diminutive for Henri = Henricus ) van Meegeren was born as the third child of Roman Catholic parents. He was the son of Hendrikus Johannes van Meegeren (teacher of English and history at the secondary school and at the teacher training college in Deventer) and Augusta Louisa Henrietta Camps .
Artistic development
He felt put back by his father, not understood and rejected, because the strict father forbade him any artistic activity and constantly judged him negatively: "You know nothing, you are nothing and you can do nothing".
He started drawing when he was eight or nine. While he was attending the “Hogere Burger School” (HBS), he received drawing lessons from the teacher and painter Bartus Korteling (1853–1930), who became his father's friend. Korteling got him excited about Jan Vermeer and showed him how Jan Vermeer made and mixed his colors. He rejected the Impressionists , and his strong personal influence led Han van Meegeren to only turn to the Golden Age of Dutch art in the future and not contemporary art, which he categorically rejected.
At his father's request, from 1907 he studied architecture at the Technical Hogeschool in Delft , the hometown of Jan Vermeer. In addition to studying architecture, he attended art school. While studying architecture, he took the preparatory exams and the candidate exam, but did not take the final exam. In 1913 he broke off his architecture studies and concentrated on drawing and painting in the art school.
He was a member of the rowing association De Delftse Sport (DDS) , which in 1913 bought the St. Huybrechtstoren wall tower in Delft, Oostplantsoen 40, from the early 16th century . Han van Meegeren made the construction drawings for the renovation of the wall tower and for the extension of the wheelhouse and clubhouse. The building project in the Delft style of the 17th century was completed in 1914 according to his plans.
On April 18, 1912, he married the art student Anna de Voogt from Indonesia against his father's wishes. After the marriage he left Delft and moved with her to her grandmother in Rijswijk at Van Vredenburchweg 72. His son Jacques Henri Emil was born on August 26, 1912 in Rijswijk. Jacques later became a painter like his father; he died on October 26, 1977 in Amsterdam.
On January 8, 1913, Han van Meegeren received first prize in a competition organized by the Afdeling Algemene Wetenschappen van de Technische Hogeschool in Delft for the 17th century watercolor painting of the interior of the church , which represented the interior of the St. Laurenskerk in Rotterdam in the 15th century shows.
This first prize was awarded every five years for the best student work from among the art students. At that time, Han van Meegeren was doing so financially that he had to take the gold medal he had won as an award to the pawn shop. But he could sell the watercolor dearly.
In the summer of 1914 he moved to Scheveningen with his family . He enrolled at the Hague Art Academy, passed the diploma examination there and received his diploma in drawing on August 4, 1914. With this he acquired the right to give drawing lessons in middle schools. Soon afterwards he was offered a professorship at the art academy. However, he wanted to remain an independent artist and turned down the offer. He then worked for a low monthly salary of 75 guilders as an assistant in drawing and art history at Professor Gips in Delft. In March 1915 his daughter Pauline (later called Inez) was born. He designed posters and painted many small pictures (Christmas cards, still lifes, pieces of flowers and portraits) for the art trade. Later he also appeared as a restorer of old paintings and as an art dealer.
He exhibited his first pictures in Delft in 1916 and from April to May 1917 in The Hague in the Pictura art gallery . He met his future wife, Jo Oerlemans. After he had been able to sell all of the paintings in these exhibitions, he moved to The Hague with his family in 1917. There he found access to the establishment. In December 1919 he was accepted as an elected member of the Haagse Kunstkring , an exclusive association of writers and painters who met weekly.
In The Hague, he taught noble women in his Takesono studio for considerable fees . From the gardens of the royal palace opposite, he regularly fetched a tame deer that belonged to Princess Juliana as a model for his drawing lessons. He made many sketches of them and in 1921 drew the picture "Hertje" in eight minutes, which made him popular in the Netherlands. From May to June 1922 he showed his biblical paintings in an exhibition in the Kunstzaal Biesing , all of which he was able to sell.
Due to his promiscuity and alcoholism , his marriage to Anna de Voogt broke up, and he was divorced on July 19, 1923. She then moved to Paris with the two children.
Although he had received the grade “insufficient” in his diploma examination in portraiture in 1914, he created pictures in portraiture with which he could earn good money.
Han van Meegeren traveled to Belgium, France, Italy and England. In doing so he acquired the reputation of a talented portraitist. With orders from the circles of the English and American high society on the Côte d'Azur , he earned considerable fees. His clients valued him for his style of painting, which was closely based on the Dutch artists of the 17th century. From 1924 to 1925 he worked in the Haagse Kunstkring as a secretary for fine arts in the painting and sculpture department. After an internal dispute, he resigned from the Haagse Kunstkring in October 1932 . On November 12, 1928, he married the actress Johanna Theresia Oerlemans (also called Jo van Walraven, Jo Oerlemans) in Woerden , with whom he had lived for a number of years. When he met her in 1916, she was married to the art critic and publicist CH de Boer (also Karel de Boer). She brought her daughter Viola with her into the new marriage.
