by Frank Wynne
Reinvigorated by the move, Han worked tirelessly on a series of architectural studies, dazzlingly realistic churches painted from audaciously imagined aerial viewpoints. This was the best work he had ever done, he told himself, as dealer after dealer tactfully flattered his technique but declined to afford him gallery space. Anna was shocked by how quickly Han’s optimism spiralled into despair as each succeeding gallery-owner offered the unsolicited advice that Impressionism, pointillism, fauvism were the way forward. By the time she gave birth to their second child, Pauline (later known as Inez), in March 1915, Han had slumped back into depression, abandoning his studio to spend the pittance he earned as a teaching assistant in bars and cafés. He felt trapped in his marriage, angry that the Sumatran princess he had married was now a frugal Dutch huisvrouw. At home his talent was a dead weight, but in the bars, a delicate sketch was enough to secure an introduction to a beautiful girl who was happy to believe he was an artist of genius.
Anna was at her wits’ end. With two small children and a mountain of bills, she was once again forced to borrow from her grandmother. She saw less and less of Han, and when he came home he was drunk. More worrying were the nights he did not come home and the whispered gossip of friends that he was seeing other women.
One night, as he was slipping on his coat to go out she challenged him: ‘Han, you can hardly expect my grandmother to support us for ever. You have to work.’
‘I do work,’ he snapped, ‘I spend all day correcting assignments by students without a whit of talent.’
‘We can’t live on eighty guilders a month. No, Han -1 mean paint. You have to paint.’
‘Why?’ he asked wearily. ‘My students’ modernist scrawls have a better chance of selling than mine. Ask any gallery-owner.’
‘Stay home, please. Finish the painting.’ She gestured to the picture on his easel of herself with Jacques and Pauline. There was great tenderness in the painting.
‘I can see so much love in this portrait – but if you love us, why are you never home?’
‘I paint church interiors, Anna, but I don’t believe in God,’ Han said with a sigh. ‘Why would I finish this canvas? Who will ever see it?’
‘Then I shall organise a one-man exhibition.’
Han laughed bitterly, lit another cigarette and went out.
But Anna was as good as her word. She visited every private gallery in Delft, taking with her a number of Han’s paintings and when she could not find a place to host an exhibition, she began to negotiate with gallery-owners in The Hague. In addition to the standard commission on every painting sold, she offered to pay for the gallery space if the owner would advance one third of the cost. In the end, the proprietor of the Kunstzaal Pictura in The Hague – either touched by her faith in her husband or avaricious enough to be indifferent – agreed. She had a space.
To fund the exhibition, Anna approached her wealthy Dutch relatives. A major gallery had enough faith in Han’s talent to mount a solo exhibition, she told them, she simply needed to borrow a little money to make it a success. In return, each of them would receive a percentage of the profits from the exhibition. Slowly, she scraped together the money and in the autumn of 1916 announced to Han that his first solo exhibition was arranged. The gallery was booked for four weeks, from April through to May 1917. She would contact the newspapers and the critics, invite the guests, arrange the wine. All he had to do was paint.
Han was exhilarated. In a few short months he painted more than he had in two years, buoyed up by his versatility, his talent. He had no subject in mind, no vision to impart: he painted classical seascapes and landscapes in thick impasto, sketched mysterious charcoals, painted delicate watercolours of the flower barges on the Delft canals and humble labourers at work in the fields. Peering into Han’s studio, it was as though a century of artistic revolution had never happened. Nothing in his works acknowledged the paroxysms of innovation which had shuddered through the world of art in the years since Han’s birth. Impressionism had given way to post-Impressionism and neo-Impressionism, to the shortlived Nabis and thence to fauvism; art nouveau would reach its apex with the Vienna Secession exhibition a year from now; cubism and Futurism were electrifying critics in Paris and New York and already art journals were filled with new terms like Vorticism, suprematism and biomorphism. Han, meanwhile, was painting portraits in the manner of van Dyck.
Han’s first solo exhibition coincided with two major events in the history of art. As Han worked on a still life that might have been painted three centuries earlier by Pieter Claesz, twenty miles away in Rotterdam, Theo van Doesburg was putting the finishing touches to the first issue of De Stijl, the magazine around which the great Dutch art movement of the twentieth century would crystallise and introduce Piet Mondrian to the world. While Han painted Anna and Inez as a poignant, traditional Madonna and Child, a thousand miles south in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball was addressing poets and artists in one of the defining moments of twentieth-century art:
How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying dada. How does one become famous? By saying dada. With a noble gesture and delicate propriety. Till one goes crazy. Till one loses consciousness. How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanised, enervated? By saying dada. Dada is the world soul . . .
This was the Dada manifesto, a desperate, impassioned reaction to the horrors of war. Dada was not art, it was anti-art, a credo ruled by absurdity, nonsense, chance and chaos, a rejection of everything that Han believed, cherished, practised – and it was to change art for ever.
