TRTR: TR Mention in Review of "I Was Vermeer"

[Jed Kelestron]

Last paragraph of review:

I Was Vermeer is a skillful book, but not deep. Frank Wynne is a lucid
introducer of the life and work but he sometimes takes economy too
far. The encounter with the Nazis is rushed, and van Meegeren’s
“questionable politics” slightly skimped. The technical aspects of the
subject are treated more compellingly by Paul Watkins in The Forger
(2000), a novel set in Occupied Paris, which also traffics with the
idea of “the good forger” pitted against the Nazi despoiler. And the
towering work is curiously absent here: William Gaddis’s gargantuan
novel The Recognitions (1955), whose central theme is fabrication and
forgery, and whose central character, Wyatt Gwyon, is modeled on van
Meegeren. The Recognitions was belatedly recognized as a masterpiece.
It is a profound meditation on the implausibility of originality (a
phrase borrowed from Cynthia Ozick), and a penetrating re-imagining of
the strange psychology of Han the man. It is a fundamental book, on
the brief life of the forgery, on the “inherent vice” of the artist,
on the fine sensitivity of the counterfeiter: “Even then they knew the
value of art. Or of knowing the value of art. As Coulanges said to
Madame Sévigny, pictures are bullion”.

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