On the left is a masterpiece painted by Johannes Vermeer called The Milkmaid. Next to it is a forgery that was attributed to Vermeer when it was “found” back in 1937. The most eminent Vermeer scholar of that day wrote this about the squalid forgery on the right:
"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….”
And my heart gently weeps.
The most knowledgeable person in the world on the subject of Vermeer’s oeuvre was duped by the forgery on the right. The expert, Doctor Abraham Bredius, saw “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer.” What I see are three slump-shouldered zombies surrounding Zombie Jesus. How and why did that happen?
That’s what we must find out. That’s our mystery.
A Trifle About Johannes Vermeer
There are a couple of facts about Vermeer that are important clues to our mystery. The great master lived from 1632 to 1675 in the Netherlands and left no diaries or other significant writings. There are about 33 paintings attributed to him, while other painters were much more prolific. He used various props repeatedly in his paintings, and he frequently depicted light coming from a window to the left. There were only two known religious paintings by Vermeer until the forgeries began to surface. The master’s paintings are very sumptuous and life-like, including:
About Dr. Abraham Bredius
At the time he “discovered” the forged Vermeer entitled Christ at Emmaus, Abraham Bredius was 83 years old. He had had a long and distinguished career, which included earlier discoveries of genuine Vermeers. His system of cataloging Rembrandt’s paintings is still in use. Bredius’ word was important in the Art world in pre-war Europe; he was called “The Pope.”
When a lawyer showed up at his door in 1937 with the “Vermeer,” Bredius inquired about the character of the attorney who dropped it off, and then he examined the painting using the standard procedures of that day.
The Procedures of the Day
To determine if a painting was centuries-old back in 1937, experts employed a simple alcohol and needle test. They rubbed a small patch of the paint with alcohol and poked it with a hot needle. Newer paint would easily puncture, whereas hardened old paint would not. It takes at least 50 years for paint to fully set.
Experts also looked at the provenance of the painting to determine if there existed a verifiable chain of custody, including old bills of sale, mentions in auction catalogs or estate inventories. Finally, the expert would give a painting the “eye” test, looking to match the master’s known traits, props, brushstrokes, signature and themes.
This Forger’s Tricks
I will not mention the forger’s name. There is clear and convincing evidence that establishes him as a Nazi sympathizer. Moreover, he sullied the name of Johannes Vermeer. Those are unforgivable sins to me.
To pass off ugly paintings as Vermeers, the forger used psychology and plastic.
He studied Johannes Vermeer, and he studied Dr. Abraham Bredius. Most importantly, he studied what Dr. Bredius knew, and wrote, about Vermeer. By doing this, the forger learned that the Vermeer expert had hypothesized that Vermeer studied the Italian masters, especially Caravaggio, and that he potentially had a "missing religious period." Remember, Vermeer had painted only two believed-to-be-authentic religious-themed paintings.
The forger sought to fill this gap.
To do that, he needed an old canvas, so he purchased a cheap painting (with a good canvas) by an unknown 17th Century artist. He removed the old paint on the found canvas and painted over it with pigments he made himself to match those of the old masters. Most significantly, he used Bakelite—a kind of early plastic—in his paints to make them harden and crack like old masterpieces. After baking in the oven, the painting could now pass the alcohol and hot needle test.
He used known props and techniques associated with Vermeer, including light shining from left to right, pointillés (dabs of bright paint) on the bread, the same carafe (to Jesus' left) that Vermeer had painted, and the favored colors blue and gold that were associated with the master. He also forged Vermeer's signature on the painting.
The forger then duped a lawyer with a clean background to show up at Dr. Bredius' doorstep with the painting, claiming, mysteriously, that it belonged to an old family that was in dire need of anonymity and money to escape fascist Italy. Who wouldn’t want to escape Mussolini?
A couple years later, the forger sold Jesus and the Adulteress to infamous Nazi Hermann Goering. It is believed that Goerring traded 137 paintings or more to own this “Vermeer.” That record of $11 million (in value) paid for one painting stood for 40 years.
The forger was found out as this painting, recovered after the war, led back to his door.
If that wasn’t enough, the forger had created a book of his original works and sent a signed copy to Hitler.
One critic and author believes that the forger specifically painted Jesus and the “good” Jews to look Aryan, while the “bad” Jews were dark-skinned and swarthy looking. Do you think that that’s Judas in red? Would a painting like this appeal more to an audience that believed in a master race? We’ll talk about that theory a little more below.
The forgery on the right is called The Washing of the Feet. As you can see, it is the same Zombie Jesus and the same carafe on the table. Light is again shining from a window on the left, and the person with the darkest complexion in the painting is wearing red. The Vermeer colors of blue and gold are present.
What little skill the forger evinced in his earlier “Vermeers” was no longer apparent, as he was now interested in pumping out as many as possible, as quickly as possible.
