The Art Forger, the Nazi, and "The Pope"

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When Bradyus was younger as an art critic and collector, he'd made his name by spotting works wrongly attributed to Vermeer. Now, at the age of 82, he was enjoying a retirement swan song in Monaco. He had just published a highly respected book in which he'd identified 200 fake or misattributed Dutch masters. His opinions were viewed as so authoritative that he'd been dubbed the Pope. It was at this moment in Bradyus' life in 1937 that Gerard Bohn paid a visit to his Monaco villa. Bohn was also a pillar of the Dutch establishment, a member of Parliament who had spoken out earlier than most against fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe. Bohn had come to Abraham Bradyus on a mission of mercy. He told Bradyus that a Dutch family of anti-fascists were living in Mussolini's Italy and they needed to raise money to emigrate to the safety of the United States, but they had something to sell that might be a value, possibly. Only Bradyus had the expertise to judge. And so Bohn unpacked the crate he'd brought out of Italy. Inside it was a large canvas still on its ancient wooden stretcher. The picture depicted Christ at a Mayus and in the top left-hand corner was the magical signature. I. V. Mayor. Your Hannes Vermeer himself. But Bohn was eager to know what did Bradyus think? He was the expert. The old man was spellbound. He delivered his verdict. Christ at a Mayus was not only a genuine Vermeer, but it was the Dutch master's finest work. We have here, I'm inclined to say, the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. Quite different from all his other paintings. And yet, every inch, a Vermeer, when this masterpiece was shown to me, I had difficulty controlling my emotion. Abraham Bradyus used an interesting word to describe his discovery. Almost reverently, he called it, or the rept. The Dutch word to describe something virginally pure and untouched. It was an ironic choice of words because a Mayus could hardly have been more corrupt. It was a rotten fraud of a painting stiffly applied to an old canvas just a few months before Bradyus caught sight of it. I'm Tim Harford. And you're listening to cautionary tales. (upbeat music) The trickery may have been crude, but Abraham Bradyus wasn't the only one to be fooled. Gerard Bone had been lied to as well. When he visited Bradyus, it was as the unsuspecting accomplice of a master forger. And soon enough, the entire Dutch art world was sucked into the con. Christ at a Mayus sold to the Boyman's Museum in Rotterdam, which was desperate to establish itself on the world stage. Bradyus urged the museum on and even contributed to help pay for the picture. And there are only 40 vermiers and this is the most important one. And in my judgment, do most beautiful one. If we wait, we'll lose it. The total cost was 520,000 guilders compared to the wages of the time that is well over $10 million today. Mayus drew admiring crowds and rave reviews. Several other paintings in a similar style soon emerged in the Netherlands. Once the first forgery had been accepted as a vameer, it was easier to pass off these other fakes. They didn't fool everyone, but like a Mayus, it fooled the people who mattered. Critics certified the fakes. Museums exhibited them. Collectors paid vast sums for them. A total of more than $100 million in today's money. In financial terms alone, this was a monumental fraud. It is also a puzzle. The Dutch art world, revered vameer, is one of the greatest painters who ever lived. He painted mostly in the 1660s and had been rediscovered only in the late 1800s. As Bradyus said, only 40 vameer paintings were thought to have survived. So the apparent emergence of half a dozen newly discovered vameers in just a few years was a major cultural event, but also an event that should have strained credulity. But it did not. Why? Don't look to the paintings themselves for an answer. If you compare a genuine vameer to the first forgery, the mace, it's hard to understand how anyone was fooled that alone anyone as discerning as Abraham Bradyus. Vameer was a true master. His most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earing, Illuminous portrait of a young woman, seductive, innocent, adoring, and anxious all at once. In the milk-made, a simple scene of domesticity is lifted by details such as the rendering of a copper pot and a display of fresh baked bread that looks good enough to grab out of the painting. Then there's woman reading a letter. She stands in the soft light of an unseen window. Is she perhaps pregnant? We see her in profile as she holds the letter close to her chest, eyes cast down as she reads. There's a dramatic stillness about the image. We feel that she's holding her breath as she scans the letter for news. We hold our breath, too, a masterpiece. And Christ at a mace? It's a static awkward image by comparison, rather than seeming to be an inferior imitation of vameer. It doesn't look like vameer at all. It's not a terrible painting, but it's not a brilliant one either. Set alongside vameer's works, it seems dour and clumsy, yet it fooled the world. And might continue to fool the world to this day had not the forger being caught out by a combination of recklessness and bad luck. (knocking) For the forger, the beginning of the end was a knock on the door. It was just past nine o'clock in the evening on the 29th of May, 1945. The war in Europe was at an end. the aftershocks were not. An officer in an armed soldier from the Allied Art Commission were the ones doing the knocking. They were standing at the top of the steps leading to the door of 321 Kaiser's Grad, one of Amsterdam's most exclusive addresses. "Mr Van Magerin?" "Ah, gentlemen, you have the advantage of me." Lieutenant Joseph Pilar of the Provisional Military Government. "I see. A welder. Do come in." The house was lit by kerosene lamps. War ravaged Amsterdam would have no electricity for weeks to come. The Dutch had just endured