Pop quiz: Which of these paintings is by 17th c. Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, and which is by 20th c. Dutch forger Hans van Meegeren?
If you know the answer, you're a better art expert than just about everyone from 1937 to 1945. Or, more likely, you've heard this story before. If you haven't, or if you'd like a pretty thorough recap, try Edward Dolnick's The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century (even if you imagine that probably the greatest art hoaxes of the century are the ones that we haven't discovered yet).
Dolnick begins at the end, when van Meegeren got caught for war profiteering and had to convince the Amsterdam police that he didn't actually loot those Vermeers, he forged them. Treason carried a death sentence, but forgery got him a year in jail and free drinks at the pub for fooling Goering, so van Meegeren was an enthusiastic witness against himself, even going so far as to paint a real fake Vermeer while in custody to prove his guilt. He died of heart failure before he could serve any time, but he'd made his point by then.
In order to get at the full story, Dolnick recounts, in an unhurried, somewhat meandering style, brief histories of occupied Holland, and Nazi art looting; observations on Vermeer's preeminence, and the judgment of museum and gallery curators and art experts; and entertaining anecdotes about forgers -- who they are, why they are forgers instead of artists, and the ins and outs of the process of both making the paintings and getting them sold.
On the one hand, he notes, a forged piece of art does what it's supposed to do -- hang there on the wall and look, one presumes, as pretty as it did before you knew it was a forgery; on the other, art investors rarely buy for looks -- they're in it for money, status, and a piece of history, all of which go out the window when their piece is a fake. Our views of forgers themselves are likewise ambivalent. Few of us feel sorry for the poor millionaires who get swindled, but forgers can muck up art history irrevocably, or at least make things very confusing for experts, not to mention the rest of us.
Okay, pencils down. The top painting is the forgery, van Meegeren's faux-Vermeer The Supper at Emmaus, and the second one is the authentic Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. If you've read this far, you get an A for effort no matter which one you picked.
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