The Forger's Spell Quotes

“Van Meegeren posed it in its starkest form: “Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he declared at his trial. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?” Van Meegeren presumably had an unflattering answer in mind. The picture had not changed, but it had lost its glamour. Why? Because the “experts and art lovers” were as fake as it was. The world was full of people who thought of themselves as art lovers but were in fact merely snobs.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“In the summer before the trial he had been diagnosed with heart disease and hospitalized for a month. On November 26, just before his prison term was to begin, he was admitted to the hospital once again. On December 29 he suffered a heart attack. On December 30, never having served a day of his sentence, he died. He died a hero. Over the course of the year that passed between his confession and his trial, public opinion in Holland had swung completely in Van Meegeren’s favor. Once damned as a traitor, he became, in the words of the American journalist Irving Wallace, “the man who swindled Goering.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.” “So your motive was not financial gain?” “I wanted to strike at the art world for always belittling me. That was all.” “It seems you succeeded.” Applause in the courtroom, gaveled down by the judge.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Finally, after all the seduced experts and suckered millionaires, Van Meegeren himself took the stand. “You admit that you painted these fakes?” the judge asked. “Yes, your honor.” “And that you sold them, at high prices?” “I had no choice. If I had sold them at a low price, no one would have believed they were authentic.” Snickering in the court. “Why did you continue with your forgeries after your success with Emmaus?” “I could not stop, your honor. It became an addiction. I wanted to prove myself over and over again.” “That’s all well and good, but you did quite nicely for yourself.” More laughter. “It’s true, your honor, but I didn’t do it for the money. I already had more money than I could ever spend. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“The court had a question. Why had Captain Piller kept Van Meegeren as a kind of private prisoner when he could immediately have turned him over to the Department of Justice? “Because it took me quite a while to find out who at Justice had been correct or incorrect in the years past,” Piller said, in a deliberately unsubtle allusion to Holland’s many collaborators and German sympathizers. “Your Honor, I can assure you, that was not an easy task.” No further questions.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren’s many victims—museum directors, art dealers, critics, scholars, and collectors—cringed at the thought of rehashing their gullibility in public. The Dutch state, though it was prosecuting the case, was one of those mortified buyers. An examination of that purchase promised to be humiliating.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“He not only admitted the charges but wallowed in them. For Van Meegeren and the two hundred spectators squeezed into courtroom 4, no prospect could be more inviting than a close-up look at just which experts had showered praise on which forgeries and which millionaires had dipped deep into their pockets.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“By March 1947, the Coremans commission had proved beyond any doubt that Van Meegeren’s tale was true. He had indeed forged the “Vermeer” he sold Goering, and all the others. He could not be accused of selling off Holland’s heritage since he had not enriched Goering but had cheated him out of millions. The collaboration charge was dropped. Van Meegeren would go to trial, but only for fraud.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Why hadn’t Van Meegeren thrown away so incriminating a piece of evidence? He had kept it, he said, precisely so that he could prove beyond question that Emmaus was his work. And perhaps that had once been his intent. But if Van Meegeren had truly wanted to tell the world that he had painted Emmaus, he had missed chance after chance.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren delighted at the trouble he had stirred up. Here were the scientists with their microscopes and magnifying glasses, their X-ray and ultraviolet and infrared photographs, their talk of spectographic analysis and partial solubility, the whole circus set in motion by his own mischievous enterprise.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Jesus Teaching in the Temple certainly looked like a Van Meegeren. The resemblance to Goering’s Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery was especially strong. In the topsy-turvy world in which Van Meegeren found himself—where the only way he could convince the authorities he was telling the truth was to demonstrate that he was a liar and a cheat—this was all to the good.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“(Van Meegeren had managed to create enough confusion about the Hitler dedication to dampen down that controversy. His story was that he had signed many copies of his book; someone else, perhaps a “German officer,” must have added a dedication and given Hitler the book.) In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Many of the first news stories had spilled over with rage. Van Meegeren’s painting career hadn’t won him much attention, but during the occupation he’d made friends in all the wrong places, and the Dutch had noticed that.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“In more recent news stories Van Meegeren came across as a rogue, not a villain, an ordinary man who had punctured the pomposity of the big shots. If he had sold a forgery to Goering, it was hardly a crime to have outwitted the biggest stuffed shirt of them all.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“rumors that an American millionaire had offered to buy all the forgeries for eight million dollars (about $ 80 million today).”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren had nothing in common with “one of these important-looking bragging artists… who make everybody who isn’t an insider feel like a blundering yokel.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“The easiest answer was that, after Emmaus’s stunning success, Van Meegeren had coasted on his reputation. Piller didn’t quite buy it. But the most conspicuous hole in Van Meegeren’s story, in Piller’s view, was that no one had ever seen him at work. That seemed awfully convenient. How did anyone know Van Meegeren was a forger? Because he said so.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“For years, Van Meegeren had lied to the world, and it had fallen for every lie. Now he had told the truth, and no one believed a word of it.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Piller’s focus had been on where the paintings had come from, not on whether they were genuine.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Most forgers are finally caught, one scholar has written, because they fool one person too few. Van Meegeren’s misfortune was that he fooled one person too many.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“To ensure that the hiding places stayed secret, Goering sent the soldiers who had done the digging to the deadly fighting on the Russian front.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Second-rate experts may swoon in the presence of second-rate paintings.*”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren’s hubris might have done him in, except for the marvelous fact that when it came to swagger and self-delusion he was no match for the experts he needed to outwit. The connoisseurs’ exaggerated regard for their own views was more than a quirk. It is a striking feature of the art world that experts have little choice but to put enormous faith in their own opinions. Inevitably, that opens the way to error, sometimes to spectacular error.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“That’s what happened with Emmaus. Nobody asked ‘Do I like it?’ That question wasn’t important. The only question was, ‘Is it a Vermeer?’ And the answer was, ‘Yes, we think it is a Vermeer.’ And that made it beautiful.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren was a master at drawing the experts’ attention and making sure they focused just where he wanted them to. So are all successful forgers. Experts truly are expert, so the forger needs to find a way to induce tunnel vision.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Bredius and his fellow connoisseurs knew that Vermeer painted specks of light shimmering on loaves of bread and favored the color blue. The forger drops a hint, and the connoisseur follows it off a ledge.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“One of our most prominent scholars in Dutch paintings told me,” Rousseau once recalled, “that when he saw the article in The Burlington Magazine and the photographs of Emmaus, he said to his pupils, ‘That’s a forgery.’ But then he went to Holland, and when he saw the picture in front of him, with its convincing craquelure, convincing colors, convincing aging, he began to doubt his own first impression. There, close to it, he saw all the convincing details and not what was wrong with the style.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“Van Meegeren tried to impersonate Vermeer. He failed, and that failure was the key to his success.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“1977, a prankster demonstrated that the expectations game works the other way around, too. Writing under a pseudonym, he submitted a typed copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s National Book Award–winning novel Steps to fourteen publishers and thirteen literary agents. Every single one turned it down, including Random House, who had published the novel in the first place.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

“More generally, as the Met’s Theodore Rousseau once remarked, “We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls.”
― Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century