what they called "the hunger winter," with some people reduced to eating gruel made from tulip bulbs to try to stave off starvation. But Lieutenant Pilar could see that at 321 Kaiser's Grad, there was plenty of everything. Pilar got to the point. A masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer, the woman taken in adultery, had been found in the possession of a German Nazi. And not just any Nazi, but Hitler's right-hand man, Hermann Göring. The Germans being Germans had kept good records. Pilar followed the money through various middlemen, and eventually traced five different Vermeer paintings back to deals with Van Magerin. At that point, the trail went cold. Where had he obtained these Dutch treasures? "I am not able to help. I know nothing of this." And this mansion, Mr. Vermeer, where did the money come from? It wasn't just the one mansion. Van Magerin owned 56 other properties in Amsterdam alone. Commercial properties, private homes, apartment blocks, even hotel. At number 738 Kaiser's Grad, a 15-minute stroll away, he hosted regular orges at which sex workers were rewarded for their exhausting efforts by being offered the chance to grab a fistful of jewels and the hallways they left. Decades before the war, the young Van Magerin had enjoyed some brief success as an artist. In middle age, as his jowls had loosened and his hair had silvered, he'd grown rich as an art dealer. "Very rich indeed," it seems. Van Magerin was arrested and marched at gunpoint across town to prison. He responded with furious denials, trying to bluster his way to freedom. But after around the clock interrogation, Van Magerin cracked. "Idiots, if you think I sold Vermeer to that fat-gurring, but it's not Vermeer, I painted it myself. That's absurd." "I can't prove it. There's another painting underneath the one, Gurring has. I painted right over it. Give me paper and charcoal and I'll sketch the composition for you. X-ray the fake Vermeer and you'll see. It's not the only one either. I painted other Vermeers and a couple of the huff. And Vermeer's Emmaus in the Boenmans? That's mine too." The fraud had unraveled, not because anyone spotted these forgeries, but because the forger himself confessed. And why wouldn't he? The alternative was worse. Selling an irreplaceable Vermeer masterpiece to Hermann Gurring was treason and treason could carry the death penalty. Better for Van Magerin to admit to the less heinous crime of forgery and claim that the Vermeers had never actually existed. All Van Magerin had to do was to prove it. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. 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Skip the stress. UT Austin's Macomb School of Business offers one-year master's programs in finance, marketing, and two AI-focused degrees. All with no GRE or GMAT required. These fast-paced STEM designated programs put you on the path to a stronger salary and faster career growth. Applications to join the class of 2028 are open. Learn more at specializedmasters.com that specializedmasters.com. When I first heard the story of the fake premiere, I was charmed by the idea that the despicable gering had been duped by a master forger. I loved the irony of the situation van Megren found himself in. In order to avoid a firing squad, he needed to prove that he'd committed a different crime. We'll get back to that. I wanted us to focus first on Abraham Braidius, the art critic who first fell for the fraud. I began my new book, The Data Detective, with the story of this forgery. The data detective is a book about how to think clearly about the world, and I wanted to start with Braidius, because I had a question. How could a man as expert as Abraham Braidius have been fooled by so crass of forgery? The answer is this. When we're trying to interpret the world around us, we need to realize that our expertise can be drowned by our feelings. When Braidius wrote, I had difficulty controlling my emotion. He was a lass, correct. Nobody had more knowledge of Vermeer than Braidius, but van Megren understood how to turn Braidius' knowledge into a disadvantage. The story of how van Megren fooled Braidius is much more than a footnote in the history of art. It can teach us why we buy things we don't need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, and vote for politicians who betray our trust. It explains why so often we buy into statistical claims that in a moment's thought would tell us, can't be true. Van Megren was not a brilliant artist, but he was a brilliant con man. He intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. In 2011, Guy Meiraz, then a behavioural economist at the University of Oxford, conducted a test of wishful thinking. Meiraz showed his experimental subjects a graph of a price rising and falling over time, and told them that the graphs showed recent fluctuations in the price of wheat. He asked each person to make a forecast of where the price would move next, and offered them a small cash reward if their forecasts came true. But Meiraz had also divided his experimental participants into two categories. Half of them were told that they were farmers who would be paid extra if wheat prices were high. The rest were bakers who would earn a bonus if wheat was cheap. The subjects could earn two separate payments, then, one for making an accurate forecast, and the second, a windfall if the price of wheat happened to move in their direction. Yet Meiraz found that the prospect of the windfall influenced the forecast itself. The farmers hoped that the price of wheat would rise, and they also predicted that the price of wheat would rise. The bakers did the opposite, they hoped and predicted that the price of wheat would fall. This is wishful thinking in its purest form, letting our reasoning be swayed by our hopes. It's just one of many studies demonstrating what psychology is called Motivated Reasoning. Motivated reasoning is thinking through a topic with the aim of reaching a particular conclusion. Sometimes it's a conscious process, as with