No this is not Vermeer, it's a Van Meegeren. A truly fake Vermeer.
Several news items in the art world have caught my attention.
http://www.essentialvermeer.com/misc/van_meegeren.html *
http://www.themanwhomadevermeers.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/arts/design/guggenheim-project-confronts-conceptual-arts-nature.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
http://www.thewrap.com/tims-vermeer-review-penn-teller-tim-jenison-documentary
The first of these websites gives a brief description of the rise and fall (and 'rise' again) of Han Van Meegeren, an unsuccessful artist and successful forger of Old Masters. This individual 'found' lost canvasses which he sold to top Nazi officials. In the case of Goering, he bartered one 'Vermeer' for 200 Dutch paintings. Van Meegeren became extremely rich selling forgeries. When he was eventually brought to trial in the Netherlands after the war, he could claim he 'saved' 200 fine works from destruction by the Nazis.
He became a heroic anti-hero because he was able to outfox some of the ablest art experts of the thirties and early forties, educated but greedy high-flyers, who talked themselves into a frenzy of delight over the newly revealed (in fact newly painted) canvasses.*
The supper at Emmaus, 1936-37
They were experiencing a 'Vermeer Moment', projecting their past aesthetic beliefs and pleasures onto a forged canvas.
They were not, in fact, experiencing Vermeer.
They were mistaken in thinking it authentic, but not mistaken in how they felt.
A Vermeer is beautiful, with light that seems to melt borders. The contours of a face, of a dress, a window or a jewel are magically soft. There are only 35 or so known Vermeers.
People have studied his technique, fascinated by how real, how authentic (that word again) a Vermeer feels.
Almost photographic.
The melting borders of truth.
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There is another take on Vermeer: that in fact he used a kind of camera obscura to achieve the accuracy of image. In 'Tim's Vermeer' a scientist, himself not a painter, has been able to reproduce Vermeer using a construction plausibly achievable in Vermeer's time. There is a documentary, which I haven't yet seen but have read about, that describes this.Quoting a review of the film on the thewrap website:
The question he asks is, What technology might have Vermeer used to create such realistic looking paintings in an era before cameras were invented? Jenison has some hunches and throws himself into his scientific experiment, painstakingly building a replica of a Vermeer scene in a storage facility in Texas.
Before it’s over, painter David Hockney (who, in his book “Secret Knowledge,” originally theorized about Vermeer and other artists of the time using optics in their work) and actor-painter Martin Mull have lent their expertise; Jenison also gets a private audience with the real Vermeer painting he’s duplicating, which happens to be part of a collection owned by the queen of England; she, alas, does not make a cameo appearance.So did the great Vermeer himself use materials and knowledge and apply 17th century technology to create the 36 plus masterpieces with such uncanny precision?
Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth./ That is all ye know in life and all ye need to know.This said of a Grecian Urn by the young and fervent Keats.
So is truth authenticity? Authenticity truth?
Do we think we like it because it's famous? Do we like/love it for what it is? Or what we think it is or represents? What is it truly?
People want to be wowed and thrilled: a newly unearthed masterpiece, a revelation.
People are so influenced by the opinions of those around us.
If I were standing next to an expert ogling the 'masterpiece' who is totally convinced, and voices that conviction, I would indeed be influenced.
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And then there is the curious question of whether a work of art that has been reproduced is still 'by' that artist.In the case of a large-scale urban art installations there are always helpers and craftspeople involved. The object is attributed to the one artist. In the case of smaller installations, there have been some curious skirmishes in the art world. When the Guggenheim museum purchased a large collection of contemporary art from an Italian patron-collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (love that name), it had to deal with whether reproductions of originals in his collection (eg. that had broken or disintegrated) could rightfully be attributed to the original sculptor.
Whose art is it when a skilled carpenter makes the same item and it's just as good? Or perhaps not quite as good because he/she is not using the original wood -- perhaps plywood this time?
Is it that double-headed hydra of Marketing and Opportunism chasing Mammon and Athena? (mixed gods and metaphors notwithstanding).
*In 1937, Abraham Bredius (one of the most authoritative art historians who had dedicated a great part of his life to the study of Vermeer) was approached by a lawyer who claimed to be the trustee of a Dutch family estate in order to have him look at a rather large painting of a Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. Shortly after having viewed the painting, the 83 year old art historian wrote an article in the Burlington Magazine, the "art bible" of the times, in which he stated, "It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio. And what a picture! Neither the beautiful signature . . . nor the pointillés on the bread which Christ is blessing, is necessary to convince us that we have here—I am inclined to say—the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft . . . "
