August 29, 2008 9:46

No Labor Day

The Stone Breakers, Gustave Courbet, 1849-50 (destroyed 1945)/FORMERLY DRESDEN STATE ART COLLECTIONS

At least no labor for me — I'm taking today off. Courbet's tireless (and, alas, lost) pair will labor in my place. Back Tuesday.

August 28, 2008 9:38

Instant Houses

Burst*oo8, Douglas Gauthier & Jeremy Edminston /LACAYO

I've checked in a few times this summer with "Home Delivery", the Museum of Modern Art show about prefabricated housing, an idea whose time is always coming but never quite comes. This is what I had to say about it recently in Time.

August 27, 2008 2:17

How to Fake A Vermeer

Christ at Emmaus, Han Van Meegeren, 1937/MUSEUM BOYMANS

Did the world need two new accounts of the Han Van Meegeren story? He was the 20th century Dutch forger who turned out a succession of phony Vermeers that for a time were widely accepted. Hard to say, but this summer the world got two of them anyway: The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick (Harper) and The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez (Harcourt). Last week I read both of them side by side. It turns out to be a good story, mostly about the hubris and gullibility of artworld experts.

Van Meegeren was a Dutch society portraitist of limited gifts who drifted into a sideline in fake Dutch master paintings that eventually made him phenomenally wealthy. His signal contribution to the dark art of forgery was to discover a way around the "alcohol test". It takes at least a century for oil paint to harden to a surface so solid that alcohol can't dissolve it. Knowing that, authenticators used to dab alcohol on canvases they thought might be recent forgeries. Van Meegeren came up with a way to combine pigment with Bakelite — plastic — to make new paints that were impervious to alcohol.

Dolnick does a better job of explaining just how a forger works, how to acquire old canvas — scraping the paint off a genuine but minor 17th-century picture is one way — or to imitate the cracked surfaces of centuries-old oil paint. (Bake the finished painting — carefully — in an oven, then bend and rub it over your knee.) Lopez takes more pains to explore Van Meegeren's toxic politics. Though he never became a Nazi, he flirted happily for years with the far right and published for a while an ultra conservative art journal that was completely in tune with Hitler's campaign against modern art.

After he was exposed, the only forgeries Van Meegeren acknowledged were from about 1937. But Lopez thinks he started turning out fakes as early as the 1920s, and that two false Vermeers that were sold to Andrew Mellon and actually hung until the 1950s in the National Gallery in Washington were Van Meegeren's work. Dolnick cites Arthur Wheelock, the expert in Dutch painting at the National Gallery now, who is more inclined to suppose that the Mellon fakes might be the work of Van Meegeren's collaborator Theo Van Wijngaarden, who figures as a character in both books.

For anyone coming to this story for the first time, there are two surprises. One is that for a few decades in the 20th century there were so many false Vermeers in circulation. At a time when there were fewer than 40 acknowledged Vermeers — today there are 36 — more than half a dozen pictures turned up abruptly in the space of not many years and expert opinion, which should have been much more suspicious of this sudden windfall, declared them as genuine. But as Dolnick observes, supply met demand, and by the 20th century Vermeer was in great demand.

The other surprise in these books is how anybody could have thought that Van Meegeren's clunky fakes were real Vermeers. Both authors explain that Van Meegeren crafted his pictures to appeal to scholars looking for evidence that Vermeer had been influenced by Caravaggio, or at least by copies of his work. So one of Van Meegeren's most prominent frauds is a Christ at Emmaus, as Dolnick calls it -- or Supper at Emmaus, Lopez's title — a painting that has echoes of the two versions of the same scene that were produced by Caravaggio. Once he had succeeded in having that comically inept canvas certified by the experts as the real thing — more than that, as one of the most beautiful and moving Vermeers of all — he could make other forgeries in the same awkward style and have them recognized as further examples of Vermeer's "other" style, what anybody with normal eyesight would now call the ugly one.