Until the end of his life, Han van Meegeren painted pictures with his own signature , but the way they were painted differed greatly from his forgeries.
Typical of his autographed pictures, as well as his forgeries, are exaggeratedly lowered eyelids that look like shells.
Conflict with art criticism
In the Netherlands, Han van Meegeren became a well-known and wealthy painter through good sales. The pictures Hertje (1921) and Straatzanger (1928) were particularly popular . By 1927 he received great reviews for his works.
His pictures, now disqualified as kitsch, and the close reliance of his painting style on the old masters outside the mainstream of Cubism and Surrealism, brought him the reproach in Dutch art criticism from 1928 that he was only capable of imitation and not of self-creative achievement. Due to his aggressive articles in the monthly magazine De Kemphaan = Der Kampfhahn (April 1928 - March 1930), which he published together with the painter Theo van Wijngaarden and the journalist Jan Ubink, he finally lost the sympathy of all benevolent critics.
Since he now regarded himself as a misunderstood genius, he wanted to prove to the art critics that he could not only imitate the style of the great masters in his paintings, but that he was able to create perfectly forged paintings by Frans Hals , Pieter de Hooch , Gerard ter Borch and Jan Vermeer that they had to be recognized by art critics as real paintings by these old masters . From 1932 to 1937 he prepared for this coup : he immersed himself in the biographies of these "old masters", studied their working methods, their painting techniques and their works of art. In October 1932 Abraham Bredius published the article "An unpublished Vermeer", in which he described the painting Man and Woman on a Spinet , which was later sold to the Amsterdam banker Fritz Mannheimer . It is believed that this picture was the first Vermeer forgery by Han van Meegeren, although it was not mentioned in his confession or at the trial.
Van Meegeren and his wife Jo Oerlemans moved to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d'Azur in October 1932 . There he rented the "Villa Primavera" in the Hameau district, avenue des Cyprès 10, furnished for eighteen shillings a week. The villa was a two-story building with yellow walls and a turret, stood in the middle of a rose and orange garden and offered a magnificent view over the roofs of the village to the Mediterranean Sea and the city of Menton beyond the bay .
In Roquebrune he tried to find the chemical and technical processes that were necessary for a perfect forgery. In view of the test of the authenticity of 17th century paintings, which was customary at the time, he had to develop processes that ensured that his colors dried quickly, did not dissolve in alcohol and formed a crackle like in Vermeer's pictures. He worked with a drying oven to dry the oil paints on the canvas at 100 to 120 degrees Celsius. In the literature there are contradicting information on the number of hours for drying.
For painting, he got himself well- cracked, large oil paintings from the 17th century, as well as the old color pigments used at the time, including 140 grams of real lapis lazuli blue for 12,000 guilders, white lead , indigo , cinnabar , real badger hair brushes , synthetic resin as a binder , varnishes and everything else that the "old masters" used to create their paintings. He also bought props for his forgeries: a white Delft wine jug, a Roman , some Berkemeyers and a map of the world by Nicolaes Visscher .
Joachim Goll describes the method of aging the picture as follows: “He dried the painting at a temperature of 100 to 120 degrees; he stretched the canvas around a cylinder and in this way achieved an extraordinarily real-looking crack formation; with the greatest care he colored every single crack and even the finest crack with Indian ink; a brown varnish finally gave the painting its age-dark coloring ”.
Origin of forgeries
First he worked on four sample images with which he tried out his forgery technique. There were two by Jan Vermeer ( lady studying music and letter reader in blue ), a lady making music based on Vermeer's painting Woman with a Lute in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a portrait of a drinking woman based on the painting Malle Babbe by Frans Hals, and one Portrait of a gentleman after Gerard ter Borch , but he did not sell these paintings because they could easily be recognized as forgeries and therefore did not meet his requirements. After a trip to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, he painted the picture Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus in the years 1936–1937 in the colors Jan Vermeer preferred: yellow, lapis lazuli - ultramarine blue , lead white .
He took the Emmausfahl by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan as a model , as the Vermeer experts suspected at the time that Jan Vermeer could have studied in Italy. With the portrait of the landlady in the picture, Han van Meegeren could have thought of a recently published photo of Greta Garbo . Christ and the disciples at Emmaus became the best painting that Han van Meegeren painted. Finally he gave it the signature of Jan Vermeer. He later depicted himself in a self-portrait while painting the picture Christ and the disciples in Emmaus .
Han van Meegeren presented this fake to his friend, attorney CA Boon, as a real Vermeer and persuaded him to recommend this allegedly valuable original to potential buyers. The famous art historian Abraham Bredius , who had become known through many relevant expert reports , examined this forgery in September 1937, despite his concerns, as a real Vermeer, whereupon the Rotterdam Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired this forgery for the sum of 550,000 guilders and from June to October 1938 presented as a highlight in a special exhibition together with 450 Dutch masterpieces from 1400–1800.
