Motherfaker
Not a fake: Vermeer’s The Love Letter
On his NYT blog the filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) has a fascinating seven-part series called Bamboozling Ourselves. His subject is the Dutch painter Hans van Meegeren, who forged Vermeers and sold them to the Nazis. Morris asks: What makes a work of art great? Why are people so easy to fool? What is genius, what is trickery? Not to be missed.
‘…what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren — we want to know more.‘
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
