I Was Vermeer by Frank Wynne

Author:Frank Wynne
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

13

A MOST STUPID AND MALIGNANT RACE

Grant me patience, just

heaven! Of all the cants

which are canted in this

canting world, though the

cant of hypocrites may be

the worst, the cant of

criticism is the most tormenting!

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

The letter in Bredius’s elegant cursive, which Han held in his trembling hand, was worth much more than the painting which, at Boon’s insistence, he now deposited with the Crédit Lyonnais for safekeeping. Though it was merely the opinion of one man, it would be all the art world would need to accept his forgery as a genuine Vermeer.

The role of the critic is crucial in the art world – as much now in the twenty-first century, as it was in the 1930s. Though new tests used to authenticate old masters have proliferated – infrared and ultraviolet examination, thermoluminescence, photospectrography, carbon dating and autoradiography – it is still the expert’s discerning eye which makes the attribution, for, though tests can determine the age of a canvas, the composition of the pigments or the nature of the underpainting, they cannot determine a Rembrandt from a Rubens.

‘A critic,’ Whitney Balliett declares, ‘is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.’ Nowhere is this more in evidence than in Bredius’s decision not to have the Emmaus submitted for X-ray and chemical analysis, not out of negligence, but because of his absolute confidence in his instinctive ability to tell a masterpiece from a forgery. The continuing success of forgers throughout the twentieth century is testament to the fact that it is a ‘talent’ which critics still prize today. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sees this intuition as the central gift of what he calls the fakebuster:

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