In the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte Feulner wrote: “In the room in which the Vermeer picture hung in a rather isolated position, it was as quiet as a chapel. The feeling of consecration overflows on the visitor, although the picture has absolutely nothing cultic or ecclesiastical. ”The emotional impact of the picture as a religious experience was so great that many art critics no longer wanted to think of a possible forgery, although some (for example the Historian Johan Huizinga ) recognized the picture as a fake. When Dr. Abraham Bredius revoked his declaration of authenticity of the Vermeer painting in the same year 1938, he was not heard by the younger art critics.
In the summer of 1938, Han van Meegeren moved to Nice . There he bought the villa estate from the proceeds of the painting Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus in the Cimiez district in the Les Arènes de Cimiez district . The villa included a vineyard, a number of rocky areas, well-tended rose gardens and an olive grove. The villa had 12 bedrooms, on the ground floor there were five bright salons with windows to the south and with a view of the Mediterranean Sea, as well as a music room and a library, which van Meegeren transformed into a studio and workshop. Jo filled the house with period furniture and valuable decor, adorned the walls with real exquisitely framed pictures by van Meegeren and designed lavish housewarming parties with neighbors. The property was located in Carabacel in the square of Avenue de Alsace , Avenue de Robert-Moriez , Avenue de Picardie and Rue de Normandie and had an exit to Avenue de Alsace .
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In the Villa Estate van Meegeren forged two paintings, which he provided with the signature of Pieter de Hooch: first The Card Players, based on his painting The Visit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and then the Drinking Society as a variation of the picture Card Players in the Royal Collection in London. Finally he painted The Last Supper I in the style of Vermeers. It was found in September 1949 while searching for evidence in the basement of Paul Coremans' villa estate. X-ray examinations revealed remains of a painting by Govaert Flinck on the canvas .
When the Second World War threatened, Han van Meegeren returned to the Netherlands on July 29, 1939. The villa was then occupied by the Italian army (file note from Archives Municipales Nice). Jacques van Meegeren, son of Han van Meegeren, sold the villa in 1957 and shared the proceeds with his sister Inez, who was married in England at the time. The villa was later demolished and the associated property was built on with high multi-family houses.
Han van Meegeren stayed in a hotel in Amsterdam for about five months in 1939 and then set up the Villa De Wijdte , Hoog Hoefloo 46, in Laren (North Holland) in 1940 . Now he made more forged pictures: Christ's head , The Last Supper 2nd version and Jacob's blessing as a fake Vermeer. For the painting The Last Supper, 2nd version , he used a painting by Abraham Hondius that he had bought on May 29, 1940 from the Douwes brothers' art dealer in Amsterdam. The paintings were soon sold. The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum also bought a fake Vermeer ( The Washing of the Feet ) from him for 1,250,000 guilders, despite IQ van Regteren Altena, Hermann Voss and HP Bremmer's concerns about authenticity . From November to December 1941 he exhibited his drawings in the Hotel Hampdorf in Laren, which he published in his illustrated book Han van Meegeren Teekeningen I in 1942 .
In December 1943 he moved to Amsterdam , where he set up a splendid apartment at Keizersgracht 321. On December 18, 1943, he divorced his second wife, Jo Oerlemans, transferring 800,000 guilders to her, but she lived as he did in the house at Keizersgracht 321, which was registered in her name and therefore did not later become part of the bankruptcy estate.
In public he played the honorable citizen. By then he had earned between 5.5 and 7.5 million guilders from his forgeries. He used the money to buy and expand many houses and hotels, for works of art and for his luxurious lifestyle. In 1946 he told Doudart de la Grée that he had owned 15 country houses in Laren and 52 in Amsterdam, including grachtenhuizen , houses on the canals that were listed as historical monuments .
The crook who betrayed Hermann Göring
During the German occupation in World War II, in 1942 he even managed to sell the Vermeer fake Christ and the Adulteress to Hermann Göring through the banker and art dealer Alois Miedl . This picture could easily have been recognized as a forgery, as van Meegeren used cobalt blue, a color that did not yet exist in Vermeer's time. He later boasted that he had sold the picture to Goering for 1.65 million guilders , but it was apparently the case that Hermann Goering did not pay the cash amount in guilders but with English banknotes. Kilbracken takes another version: "Göring paid in exchange: he gave around two hundred of the smaller works stolen by the Nazis, but the total value exceeded the purchase price agreed in cash."
Göring, who in addition to Miedl also used other agents to expand his art collection, exhibited the Vermeer forgery Christ and the Adulteress along with the other art treasures in the exhibition rooms of his Carinhall residence . After August 25, 1943, Göring had the picture stored with part of his art collection in a salt mine near Salzburg in Austria. On May 17, 1945, the Allies were able to enter the mine, where the forgery, the "unknown Vermeer", was found by Captain Harry Anderson.