Van Meegeren managed to sell one of these, a completely ridiculous Christ and the Adulteress, to none other than Hitler's Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, who was determined to get his own Vermeer after ceding a couple to the Fuehrer. Very soon after the liberation of the Netherlands, when the Adulteress picture was still assumed to be legitimate, Van Meegeren was arrested for wartime trading with the enemy, which carried serious penalties. Under questioning he offered a stunning defense — that he hadn't sold anything of value to Goering because that painting wasn't a Vermeer, it was by him. If anything he was a hero because he had pulled a fast one on the detested Nazi. (There were penalties were forgery too, but much less serious ones.) To prove his point, Van Meegeren even painted another large scale "Vermeer" for his American captors and whichever members of the press and public came by to watch him work. He was eventually sentenced to a year in prison but died of a heart attack before he could start serving his sentence. He died a hero to the Dutch, the "man who swindled Goering", but in the years since then the fuller story has emerged. Full enough to fill two books. Take your pick.

August 26, 2008 9:48

Monster Movie

Myra, Marcus Harvey, 1995/WIKIPEDIA COMMONS

The U.K. is in a bit of an uproar over art this week. To encourage tourism to London for the next Olympics, in 2012, the Brits produced a video that was screened recently in Beijing. In a montage of images of London's cultural scene, someone decided to include a brief glimpse of Marcus Harvey's huge portrait of Myra Hindley, one half of the couple behind the Moors Murders. Over a period of two years starting in July 1963 she and her boyfriend Ian Brady kidnapped, tortured and killed five children. In the '90s Harvey made a portrait of Hindley, based on an old photograph, that was composed of hundreds of children's hand prints. A few days ago the offices of London's Mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Gordon Brown both denounced the inclusion of that image in the video and asked for it to be clipped.

Most Britons first saw the picture when it appeared as part of "Sensation", the 1997 museum show drawn from Charles Saatchi's collection that also included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and various other Young British Artists. (Well, they were young at the time.) When "Sensation" came to the Brooklyn Museum two years later it was Chris Ofili's portrait-with-elephant-dung of the Virgin Mary that created a backlash. But in Britain, where the Moors Murders were still famous, an enduring fixture of pop culture, it was Myra. The mother of one of Hindley's victims actually picketed the London version of the show. While it was on display the painting was vandalized and had to be withdrawn for cleaning. When it returned a few days later it was behind a plexiglass shield and guarded by security.

I saw Myra when "Sensation" came to Brooklyn and again a few years later at Saatchi's Gallery in London. I expected to hate it, in part because the sensation quotient of Saatchi's collection in those days was the most tiresome thing about it, and also because the hand print technique was such a blatant rip off of Chuck Close's thumb print portraits. But it affected me differently when I finally stood before it. You recognized the hand prints right away as one of the earliest magical signs, the marks that appear in the Paleolithic cave paintings. The blurred image of Hindley was like some anonymous and imponderable face of evil that the hands were trying in vain to appease. It didn't seem to be about the Moors Murders so much as the universal human need to fend off darkness. (Did I mention that it's about twelve feet tall?)

Marcus Harvey's motives in making the picture may have been cynical ones — it was guaranteed to get media attention — but sometimes even cynical art can work, and Myra had a power that wasn't just the power to shock. Can any of this be experienced when you simply catch a glimpse of the painting in a video meant to drum up tourism? Of course not. Used that way it's reduced back to its base level power to titillate, a shorthand way to say "Visit swinging London where we make groovy shock art!"

The worst thing about that video isn't that it validated Myra. The worst thing is that it devalued it.

August 25, 2008 9:38

John Russell: 1919-2008

Well, there's a good long life. Russell came to the New York Times as a critic in 1974, not long after I had started reading everything I could find about art. I was very soon aware of two things about him. One, he rarely had anything negative to say. The pejorative was a mood that didn't appeal to him much. And two, he could write. He was one of the most lyrical writers I ever came across in a newspaper. And he wasn't just a phrase maker. He was a genuine instructor. He elucidated — his work opened your eyes. For an excellent example, go find his book on Seurat.

There's a passage in another of Russell's books, The Meanings of Modern Art, in which he talks about a moment in the 19th century when "whole new departments of feeling came into view". (Bear with me on that one, I'm quoting from memory.) That wouldn't be a bad description of what he could do sometimes with just a sentence.