Before a single painting had been hung in the Kunstzaal Pictura, Marcel Duchamp – barely a year older than Han – would craft the sculpture which would come to define the twentieth century. Duchamp, carefully choosing a factory-made urinal from the J.L. Mott Iron Works, rotated it ninety degrees and signed the piece R MUTT, 1917. Just as Han was preparing to welcome guests to his solo exhibition, Duchamp submitted his ‘readymade’, titled Fountain, to the Society of Independent Artists for an unjuried exhibition, in which any artist paying the fee of six dollars could exhibit. The society, of which Duchamp was a board member, convened an emergency meeting and voted to withdraw this ‘immoral’ sculpture from the exhibition as ‘not being art’. Duchamp resigned from the board shortly after the incident. In The Creative Act, he wrote:
In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.
The verdict of the spectator is in. Almost a century later, BBC News commented gravely:
A white gentlemen’s urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts . . .
‘The choice of Duchamp’s Fountain as the most influential work of modern art ahead of works by Picasso and Matisse comes as a bit of a shock,’ admitted Simon Wilson, a British art expert hired by the poll organisers to explain the results. ‘But it reflects the dynamic nature of art today and the idea that the creative process that goes into a work of art is the most important thing – the work itself can be made of anything and can take any form.’
From their comments on the BBC message board – a travesty! a disgrace! da Vinci would turn in his grave! These artists are taking the proverbial, surely? – the bourgeois are still clearly épatés.
As the first guests arrived at the Kunstzaal Pictura, Han watched guardedly, straining to identify any critics mingling with Anna’s friends and family and gallery regulars. He felt a surge like an electric jolt as the gallery-owner affixed the first red dot, marking a painting ‘sold’. He sipped his wine, careful not to drink too much. He hovered on the periphery of conversations, catching snatches of praise, watching as another good burgher bought one of his canvases.
‘M
ijnheer van Meegeren?’
‘Yes?’
Han turned to see a rather formally dressed middle-aged man.
‘Karel de Boer.’ The man offered his hand.
‘Of course, of course,’ Han shook the man’s hand warmly. Karel de Boer was among the most influential of Dutch art critics.
‘And this is my wife, Jo.’
Han turned and immediately recognised the celebrated actress Joanna Oelermans – or Joanna van Walraven as she was billed. She was a strikingly handsome woman, tall and slender with a face that seemed carved in oriental alabaster.
‘Your paintings are very fine.’ She took his outstretched hand and for a moment he was torn between gratitude and concupiscence. Han turned back to Karel.
‘So good of you both to come . . .’
‘Not at all . . .’ de Boer smiled. Han ached to ask what he thought of the exhibition, wanted to drag him from painting to painting and explain his technique, his inspiration, his method.
‘It’s obvious you have a great love of the Golden Age,’ de Boer remarked and Han tried to detect some criticism or compliment in the words.
‘I suppose . . .’ Han tried not to sound defensive, ‘I really don’t understand many of these current obsessions in art. I mean, artists making thick, obvious brushstrokes. Don’t the public realise that it is easy to show your brushstrokes – every child or novice reveals their brushwork – much more difficult to create subtle gradations which give the illusion of the real. Not that I’m afraid to show my brushwork or to use impasto if the subject demands it. I have little interest in these fashionable “innovations”. The techniques perfected by Raphael and Vermeer are good enough for me.’
Han felt a glow; the flush of wine and the coursing excitement sharpened rather than dulled his performance. He was animated, witty; above all, he seemed relaxed, unconcerned about his fate. As the last of the guests straggled out of the gallery, Anna came over and hugged her husband.
‘We’ve sold three paintings and several of the drawings.’ She smiled. ‘Now all we have to do is wait for the reviews . . .’
The exhibition was a success. The critics were fulsome in their praise. Han’s work, they agreed was ‘excellent’, he was ‘an extremely versatile artist’. De Boer wrote a considered, positive review. By the time the exhibition closed four weeks later, every canvas, every watercolour had been sold.
The success of the exhibition made it possible for Han and Anna to move to a larger house in The Hague and brought a steady stream of new commissions. His success and modest celebrity meant that he could now charge as much as a thousand guilders – the equivalent of six thousand dollars today – for his gloomy, priggish likenesses in the style of Rembrandt and van Dyck. Han cultivated his friendship with Karel and Joanna de Boer, and was rewarded by being accepted into fashionable intellectual and artistic circles. He was even elevated to membership of the elite Haagsche Kunstring – the Hague Art Circle – an old boys’ network which offered a splendid opportunity for him to meet like-minded reactionaries who agreed with his opinions on the aberrations of modern art and the venality of critics and dealers.