The confession
When, at the end of May 1945, the employees of the office to combat asset flight read in the books of the Goudstikker art dealership, which was operated by the banker and art dealer Alois Miedl until 1944 , that Han van Meegeren had sold a Vermeer Christ and the adulteress to Hermann Göring via Alois Miedl and the There was (unfounded) suspicion that he had belonged to the National Socialist Nationaal-Socialistische Bewegungsing ( National Socialist Movement ), he was taken to prison in Weteringschans on remand from May 29, 1945 to autumn 1945 for fraud and favoring the enemy.
In view of the imprisonment threatening him as a collaborator and as a seller of national cultural property of the Netherlands, he confessed after three days of imprisonment that he had forged this and other Vermeers . He explained: “The painting that came into Göring's hands is not a Vermeer van Delft, as you assume, but a van Meegeren! I painted the picture myself! "
Since it was hard to believe that the alleged “Vermeers” were in the hand of Han van Meegeger, he painted the last forged but unsigned Vermeer Jesus among the scribes during his pre-trial detention from July to September 1945 in the presence of witnesses .
At the end of 1945 he was declared bankrupt. From 1937 onwards, he was supposed to pay income and property taxes on the sales proceeds from the counterfeiting activity, in addition to the demands of the buyers for reimbursement of their full purchase price, whereby they also charged the commissions of the agents and dealers.
In anticipation of his trial, he gave interviews to the writer Marie-Louise Doudart de la Grée in 1946 , which she used and published in two books.
Expert committee
The court set up a seven-person international commission with Professor Dr. Paul Coremans, Dr. JW van Regteren Altena, Dr. H. Schneider, Dr. W. Froentjes, Professor HJ Plenderleith, Mr. FIG Rawlins and Dr. AM de Wild a. The commission thus consisted of directors, professors and doctors from the Netherlands, Belgium and England. Its head was the director of the chemical laboratory of the Belgian museums, Professor Dr. Paul Coremans.
For more than two years, the commission examined the Vermeer and Frans-Hals pictures, which Han van Meegeren had named as his forgeries, according to all the rules of art and science to clarify whether the paintings must have been created in the present and whether Han van Meegeren could have painted it.
Elaborate material examinations served to check whether these pictures were really forged by Han van Meegerens.
After long deliberations, Professor Dr. Paul Coremans found out through microchemical investigations that Han van Meegeren prepared his colors with the plastic binder Albertol (= Ampertol ), a chemical product of the phenol-formaldehyde group, which he mixed with modern white lead . Since these two products had only been manufactured since the beginning of the 20th century, it was proven that the pictures examined could not be 17th century paintings.
The results of the investigation, to which Han van Meegeren had also contributed with numerous references, gained evidential value in the trial, but were controversial for a long time until new investigation techniques confirmed them in 1967.
Process, sickness and death
The main hearing of the district court in Amsterdam against Han van Meegeren began on October 29, 1947 in room 4 of the Palace of Justice on Prinsengracht. The collaboration accusation was dropped because Paul Coremans was able to prove that the alleged Vermeer sold to Hermann Göring had been painted by Han van Meegeren and was therefore not part of the Netherlands' national cultural heritage. The public prosecutor, Meester HA Wassenbergh, brought charges of forgery and fraud against Han van Meegeren and called for two years in prison. Various photographs show Han van Meegeren in the courtroom, in which many of his forgeries were exhibited.
On November 12, 1947, the fourth chamber of the Amsterdam District Court sentenced him to the minimum sentence of one year in prison for forgery and fraud. He did not appeal. However, he did not have to go to prison because he was admitted to the Valeriuskliniek in Amsterdam on November 26, 1947, the last day of his appeal period, after a heart attack. There he suffered another serious heart attack on December 29th. He died of a heart attack at around 7 p.m. on December 30, 1947. A few hundred friends paid their last respects to the deceased in the chapel of the crematorium in Driehuis-Westerfeld. His urn was buried in 1948 on the Algemene Begraafplaats in the village of Diepenveen in the municipality of Deventer .
According to a Dutch opinion poll in mid-October 1947, Han van Meegeren was second on the popularity list, just behind the Prime Minister. Many Dutch saw in him the smart crook who really succeeded in tricking the art experts of the Netherlands and Hermann Göring.
Han van Meegeren is still considered one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century. After his trial, however, he declared himself: My triumph as a forger was my defeat as a creative artist .
