Word: meegeren
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...Vermeer is acknowledged as one of the leading artists of the past 500 years. His influence extended to the Impressionists, Marcel Proust - and criminals. Many of his 35 works have been stolen (one, 'The Concert', is still missing), and in the 1930s and '40s a forger named Hans van Meegeren made millions of dollars with at least six high-class fakes before being caught and imprisoned...
...Vermeer might have smiled at Van Meegeren's efforts. Few of his own subjects were original, he was ruthless in his pursuit of objectives, strove for perfection over volume and borrowed ideas liberally. But there any comparison must end. In a Vermeer painting serenity prevails and, as Bailey notes, a viewer is taken into a room and invited to walk around and talk to those present. It is this unique intimacy that ensured Vermeer's reputation over time, and that continues to enthrall...
...article on art forgeries ((ART, May 7)), Robert Hughes described Hans van Meegeren, who specialized in pseudo Vermeers, as a "talentless and paranoid academic hack." I knew Van Meegeren in the 1940s in the Netherlands when I was a teenager, and his portrait of my father now hangs in my home. He was undoubtedly paranoid. However, he was also very gifted, as numerous paintings and drawings can testify. To judge artists only by the imitations they make is to conclude a priori that they are not original in their...
...Jackson Pollock used synthetic Duco lacquers in the late '40s and early '50s. One of the first celebrated artists to rely wholly on synthetics was Holland's Hans van Meegeren, who used them to paint equally synthetic Vermeers in the 1930s. Since new oil paint can be distinguished from old in a simple laboratory test, the forger used a heat-setting resin to avoid detection...
This question was raised and left unanswered in actuality by the postwar trial of Holland's Han van Meegeren for forging Vermeers-the case that prompted Edith Simon to write this novel. The 44-year-old wife of a University of Edinburgh don, Author Simon was born in Berlin of German parents, did not learn English until her parents moved to Britain when she was 14. Since then, she has published ten books in English, ranging from a distinguished study of the Knights Templars to The Golden Hand, a novel of 14th century England that ranks with the finest...