In The Hague, Han rented an artist’s studio a short walk from the family home, explaining to Anna that he could not concentrate on his work with Jacques and Inez constantly demanding his attention. Here, he worked on portraits, experimented with new styles and also offered private lessons to middle-class girls. He was not concerned with imparting the eternal truths of art to these young women, he was employed merely to teach them how to paint a spray of spring flowers. The armoury of the complete woman had changed little since Jane Austen wrote, ‘A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word . . .’ Like embroidery or playing the piano tolerably well, art was one of the talents a prospective husband valued in his bride-to-be. For his part, Han’s pupils afforded him something more intoxicating than sex, they offered him unqualified admiration, called him Maître, hung on his every word, eagerly watched every movement of his pencil.
It is ironic that Han’s most famous picture – the most famous, at least, to which he signed his own name – was something he dashed off in less than ten minutes during one of his classes. It was to become the single most reproduced image in twentieth-century Holland, appearing on greeting cards, calendars and prints.
To add spice to the monotony of still lives and decorous life drawings, Han had arranged to have a young deer brought from the nearby zoological gardens for his students to sketch. He himself had sketched the skittish doe so often that when one of the young ladies wagered that he could draw the little creature in ten minutes, he completed the pencil sketch in nine. At Anna’s suggestion, Han took the picture to a number of local printers, suggesting they might like to use the image for a commercial poster. No one seemed interested in Han’s sweet, rather sentimental sketch. Han was neither surprised nor disappointed, but as an experiment, as he was leaving a meeting with a printer who had turned down the sketch, he mentioned in passing that the animal was Queen Juliana’s deer. It was not entirely untrue – the zoo belonged to the monarch, though it is unlikely that the queen herself had ever set eyes on the animal. This new information helped the printer to recognise the sureness of line, the poignancy of the doe’s frail stance. It was, the printer said, ‘a charming vignette’; beautifully executed, a perfect subject for a greeting card or a calendar perhaps. Han was contemptuous. As if it were not bad enough that his finest paintings were sold for a fraction of what his portraits brought in, now this inconsequential sketch had sold – not because of the aesthetic qualities of the drawing, nor even because of the artist’s signature, but because the beast was owned by a queen.
Despite the improvement in their fortunes, Anna sensed that she was losing Han. When he was not at his studio, he spent his time drinking with his friends from the Kunstring and, more and more often, in the company of Joanna Oelermans. From their first meeting, Han knew that he coveted not only Karel de Boer’s respect, but also his wife. Han had asked if he might paint her portrait and with Karel’s consent, Jo agreed. The portrait was merely an excuse for endless sketches and preliminary work. The commission stretched out over weeks and months. They were frequently seen together walking arm-in-arm along the canals, talking about art and life. Han called her Jolanthe, and courted her with all the delicacy with which he had once wooed Anna. For her part, there was something mercurial in Han that Jo found attractive. Inevitably they became lovers. Han was bored with married life and jealous of the freedom and elegant dissipation of his friends. As an artist, conventional bourgeois morality did not, he reasoned, apply to him. If the world did not care that Leonardo was homosexual, that Baudelaire contracted syphilis, that Gauguin abandoned his wife, Han believed his own peccadilloes were eminently forgivable. His friends warned him that cuckolding one of the most eminent art critics in the country was hardly likely to further his career. Anna, tired of listening to another concerned friend confide that she had seen Han and Joanna together, confronted her husband. Han protested that his relationship with Jo was platonic, intellectual, spiritual, but gossip flourished in the Hague Art Circle, where members joked that it was unsafe to introduce one’s wife to Han van Meegeren.
Karel de Boer was deeply bitter that an artist whose career he had promoted could so publicly humiliate him and he and his colleagues were to forcibly remind Han how influential the critic’s voice could be.
Han’s second solo exhibition, held in the Kunstzaal Biesing in May 1922, was titled Bijbelsche Tafereelen (Biblical Paintings). It was curious that Han, a professed atheist, should mount an exhibition entirely of religious works, though he may have been inspired by three months he spent travelling in Italy in 1921. Certainly, there were elements here of the religious altarpieces of the Renaissance, though filtered through an art nouveau sensibility. For all his railing against his father’s dour Catholicism and his conviction that religion had been the death of his brother
Hermann, Han was drawn to the spiritual, the mystical. The exhibition was a glorious failure. Though the reviews dutifully praised Han’s skill as a draughtsman, they were quietly devastating: ‘A gifted technician who has made a sort of composite facsimile of the Renaissance school, he has every virtue except originality,’ one critic suggested. Another noted his failure to imbue his works with passion: ‘Whenever he sets out to paint Christ, he is so overwhelmed by the notion of nobility and solemnity that the resulting Christ figures are often insipid and sickly, sometimes miserably forsaken, always weak and powerless.’ A third summed up the exhibition with the barbed, ‘It left me feeling that I had seen it all before and that I will not remember it for long.’
Shaken, Han turned to Anna for support but his wife, worn down by the impossible job of being Mrs Han van Meegeren – factotum, cuckold, mother, muse – was less than sympathetic. Her forbearance had run dry. In March 1923 they were divorced and soon afterwards, taking Jacques and Inez with her, Anna left for a new life in Paris.
6
A CAREFUL CHOICE OF ENEMIES