The estate
The foreclosure auction of the estate
On September 5 and 6, 1950, his estate was foreclosed in a tent in the garden of the Amsterdam house at Keizersgracht 321. The house and inventory, furniture and works of art, including numerous paintings by old and new masters from van Meeger's private collection, totaling 738 were auctioned Objects. The house was offered with an estimated value of 65,000 guilders, the proceeds amounted to 123,000 guilders. The unsigned picture The Last Supper (1st version) brought in 2,300 guilders. The unsigned picture of Jesus among the scribes , painted while in custody, fetched 3,000 guilders. Today this picture is in a Johannesburg church. The total proceeds of the estate amounted to 226,599 guilders.
The son's declaration
In January 1951, Han van Meegeren's son told the Paris press that his father had forged four other paintings:
- The in Frans Hals hall of the Groninger Museum located youth with the whistle
- The Laughing Cavalier, part of the Cornelis Hofstede de Groot collection
- The lady in the blue hat contained in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection
- A counterpart to the famous head of a young girl in the Mauritshuis in The Hague
However, Han van Meegeren's son was unable to produce any evidence, documents, sketches or witnesses, so his statements did not appear credible. The lady in the blue hat was stolen from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum .
Review of the results of the expert committee
M. Jean Decoens objections to the opinion of the commission of inquiry
Jean Decoen, a Brussels art expert and picture restorer, represented Terug naar de waarheid in his 1951 book . Vermeer - Van Meegeren. Twee authentieke schilderijen van Vermeer is of the opinion that the two images ascribed to Han van Meegeren Christ and the disciples in Emmaus and The Last Supper, 2nd version, are real works by Vermeer. Han van Meegeren forged his Vermeers based on these two models. Incidentally, the research results and conclusions of the expert commission under Paul Coremans are wrong with regard to these paintings.
The shipowner Daniel Georg van Beuningen from Vierhouten, the buyer of the pictures The Last Supper, 2nd version 1941–1942, Drinkers Society and Christ's Head , asked Coremans to publicly admit his alleged mistakes made during the judicial investigation and afterwards. When Coremans refused, Daniel Georg van Beuningen filed a private lawsuit against Coremans, which was to be heard in a trial on June 2, 1955. He sued Coremans for £ 500,000 in damages on the grounds that the wrong judgment had damaged his reputation as an art collector and reduced the value of his wonderful Vermeer painting The Last Supper , Version 2. The trial was adjourned when Daniel Georg van Beuningen died on May 29, 1955. At the instigation of the heirs, he was resumed after about seven years. The trial resulted in Coremans and his commission of inquiry being fully rehabilitated. Van Beuningen's heirs had to pay compensation for their part and bear the costs of the proceedings.
Research results from 1967
The Artists' Materials Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh , PA, under the direction of Robert Feller and Bernard Keisch, investigated the forgeries of Han van Meegeren checked by the Coremans Commission in 1967 and confirmed their results that the images were not from the 17th century. Century, but must be forgeries of the 20th century. Jean Decoen's objections to the opinion of the investigative commission are thus refuted. The test results are presented here:
Han van Meegeren knew that white lead was used in Vermeer's time , but he had to get it from the modern paint trade. While Dutch lead was extracted from deposits in the European low mountain range in Vermeer's time, lead ores have been imported from America and Australia since the 19th century. The modern white lead differs from the old white lead firstly in the content of trace elements, secondly in the isotopic composition of the lead.
Dutch white lead was characterized by high levels of silver and antimony , while modern white lead, which Han van Meegeren had to use, contains neither silver nor copper, as these elements are now separated when lead is smelted.
Counterfeits, for which modern lead or modern lead compounds such as lead pigments were used, can be detected using the lead-210 method. Lead-210 is a lead isotope of the uranium-238 decay series, in which it is formed from radium-226 and continues to decay with a half-life of 22 years. This short half-life can be used to identify recent counterfeits.
The values of the picture Christ and the disciples in Emmaus by Han van Meegeren (Polonium-210: 8.5 ± 1.4, Radium-226: 0.8 ± 0.3) do not correspond to the values in the paintings of the Dutch from the years 1600/1660 (Polonium- 210: 0.23 ± 0.27, Radium-226: 0.40 ± 0.47).
Meaning and effect
It is difficult to accurately portray details of Han van Meegeren's life because Han van Meegeren led a conspiratorial life. Much of what you think you know about your life is just a process of reconstructing your life and work. Even the statements of Han van Meegeren may not be truthful in detail and could be revised by more recent research. Han van Meegeren played a variety of roles, but they were fraudulently faked. He deceived and disappointed those he dealt with. Ultimately, his father was right when he called out: "You are a fraud and you will always be". But this double game has drawn him. He became addicted to nicotine, alcohol and morphine.
Counterfeit forger
A couple of supposedly genuine Berkemeyers, which van Meegeren had bought dearly in order to paint them over in his forgeries, later turned out to be imitations from the nineteenth century. Since Han van Meegeren's paintings have been trading on the art market with rising prices, forgeries have also appeared there under his signature. The fact that there are not only his fake Vermeers, but also fake van Meegerens, is a cheerful punch line in this tragic comedy.
