The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

[Ilana]

Discuss our new group read. You'll have a month to complete it before we move on to the next book but feel free to read the book at anytime.

[Ilana]

What I loved most was the short chapters, just for the convenience of being able to stop and pick up the book easily. That said the book did jump around from subject to subject depending on the chapter at time I felt it was a little out of order however I did enjoy the story and the asides on forgery in general.

I didn’t like Van Meegeren paintings at all. I can’t see how his work was taken for Vermeer’s but sixty years and a shift in perspective can make quite a bit of difference. How were the art historians deceived? Did they look too hard at the details and miss the entire picture? People who think they are infallible tend to have huge blind spots of things that don’t fit into their view of the world. What I found intriguing was how a name of an artist can change a so-so painting in a masterpiece; do we really place that much value on a name?

I think Van Meegeren selling Woman Taken In Adultery to Goering is the best thing he ever did for my own reasons. I believe that art forgery has a great impact on the world it doesn’t just cheat a millionaire out of a few thousand dollars but it rewrites history. Every piece of information we gain goes into a giant jigsaw puzzle if we get a fake piece then we end up with an entirely different picture.