The Forger's Spell
A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century

"Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it," he declared at his trial. "Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?" Van......more

As the title suggests, this book tells the story of the greatest art hoax of the 20th century, but it does more than that. In a choppy style (most chapters ran from 5 to 8 pages) we are introduced to a range of diverse areas of knowledge that indeed we should know something about to better appreciat......more

A big part of this narrative focused on the role psychology played in duping art experts; how Van Meegeren's forgeries seemed custom-made for the art experts that he fooled, as he appealed to "what they wanted to see" and thus could get away with painting mediocre works that still sold for millions.......more

This book was exactly the sort I like, combining art history, art fraud, embarrassed art critics, and bamboozled Nazis. Maybe every potential new multimillion-dollar art purchase should be shown to a focus group of non-art-fans to get outside the psychological effects of confirmation bias and peer p......more

"The Forger's Spell" by Edward Dolnick is a well told story about one of the most infamous art forgery cases of the 20th century. Han van Meegeren spent the duration of WW2 painting Vermeers; and what makes this case so fascinating - besides the big name artist he picked - was the way the critics f......more