Fake as a method
The forged images appear under the term fake as a hiding of one's own originals under someone else's signature. Until the discovery of Eulenspiegelei, this hiding of one's own originals is connected with a conspiratorial knowledge of a clever, humorous act of deception. Han van Meegeren consciously and successfully chose the fake method to force the exhibition of his originals in museums. The museum exhibitions of the pictures with forged signature under the real artist name Han van Meegeren lead to a higher evaluation of the pictures previously despised as forgeries and to the dissolution of the previous concept of the original , which was linked to the real signature of a picture.
Stefan Römer writes in his book Artistic Strategies of Fake: Critique of Original and Forgery : “At the latest at the moment when counterfeits are deliberately exhibited in a museum and thus assured a certain institutional function, the turning point that sanctioned the era is sanctioned seems to replace the original, even if the museums initially only intended this for self-legitimation from the 1950s onwards. "
Retrospectives in museums
Posthumously , pictures or forgeries by Han van Meegeren were shown in exhibitions in Amsterdam (1952), Basel (1953), Zurich (1953), Haarlem in the art dealers de Boer (1958), London (1961), Kortrijk, Belgium (1961), Rotterdam (1971), Minneapolis (1973), Koningswei, Tilburg (1974), Essen (1976–1977), Berlin (1977), Slot Zeist (1985), New York (1987), Berkeley (1990), Munich (1991), Rotterdam (1996), The Hague (1996) and in the Haagse Kunstkring Den Haag (2004), Stockholm (2004), Halle (Saale) (2014–2015) and thus made accessible to a broad public. The most important exhibition catalogs are:
- Georg Schmidt (Ed.): Wrong or Real? Kunstmuseum Basel , Basel / Zurich 1953.
- Museum Folkwang , Essen, and Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin (ed.): Forgery and research. 1976, ISBN 3-7759-0201-5 .
- Really wrong . Arnaldo Mondadori Arte, Fondation Cartier, Villa Stuck , Munich 1991.
- Original to ... forgeries between fascination and fraud . Editor: Boje E. Hans Schmuhl in connection with Thomas Bauer-Friedrich . Catalog on the occasion of the exhibition "Original to ... Forgeries between fascination and fraud" in the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle (Saale) . Moritzburg Foundation, Halle (Saale) 2014, ISBN 978-3-86105-084-1 . Pages 148 to 197 and 247 to 248.
Works
Catalog of works and illustrations
- Marijke van den Brandhof: A vroege Vermeer uit 1937. Achtergronden van leven en work van de signs / vervalser Han van Meegeren . Diss., Het Spectrum, Utrecht 1979 (catalog raisonné p. 153–163 and numerous illustrations of the pictures with the signature H. van Meegeren)
- H. de Boer, Pieter Koomen: Han van Meegeren Teekeningen I. LJC Boucher, s'Gravenhage 1942 (illustrated book of the drawings Han van Meegeren)
- Frederik H. Kreuger : Han van Meegeren Revisited. His Art & a List of his Works. Fourth enlarged edition. Quantes Publishers Rijswijk, Delft 2013, ISBN 978-90-5959-065-6 (English).
Fake pictures
Trial images that were not sold
- Lady studying music 1935–1936
- Woman making music 1935–1936
- Portrait of a gentleman 1935–1936
- Portrait of a drinking woman 1935–1936
- The Last Supper Version 1, 1938–1939
- Jesus among the scribes July – September 1945 (estate sale for 3,000 guilders)
- The matchmaker (The forgery by Han van Meegeren based on the original by the painter Dirck van Baburen )
Counterfeits sold
- Man and woman at a spinet. 1932 (sold to the Amsterdam banker Dr. Fritz Mannheimer)
- Christ and the disciples at Emmaus. 1936–1937 (sold to the Boymans Foundation for 520,000–550,000 guilders)
- Drinker society. 1937–1938 (sold for 219,000–220,000 guilders to DG van Beuningen)
- The card players. 1938–1939 (sold for 219,000–220,000 guilders to W. van der Vorm)
- Christ head. 1940–1941 (Sold for 400,000–475,000 guilders to DG van Beuningen)
- The last supper. 2nd version 1940–1942 (sold for 1,600,000 guilders to DG van Beuningen)
- Blessing of Jacob. 1941–1942 (sold for 1,270,000 guilders to W. van der Vorm)
- Christ and the adulteress. 1941–1942 (sold for 1,650,000 guilders to Hermann Göring)
- The washing of feet. 1941–1943 (sold for 1,250,000–1,300,000 guilders to the Dutch state)
Film and video
- In 1985 Peter Greenaway created the film A Zed & Two Noughts (German title: Ein Z & two zeros ) and wrote the screenplay for it. The actor Gerard Thoolen plays a surgeon and painter named Van Meegeren , who is perhaps based on Han van Meegeren.
