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The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century |
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Amazon Sales Rank: 6503
Publication Date: 2008-07-01
Release Date: 2008-06-24
Publisher: Harper
ISBN: 0060825413
Type: Hardcover
Number Of Pages: 368
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As riveting as a World War II thriller, The Forger's Spell is the true story of Johannes Vermeer and the small-time Dutch painter who dared to impersonate him centuries later. The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art. It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life. ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.
Average Rating: 
Review: 2008-10-27
Utterly feeble
"The Forger's Spell" offers up a cartoon version of history, leavened, to ill effect, by bombastic and cliche-ridden writing. Edward Dolnick seems to think of the Van Meegeren story as a light-hearted romp through World War II, where war criminals like Hermann Goering are shown to be "rubes" by the clever forger. That Van Meegeren himself was a Nazi-sympathizer seems unimportant in this storyline, as does the fact that there was nothing particularly humorous about the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.
Dolnick brings to light absolutely nothing new about the Van Meegeren case, relying almost exclusively on already published sources. To make up for this dearth of real research, he indulges in a great deal of pop-psychological musing on the nature of deception, about which he also has very little to say. He appears to know next to nothing about Dutch art, referring to Caspar Netscher as a "long-forgotten" painter. This book, moreover, is poorly structured. It repeats itself over and over again, and could easily have been pared of half its bulk without losing anything except tedium.
There is a much better book on Van Meegeren called "The Man Who Made Vermeers," which has just come out recently. It's intelligent, engaging, and thoroughly researched - everything that "The Forger's Spell" is not. I would certainly recommend it over "The Forger's Spell," which really is not a book that needed to be written. (That said, "The Man Who Made Vermeers," is not perfect: the writing is a bit too colloquial for my taste.)
Tempting though it would be to award "The Forger's Spell" only one star, I feel that I must give it two because Van Meegeren's story has in fact been told even more idiotically by Frank Wynne, who set a standard for quality so low that even the Mr. Dolnick is unable to stoop down far enough to meet it.
Review: 2008-10-24
the forger
I almost gave this a 5 star. It is a really well written detailed book about the man who fooled Goering and sold him a fake bill of goods during WW11 and learning afterwards what Goering's reaction was is what the cost of this book.
However, somewhere in the middle of this book, the author strays a bit and goes into too much detail about other forgers and the book loses me. It would have rated a 5 star had it stayed with the main culprit of this story, possibly resulting in the book being leaner.
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Amazon List Price: $26.95
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