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Thesis

A forgery good enough to fool the experts deserved the praise they gave it

Chiara Bellandi Contributor
· 6 replies
Beauty & artModern EuropeanNelson GoodmanArthur Danto#aesthetic-value#authenticity#forgery#van-meegeren
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Its coordinates: 5.1 Theories of Beauty · 5.2 Philosophy of Art · 5.2.1 Definition and Boundaries +7 more

Where it stands

In 1937 the great Vermeer scholar Abraham Bredius announced a newly discovered masterpiece, The Supper at Emmaus. The Boijmans museum in Rotterdam bought it; visitors queued; critics wrote about its spiritual depth. It was painted a few years earlier by Han van Meegeren. After the war he was arrested for selling a "Vermeer" to Göring, and to escape a charge of treason he proved he had forged it, painting a new "Vermeer" under supervision.

Overnight, the Emmaus stopped being beautiful. Critics found it clumsy, the faces heavy, the colours wrong.

Thesis: the forgery deserved the praise it got. Whatever the critics saw in 1937 was really on the canvas. Only their beliefs about it changed.

For: aesthetic value lies in what you can see. If no one could see a difference, there was no difference in beauty, only in history and price.

Against: Nelson Goodman argued that knowing a picture is a forgery changes how we look at it and trains us to see differences we could not see before. And a painting is not just a surface; it is an achievement by someone at a time. Van Meegeren's achievement was deception, not vision.

I restore Renaissance panels for a living, and I argue with myself about this weekly. Please take a side.

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6 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Bec Doyle

    For Contributor

    For. Wine shows tell you everything about this, because we taste blind. A wine that wins a gold medal blind and is then revealed to be cheap has still won the medal. The panel was right about what was in the glass. If the critics' praise was wrong in 1937, then all their praise of every Vermeer was praise of a label.

  2. Hsieh Wei-ting

    For Fellow

    For, narrowly. If what the critics saw was really there, then van Meegeren made a beautiful painting and also told a lie about it. Those are two acts. We rightly punish the second; we have no reason to retract our judgement of the first. Parisa's long take is different because the meaning depended on how it was made. Does a painting's beauty really depend on the date?

Against the thesis 4

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Against Contributor

    Against. In film, nobody thinks a shot is only its pixels. A long take means something because it was a long take, because the actor really held the moment for four minutes. If you faked it with hidden cuts, the image would look the same and mean something different.

    Painting is the same. What the critics praised in Emmaus was a seventeenth-century master's vision. That vision was not there. Something else was, and they misdescribed it.

  2. Claire Dubois

    Against Fellow

    Against, from translation. A translation that imitates an author's style can be brilliant, and I'll praise it as a translation. If someone published my pastiche as an unknown Proust manuscript and readers wept at it, their tears would be real but their praise would be misdirected. They would be praising Proust for my work.

    So the praise wasn't false, just addressed to the wrong person. Van Meegeren deserved some of it, under his own name, for skill.

  3. Chiara Bellandi

    Against Contributor

    Claire's "addressed to the wrong person" is close to where I end up. Bec, I'll grant the blind tasting, but nobody praises a wine for being by the vintner it isn't by. The critics praised Vermeer's late spirituality. That wasn't on the canvas, because there was no late Vermeer.

  4. Irina Sokolova

    Against Reader

    Against, from a craft where copying is the honest thing to do. When I paint an icon I follow an older model as closely as I can, and I do not sign it on the front. Nobody calls that forgery, because nobody pretends the copy is the old one. It presents itself as what it is: a new icon of an old image.

    Van Meegeren did something else. He did not copy Vermeer. He invented a Vermeer that never existed and offered it as a stage in a real man's life. The critics praised a late spirituality in Vermeer's development, and that stage was false. So their praise was not wrong about the surface, but it was praise of something that was not there.

    Bec's blind tasting works because the medal is for what is in the glass. Nobody praised the Emmaus for its surface alone. They praised it as a Vermeer.