Why People Buy Into Fakes and Forgeries

AW Blog subscriber Peter Kostoulakos sent me the line to an article in the NY Times by Errol Morris entitled Bamboozling Ourselves. Morris discusses the two books that were recently published on Vemeer forger Hans Van Meegeren. The books, The Man Who Made Vemeer and the Forgers Spell are both widely acclaimed. I read the Man Who Made Vemeer, and it reads like a novel. I highly recommend it.

Morris is writing a 7 part series on why people are susceptible to forgery and fakes, so the series should get very interesting.

Morris states There is something compelling about two people writing about the same man at the same time, as if the authors themselves might be doppelgangers, or at least mirrored two aspects of Van Meegeren’s biography. Both books begin on May 29, 1945. Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.

To read the article by Morris, click HERE.