You see, once the first “Vermeer” was believed to be authentic, the forgeries that followed only had to show the same models and a few Vermeer characteristics in the paintings. The authenticity questions were muted.
This “Vermeer” was bought by the Netherlands government for what would now amount to 5.3 million dollars.
The forgery on the left is called Isaac Blessing Jacob and was sold to a wealthy Dutch industrialist for what would be equal to over five million dollars today.
When asked why he didn’t seem to put in the effort he had in previous “Vermeers,” the forger said that it didn’t matter because “they sold just the same.”
The story in the Bible is that Jacob stole the blessing of his father that was intended for his older brother Esau by pretending to be Esau. Blind old Isaac was fooled. The forger included the cheesy theatrics of Jacob looking around in a guilty manner.
The carafe, the bread and the colors blue and gold are again present. The forger included the carafe in the picture even though it appeared in only two of Vermeer’s authentic paintings.
Vermeer’s Believed-to-Be-Authentic Religious-Themed Paintings
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary is dated to 1655 (below, left). Notice the lack of zombies in the painting. Jesus has a mellow halo, and he does not look like the forger’s Jesus. On the right is The Allegory of Faith, also zombie free, which was painted by Vermeer around 1670.
Books on the Subject
There have been a number of books written about the Vermeer forgeries. Nazis! Art fraud! Mystery! Who could resist? I will discuss two below, both published in 2008. Jonathan Lopez wrote a book entitled The Man Who Made Vermeers, which has been rightfully lauded by the critic for The New Yorker magazine.
Lopez spends a good deal of time explaining how the forger was not who he appeared to be in 1947: A supposed Dutch national hero who swindled Hermann Goering. Rather, Lopez proves that he was a scam artist from at least the 1920s and a Nazi sympathizer. Lopez has made an air-tight case.
Another major argument in the book is that the forger used Aryan features and themes to make his forgeries more receptive before the Second World War. The idea being that, although the paintings did not look like actual Vermeers, they did look familiar. Although they weren’t timeless, they were timely. Because of that, Lopez argues, the paintings look “dated” to us, but in pre-War Europe, they were like oil-based comfort food.
I agree with Lopez to a point. (He shows us völkisch art that is strikingly similar to the forgeries). But it is not enough!
______________________________
The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick is an easier read, but it paints the forger as a hero. Even before I found out that the forger was a Nazi sympathizer, I still hated him for what he did to Vermeer.
Dolnick, though, having been a science writer, explains the techniques used by the forger with the bakelite (plastic) and the baking of the paintings in exquisite detail.
He is also a master storyteller.
The New Yorker critic claimed that Dolnick spent too much time on Hermann Goering, but that is one hell of an interesting story. You can’t blame Dolnick for that.
Perhaps more interesting than Goering, though, is Dolnick’s use of the “Uncanny Valley.” It is a theory, first encountered in robotics, which claims that we enjoy facsimiles if they are not too realistic.
For example, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori discovered:
“’The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only to a point. If an android became too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.’
People like R2-D2 and C-3PO. No one cared that they looked as much like vacuum cleaners as like human beings. To be 50 percent humanlike was fine. ‘But when a robot becomes ninety-nine percent lifelike, … so close that it’s almost real, we focus on the missing one percent.’ Something about the skin strikes us as wrong; the dead eyes make us cringe; the herky-jerky movements turn us off.
For this reason, a close copy of a Vermeer might fail—indeed the forger tried close copies that failed—whereas something that was not quite the opposite of a Vermeer might succeed. A very interesting argument, don’t you think?
But, even after reading both books, I was still left with a question in my mind: How did anybody fall for those Vermeer forgeries! Look at them! Look at Vermeer’s paintings! Despite this, I would recommend that you put both books on your list. They are well worth your time.
Was Dr. Bredius in on It?
Nobody has seriously claimed that Dr. Bredius played a part in the scandal other than that of dupe. His reputation and legacy were on the line, and he apparently already had a significant fortune. Moreover, he donated the equivalent of $90,000 to the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam so that it could purchase the forgery entitled Christ at Emmaus.
Yet, there is the fact that the lawyer who provided the “Vermeer” to him and the art dealer who eventually helped with the sale split $1.5 million. Would you pay $90k for a share in $1.5m? With the possibility of more to come? Also, there’s the fact that the first art dealer shown the painting called it a “rotten fake.” In other words, it was pretty obvious to some that the emperor wore no clothes.
On the other hand, Dr. Bredius donated five Rembrandts and three Jan Steens to the Mauritshus, the famous Dutch museum where he was the Director for twenty years. The remainder of his large collection became the backbone of another museum that exists today called the Bredius Museum. Obviously, Dr. Bredius did not need the money.
