Word: meegeren
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Died. Hans van Meegeren, 58, master forger of old masters; of a heart ailment; in Amsterdam. Painter Van Meegeren set out to even scores with hostile art critics by showing them up as incompetents, produced such a persuasive "Vermeer" that critics acclaimed it as Vermeer's masterpiece. In 1945, charged with collaboration for having sold Hermann Göring a Vermeer, Dutchman Van Meegeren saved his neck by declaring himself a faker, proved it by painting another "Vermeer" in his prison cell...
What is in a name? Everything, it would appear, when TIME [Nov. 24] refers to the Boyman's Museum, Rotterdam, and other purchasers of Van Meegeren's pictures, as suckers, owing to their acquisitions having proved the work of a contemporary artist, instead of genuine Vermeers. Has their merit wilted thereby? Is the Christ at Emmaus any less beautiful, because the authorship is changed...
...sincere congratulations go to Van Meegeren for being a great craftsman, and for having exposed . . . the snobbism which prevails in the art circles...
...must have been the strains of the war that weakened my judgment." Sternly, the judge asked Van Meegeren why he had "done this thing." Replied the 58-year-old painter: "Because no one noticed my work." Van Meegeren wanted to know what was to become of his paintings. Informed that they would be returned to the suckers who had bought them (including the Dutch Government), he breathed a sigh of relief. The court might have ordered the paintings destroyed, and thus robbed Van Meegeren of his niche in art history...
...Meegeren was actually tickled to get only one year in jail. "Two years," he told a reporter, "is the maximum punishment for such a thing. I know because I looked it up in our laws twelve years ago, before I started all this. But sir, I'm sure about one thing: if I die in jail they will just forget all about it. My paintings will become original Vermeers once more. I produced them not for money but for art's sake." The money was nothing to sneeze at, either. Though he declared himself bankrupt two years...