| The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century | 
 enlarge | Author: Edward Dolnick
Publisher: Harper
Category: Book
List Price: $26.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 28406
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0060825413
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.9492
EAN: 9780060825416
ASIN: 0060825413
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 Well Written and Interesting.... January 6, 2009
A well written and informative story of one of the greatest hoaxes in art history. Being a novice to the art world, I was worried upon beginning the book that I might not understand the complexities of art forgery. However Dolnick's writing was understandable and intriguing even to a novice.
Thoroughly enjoyable December 30, 2008
I'm a reader of non-fiction, and too many non-fiction books suffer from the author's need to sensationalize the story. Not so here: the story is sensational on its own. I found it to be uniformly interesting and enjoyable.
If I were to complain about anything, it would be Dolnick's apologies for the art experts who were fooled. But this is minor carping.
 It's OK - could be better December 29, 2008
The story of how Hans van Meergeren faked Vermeer paintings and fooled the experts and Goering is now 60 years old and has been told many times. This retelling is somewhat gee-whiz and frenetic (60 breezy chapters in 300 pages) although Dolnick appears to have done all the relevant homework. It skips around, repeats itself, and needs editing. For a book which is about how just looking at pictures fooled so many, its own pictures are too few and too small - deprives the reader of the pleasure of "seeing" what all the fuss was about. Does give some insight into the how and why of art fakery
I loved this book ... December 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My impression from reading other reviews of this book are that those who criticized it did so for one (or more) of 4 reasons. Either (1) it's not as good as his previous book "The Rescue Artist", (2) Van Megeeren's story has been told better by other authors, (3) it's redundant in parts and/or (4) it trivializes the evil nature of the Nazi's. I had not read The Rescue Artist and, philistine that I must be, was not familiar with Van Megeeren's story. However, I must say that I thought this book was wonderful. I was hooked right from the get-go. I did not find it redundant but rather appreciated the way he explored not only Van Megeeren but how forgers work and many other aspects of the art world and forgery. Even if some of these were somewhat tangential to the main story, I still found the entire book fascinating. I also appreciated the color illustrations of the paintings themselves, which allowed the reader to compare the forgeries with the real things. It may be that for those who have already read extensively on Van Megeeren, this may not be the book for you. For everyone else however, I highly recommend the book.
Utterly feeble October 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"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.
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