Fake, Fortune, and Bakelite: Part three

Provenance, Psychology, and the Painting Above the Chimney

Over the past two weeks we have followed Han van Meegeren from his garden shed in the south of France, through the Rijksmuseum’s acquisitions committee, and into the art collection of Nazi Leader Hermann Göring. We have watched him mix lapis lazuli by hand, bake canvases in an oven, and eventually confess in open court to one of the most elaborate frauds in art history. This week, the deeper question: how does the art market actually work, and why did even the best experts in the world fail to see what van Meegeren was doing?

Two terms dominate the world of art authentication, and both are worth understanding before you accept any discount painting from a stranger when you get off your cruise ship to stretch your legs.

The first is provenance, which simply means documented ownership history. Where has the painting actually been, and who owned it in the past? Does it appear in estate inventories, wills, auction records, old photographs, shipping manifests, insurance documents, or family correspondence? Without a credible ownership chain stretching back toward the artist’s lifetime, even a technically convincing painting remains suspect. Van Meegeren understood this perfectly, so he also invented entire false documented histories for his paintings, planting them convincingly in the archives before presenting them to the market.

The second term is catalogue raisonné, which sounds like a French dessert involving blancmange and raisins but is actually the official scholarly catalog of accepted works by a given artist. These are substantial volumes full of pictures compiled over decades by specialists who examine every known work by an artist and make formal judgments about authenticity. If your painting is accepted into the catalogue raisonné, champagne corks may fly. If it is rejected, the family heirloom returns abruptly to being something Aunt Mary bought in a junk shop.

What neither term fully accounts for is the psychological dimension of the market. The art establishment wanted new Vermeers and scholars had theorized that they might exist. Collectors and museum directors were primed to believe. Van Meegeren, who understood this better than the experts understood themselves, gave them the paintings their imagination had already half-created. The committees reviewing his forgeries were not merely assessing paint. They were voting on a backstory they already wished were true.

Authentication is partly science, and science matters significantly. Laboratories today can analyze pigments, canvas fibers, varnishes, chalk grounds, and wood panels with spectrometers and electron microscopes. They can identify synthetic compounds that did not exist in the seventeenth century and isotopic signatures tied to specific geographic sources of raw materials. Bakelite paint, which defeated 1930s needle-probe testing entirely, is now identified routinely by instrumental analysis.

Van Meegeren’s specific technique has become his signature: a painting with Bakelite in its medium is attributed to him almost by default. But even now, after all the technological advances, the deeper question in authentication often remains psychological: does this painting feel like the artist we believe in? The committees are not merely protecting scholarship. They are also protecting cultural mythology. Nobody really wants to discover that one of the great old masters occasionally sent a  second-rate work out of the back door of the atelier and swapped it for a bottle of absinthe.

Van Meegeren was convicted of forgery and fraud in October 1947 and sentenced to one year in prison. He died of a heart attack the following month before serving a single day in prison, so, given the circumstances, it seems like he had the last word.

In his lifetime van Meegeren produced thousands of paintings and his best works are today sought after by art collectors and command surprisingly high prices. In fact they are so sought after that it has even become profitable to fake paintings by Hans van Meegeren, the master faker.