My Sister’s Theory
My sister believes that it is plausible for a master to have been a young person at one time. I grant her that! But she goes on to say that a very young Vermeer might not have honed the skills that he evidenced in later years, after much trial and error. As an artist herself, she would know about this. But could a teenage Vermeer be that bad? I don’t think so. Moreover, wouldn’t he have destroyed, or painted over, those earlier, ugly works once he had attained mastery over his skillset?
[UPDATE 9/4/16] After reading the diary, my sister explained to me, calmly but directly, that her theory was not a reason to believe it was a real Vermeer, but a reason some people might have thought it was a real Vermeer. Since she is my sister and is very smart, I thought that that was assumed, but better to be safe than to have your sister mad at you!
My Wax Seal Theory
Did Dr. Bredius place too much faith in Science? If he believed that the alcohol and hot needle test was infallible, a forger could get away with painting just about anything. I believe that if you took a microscope to Christ at Emmaus and looked carefully at the forged Vermeer signature, you would see a depression or scratch where Dr. Abraham Bredius attempted to poke it with a hot needle.
That’s what I would have done? How about you?
If the Vermeer signature is at least one hundred years old, that’s powerful evidence. It would be like getting a package from the King carefully sealed with wax, affixed with an impression of the royal coat of arms. That’s why I call this the “Wax Seal Theory.”
Instead of painting a picture of Jesus, what if the painting had Vermeer’s signature and depicted Felix the Cat or a B-17 Flying Fortress? Yes, a forger could go too far, even after defeating the scientific procedures of the day. In fact, I think this forger did go too far because of the shoddy quality of the paintings. That’s why I don’t totally buy the wax seal theory for everyone, but it probably worked on Bredius.
But what about everybody after Dr. Bredius?
The Rest of My Theory
Not quite satisfied with the explanations offered by Dolnick and Lopez, I went in search of recent scholarship about the psychology involved in fraud. When considering Art fraud as it relates to other scams, something unusual became apparent. In Art fraud, the persons deceived have every incentive to continue to buy into the fraud, even after it is apparent that they have been duped.
Please consider this:
As you can see depicted above, my belief is that with an Art fraud, every person with an interest in the painting becomes an advocate for it. Reputation, money, fame, and pride are on the line. The green arrows show how they will fight for the painting’s authenticity before a skeptical public. That is quite different when the fraud is a Ponzi scheme, as depicted below:
In a Ponzi scheme and most other frauds, you will have some victims who are prideful and won’t turn on the scammer. Those are depicted with the green crosses in the figure above. However, many people will want their money returned—even if a few cents on the dollar—and will fight back. Their incentive, which had been to prop up the Ponzi scheme while it was supposedly making money, is now to get back the money they have sunk into it. They become advocates against the fraud.
A 2015 article in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities describes confidence tricks as “the exploitation of predictable imperfect decisions.” It is predictable that a person will pick the wrong card in a game of Three-Card Monte. It is predictable that a man looking for lost Vermeer religious period paintings will be eager when something close to it appears with a hard-baked Vermeer signature on it. The authors of the Yale article also note that it is a common practice of the con artist to exploit the “cognitive impairments resulting from aging.”
In 2014, professors at the University of Exeter conducted a study to determine if people who fall for scams share any personality traits. They do. First the professors located a group of people who were susceptible to scamming. Then they administered personality tests. The authors of the paper found a number of traits that showed a significant relationship among the con victims. We will deal with one of the more important: Trust in authority.
The Vermeer forgery scam was replete with it!
The most important authority, however, was not a person. It was a signature on a painting. Authority could also be found in the appearance of that familiar carafe and other Vermeer props and stylistic choices. Those authorities spoke to Dr. Bredius as if in the voice of Johannes Vermeer. After he was fooled, he became the trusted authority figure who perpetuated the scam. He was infected with the con as if it was a virus.
Using Piety Against the Pious
Finally, I believe that the subject matter, Christ, had a lot to do with the reception of the paintings. The Dutch were very religious, and they were modest. Instead of the grand carrying-on that one sees in the version of Supper at Emmaus painted by the Italian master Caravaggio, you see the humble Dutch version of a dinner with Jesus and friends. The Dutch wanted to believe that their national artist, their hero, shared their religious beliefs.
Conclusion
I believe that Art fraud is sui generis. There are no frauds like it. Where else do you find dupes so animated in supporting the scam? I believe that the forger preyed on an older gentleman’s vanity and that set into motion what I show in the graphic above. Dr. Bredius was not involved, other than as a mark. He was, however, infected with the virus and became the “authority” that perpetuated the scam.
The psychological principles of scamming, which are now being studied, were used to perfection by the forger, especially the principles of targeting the enfeebled and using an authority figure (Vermeer’s signature and trademark mannerisms). A pious audience wanted to believe their hero, Johannes Vermeer of Delft, shared their piety, and that he painted people who looked familiar and comforting to them.
What do you think? Have we solved the mystery?