- Film seduced hands 1948 (see Sepp Schüller p. 41)
- Film Van Meegeren's false Vermeers 1951 by Jan Botermans and Gustav Maguel (see Sepp Schüller p. 57)
- Video on Paul Coremans and the van Meegeren case
- Czechoslovak television crime series Dobrodružství kriminalistiky from 1990 (German: perpetrator unknown - great moments of criminalistics ) has an episode that deals with the van Meegeren case ( The master forger ).
literature
- Literature by and about Han van Meegeren in the catalog of the German National Library
- Article by Han van Meegeren in the monthly magazine De Kemphaan April 1928 – March 1930 (partly under a pseudonym).
- Source collections
- Arend Hendrik Huussen Jr .: Henricus (Han) Antonius van Meegeren (1889–1945). Documents concerning zijn leven en strafproces. (Cahiers uit het noorden 20), Zoetermeer, Huussen 2009.
- Arend Hendrik Huussen Jr .: Henricus (Han) Antonius van Meegeren (1889–1945). Documents, supplement. (Cahiers uit het noorden 21), Zoetermeer, Huussen 2010.
- Bibliographies up to 1979
- H. van Leeuwen: Bibliography about Han van Meegeren, de kunstschilder - verwalser. Amsterdam, 1968.
- Marijke van den Brandhof: A vroege Vermeer uit 1937. Achtergronden van leven en work van de signs / vervalser Han van Meegeren. Dissertation. Het Spectrum, Utrecht 1979, pp. 147-152.
- Biographies
- Sepp Schüller: Wrong or real? The van Meegeren case. Brothers Auer, Bonn 1953.
- Joachim Goll: Art forger. 1st edition. EA Seemann, Leipzig, 1962 (with images no. 106–122 and bibliography p. 249–250) p. 179–187.
- Lord John Raymond Godley Kilbracken: Forger or Master? The van Meegeren case. P. Zsolnay, Vienna / Hamburg 1968.
- Marie-Louise Doudart de la Grée: I was Vermeer. The forgeries of Han van Meegeren. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1968. (Translation of the original edition Geen Standbeeld voor Han van Meegeren. De Goudvink, Antwerp 1966 (contains interviews with Han van Meegeren and excerpts from court files))
- Anthony Bailey : Vermeer. Siedler, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-88680-745-2 .
- Frederik H. Kreuger : Han van Meegeren, meestervervalser. Veen Magazines, Diemen 2004, ISBN 90-76988-53-6 (Dutch).
- Frederik H. Kreuger : A New Vermeer, Life and Work of Han van Meegeren. Rijswijk 2007, ISBN 978-90-5959-047-2 (English).
- Edward Dolnick: The Nazi and the Art Forger . The real story of Vermeer, Göring and the greatest art fraud of the 20th century. 1st edition. From the American by Dominik Fehrmann. Parthas Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86964-082-2 .
- Methods and techniques of image falsification
- Bernard Keisch, Robert L. Feller, AS Levine, RR Edwards: Dating and Authenticating Works of Art by Measurement of Natural Alpha Emitters. In: Science. 155, No. 3767, 1967, pp. 1238-1242.
- Bernard Keisch: Dating Works of Art Trough their Natural Radioactivity: Improvements and Applications. In: Science. 160, 1968, pp. 413-415.
- R. Strauss: Activation analytical investigations of pigments from paintings by South German painters of the 17th and 18th centuries. Dissertation, Technical University of Munich, 1968.
- SJ Flemming: Authenticity in Art. The Scientific Detection of Forgery. The Institute of Physics, London 1976.
- W. Froentjes, R. Breek: Een nieuw onderzoek naar de identiteit van het bindmiddel van Van Meegeren. In: Chemisch Weekblad. Magazines. 1977, pp. 583-589.
- Original to ... forgeries between fascination and fraud . Editor: Boje E. Hans Schmuhl in connection with Thomas Bauer-Friedrich . Catalog on the occasion of the exhibition "Original to ... Forgeries between fascination and fraud" in the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle (Saale) . Moritzburg Foundation, Halle (Saale) 2014, ISBN 978-3-86105-084-1 . Pages 247 to 248.
