Just the ticket for spring: The Man Who Made Vermeers, by Jonathan Lopez.

I’ve been wanting to read this book pretty much since it came out. It’s about Han van Meegeren, the famous 20th century Dutch art forger. The book has it all: true crime, art, money, high (and not-so-high) society, Nazis…. what more could a person want?

It’s partly a biography of van Meegeren, but it’s also a tour of the Art Scene of the first half of the 20th century, and a social history that investigates the conditions that made it possible for van Meegeren and his partners in crime to perpetrate art fraud on a grand scale. The short version is that they were giving gullible people what they badly wanted (rich, relatively uninformed Americans, for example, were buying European Culture by the boatload in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), and they were showing experts what they wanted to see: the subjects of many of van Meegeren’s “Vermeers” were carefully calculated to fill perceived “gaps” in Vermeer’s work, such as religious themes.

It’s also a good book to get a person thinking about larger questions like “What counts as art?” Not only are van Meegeren’s “Vermeers” better than most of his original work (he was also a fairly successful society portrait painter, for one thing), but his fakes are now highly sought after in their own right… go figure.