Epistemophilia: Hans van Meegeren, the fake Christ and art thieves suck

So, while I was in the library the other day, I picked up a book on display about art travel (called Art + Travel) through Europe that actually is really entertaining-and since it's a travel book it has plenty of maps. It provides a lot of information for a travel book and has reproductions on a great number of paintings by Caravaggio, Munch, Van Gogh, Vermeer and Goya. And where to see them.

I wanted to highlight the story of an art forger named Hans Van Meegeren (1889-1947.) He started out as a student of architecture then later tried to become a painter but the Dutch critics weren't very complimentary. He set out to prove the experts wrong and began a career as a forger of Dutch masterpieces, including Vermeer who was from his own home town of Delft. He fooled many art critics and even the Nazis. Goering has one of his fake Vermeers, "Christ and the Adultress" in his collection. And this is how Van Meegeren got in trouble. After the occupation, he was arrested for selling Dutch cultural treasures to the Nazis. To prove his innocence, he painted one of his fakes in court, demonstrating the techniques he used to imitate the Dutch masters and how he made the paint appear aged.

He was given a token sentence of one year for the forgery and became a folk hero among the Dutch for fooling art experts and, even better, the Nazis. Alas, he died of a heart attack before he could serve his sentence.

BTW, the article about Vermeer (my favorite since I love all things Dutch Realism) mentions not much is known about him or his life but he was an admirer of the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius and owned some of his paintings. I don't know him--apparently he was in turn a student of Rembrandt. There is some information about him here.

I'm not the only one who loves Dutch Realism. The most stolen artwork in history is Van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece. I remember my art history teacher in college telling us he painted everything to exacting detail using single-haired brushed to get some of the details. You can zoom in and see amazing detail on the crown and the jewels and garments. Seven times it's been stolen and I didn't know this-it weighs 2 TONS. A panel of it is still missing.

A Vermeer was also one of the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The total value of that theft was around $500 million. None of the items have been recovered and also include works by Rembrandt, Degas and Manet.  The going theory now is a faction of the IRA has them. Apparently,  a lot of art is stolen as bargaining items for international crime. WTF, is the IRA still around? People are pigs, as my Mother often says.

(here's something cool about that Museum: if your name is Isabella, you get in free.)