Han van Megeeren's reception in fiction
- Novels
- William Gaddis : The Forgery of the World. ISBN 3-442-44878-6 , ISBN 3-86150-236-4 (novel inspired by the figure of Han van Meegeren)
- Luigi Guarnieri: The Double Life of Vermeer. Antje Kunstmann, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-88897-381-3 (Italian original: La doppia vita di Vermeer. Mondadori, Milan 2004). Novel about Han van Meegeren. Interestingly enough, this “novel” itself is in a certain way a fake: like Henry Keazor, “Falsified!”, Frankfurter Rundschau. April 12, 2005, No. 84, Forum Humanwissenschaften, p. 16, Guarnieri wrote large parts of his book z. T. copied verbatim from Lord Kilbracken ( Van Meegeren. London 1967). Guarnieri's brother Giovanni is a translator (see http://www.translatorscafe.com/cafe/MegaBBS/thread-view.asp?threadid=281&start=1 ), so Luigi was able to have him easily translate the book into Italian. Keazor shows that Guarnieri tries to cover his tracks by not mentioning the book Kilbrackens in the Italian original version (there is only mentioned its predecessor publication from 1951, still presented under Kilbracken's real name "John Godley"), but the German publisher wanted Probably give his readers the German version and came across the German translation of the later book by Lord Kilbracken, which is now - accidentally, so to speak - mentioned, even if Guarnieri does not, of course, at any point indicate how extensively he used it.
- Frederik H. Kreuger: The Deception. Novel and His Real Life. Quantes, Rijswijk 2005, ISBN 90-5959-031-7 (English)
- Plays
- Arnold Schwengeler: The forger. Francke, Bern 1949.
- Gerd Focke: Scandal about sea meres. Hofmeister, Leipzig 1960.
- Larry Ward and Gordon Russel: Masterpiece. 1964.
- Marie Doudart de la Gree: Het Fenomeen. The Hague 1974.
- Ian Walker: Ghost in the Light. In: Three Plays. Publisher iUniverse, 2005, ISBN 0-595-33992-1 .
- Bruce J. Robinson: Another Vermeer. 2007.
Web links
- Everything you need to know about Han van Meegeren
- Literature by and about Han van Meegeren in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Han van Meegeren in the German Digital Library
- Search for "Han van Meegeren" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
Archival material
- Archives about Han van Meegeren in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD)
- Archives about Jacques Henri Emil van Meegeren in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD)
Video
- Van Meegeren's Fake Vermeers. From the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Dutch spoken with English subtitles: Film about Han van Meegeren and his fake pictures of Vermeer.
- Terra X: F - like falsification 2nd episode: "Master" works Film by Nina Koshofer, moderated by the actor Christian Berkel . In the film, Frederik H. Kreuger judgesthe forger Han van Meegeren. With full-length video on demand.
Image sources
Individual evidence
- ↑ Doudart de la Grée pp. 134-161; Kilbracken pp. 127-129.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 129-134.
- ↑ Black and white illustration by Goll and Schüller, color by Kreuger p. 25.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 143-147; Bailey p. 253.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 142-145.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 43-56, 86-90.
- ↑ Goll p. 183.
- ↑ Schüller p. 25.
- ↑ Schüller pp. 22-24; Kilbracken pp. 56-61.
- ↑ Schüller p. 26.
- ↑ Schüller pp. 32-34; Kilbracken pp. 175-176.
- ^ Frederik H. Kreuger: Han van Meegeren, meestervervalser. P. 167ff.
- ↑ Schüller pp. 34-37.
- ↑ Doudart de la Grée p. 43.
- ^ Bailey p. 255.
- ↑ Kilbracken p. 13.
- ↑ Kreuger, A New Vermeer p. 146.
- ↑ Schüller pp. 18-19.
- ^ Bailey, p. 253.
- ↑ Toni Roth: Possibilities and limits of recognition and evidence. In: Art and the beautiful home. 83, 1971, pp. 81-85.
- ↑ Doudart de la Grée pp. 176-217; Kilbracken pp. 268-281.
- ↑ Kilbracken p. 282.
- ^ Doudart de la Grée p. 224.
- ↑ Schüller pp. 46-48.
- ^ Kreuger: A New Vermeer .
- ↑ Schüller pp. 48-58.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 256-258.
- ^ Richard Strauss: Activation-analytical investigations of pigments from paintings by South German painters of the 17th and 18th centuries . Dissertation, Technical University of Munich, 1968.
- ^ Museum Folkwang and Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin (ed.): Forgery and research. Essen 1976, pp. 195-196.
- ↑ See Bernard Keisch: Discriminating Radioactivity Measurements of Lead: New Tool for Authentication. In: Curator. 11, No. 1., 1968, pp. 41-52.
- ↑ Counterfeiting and Research. P. 191.
- ↑ Quoted from Doudart de la Grée pp. 145, 230.
- ↑ Kilbracken pp. 188, 267.
- ^ Bailey p. 258.
- ^ Stefan Römer: Artistic strategies of the fake: Critique of the original and forgery. DuMont, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-7701-5532-7 , p. 13.
- ↑ The master forger - Amsterdam 1945 , perpetrator unknown - great moments of criminalistics. In: Fernsehserien.de
- ↑ Table of Contents
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Meegeren, Han van |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Meegeren, Henricus Antonius van |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch painter, restorer, art dealer and art forger |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 10, 1889 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Deventer , Overijssel Province , The Netherlands |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 30, 1947 |
| Place of death | Amsterdam |