a lawyer in the courtroom or a candidate in a political debate. But we often don't know we're doing it. It can be something as simple as sports fans convincing themselves that game after game, referee after referee is biased against their team. Whichful thinking isn't the only form of Motivated Reasoning but it is a common one. A farmer wants to be accurate in his forecast of wheat prices but he also wants to make money so his forecasts are swayed by his avarice. And an art critic who loves Vermeer is motivated to conclude that the painting in front of him is not a forgery but a masterpiece. It was wishful thinking that undid Abraham Radius. He knew and loved Vermeer better than anyone alive and was keen to be the man to discover one final work by Vermeer. But it was more than that. Radius had a pet theory about Vermeer. He'd become fascinated by the gap between Vermeer's early works which had Biblical themes and his later more famous portrayals of everyday domestic life. No known paintings existed in that gap. What lurked undiscovered in those apparently fallow years wouldn't it be wonderful if another Biblical work were found. Radius also speculated that the Dutch master had as a young man travelled to Italy and been inspired by the religious works of the great Italian artist Caravaggio. This was conjecture. Not much was known about Vermeer's life. Nobody knew if he'd ever seen a Caravaggio. Van Magerun was a forger who understood his victim all too well. He created Emmaus to fulfill all Radius' dreams. It was on a Biblical theme and just as Radius had argued all along was a homage to Caravaggio. When Radius saw the picture, he had no doubts. Why would he? Van Magerun's unwitting stooge Herod Bone wasn't just showing Radius a painting. Bone was showing him evidence that had been right all along. In the final years of his life, the old man had found the missing link at last. But is wishful thinking really this powerful? Yes, Abraham Radius was emotionally involved. He loved Vermeer. He was proud of his record as a connoisseur. He was desperate not to miss the chance of a major discovery. But shouldn't his expertise have enabled him to spot such a crude con? The French satirist, Molier, once wrote, "He learned full is more foolish than an ignorant one." Perhaps Molier was right. If people with deeper expertise fall into the trap of wishful thinking, they're able to muster more reasons to believe whatever they really wish to believe. One recent study by Maggie Toplach and other psychologists found that intelligence was no defense against motivated reasoning and an older study, something of a modern classic, also throws light on the question. The political scientists Charles Taber and Milton Lodge looked at motivated reasoning about two political hot-button issues, gun control and affirmative action. They asked people to evaluate various arguments for and against each position, and they found, as you might expect, that politics got in the way of people's ability to dissect the strengths and weaknesses of different points. More surprising, however, was that simply reading the arguments pushed people further towards political extremes, they grabbed on to arguments they liked and quickly dismissed or forgot about counter-arguments. Even more striking was that this polarizing effect was stronger for people who already knew a lot about civics and politics. These well-informed people were better at cherry-picking the information they wanted and dismissing the rest. More information and more expertise produced more strongly motivated reasoning. From his Monaco Villa in 1937, Abraham Bradius offers us the perfect warning about the dangerous combination of wishful thinking and deep expertise. Bradius noticed details about the forgery that a less skilled observer would have missed, and those details supported the conclusion he wanted to reach. Those tell-tale white dots on the bread, for instance. The bright speckles seemed a bit clumsy to the untrained eye, but they reminded Bradius of Vermeer's highlights on that tempting loaf of bread in the milk-mane. The composition echoed a tense and understated painting of the Emmaus scene by Caravaggio. The ad resonance would have been lost on a casual viewer, but it was not lost on Bradius. He would have picked up other clues designed to show Emmaus was the real thing. There's a jug in the painting, just a jug to most observers. But Bradius would have noted that it was in a 17th century style, not the sort of vessel available in Biblical times. That is just the sort of anachronism that indicates an authentic work. But Van Megeren was a step ahead. He had obtained a 17th century antique and used it as a prop. There were 17th century pigments too. Van Megeren had duplicated Vermeer's colour palette and his materials. It bought years worth of rare lapis lazuli paint from a London supplier in order to produce an authentic Vermeer blue. An expert such as Bradius could spot a 19th or 20th century forgery simply by looking at the back of the painting and noting that the canvas was too new. Van Megeren knew this. He had painted his work on a 17th century canvas. Carefully scrubbed of its surface pigments but retaining the undercoat and its distinctive pattern of cracking. And then there was the simplest test of all, was the paint soft. The challenge for anyone who wants to forge an old master is that oil paints take half a century to dry completely. If you dip a cotton swab into some pure alcohol, gently rub the surface of an oil painting and the cotton may come away stained with pigments. If it does, the painting is a modern fake. Only after several decades will the paint harden enough to pass this test. Bradius had identified fakes using this method before but the paint on Emmaus stubbornly refused to yield its pigment. This gave Bradius an excellent reason to believe that Emmaus was old and therefore genuine. Van Megeren had fooled him with a brilliant piece of amateur chemistry. The forger had figured out a way to mix 17th century oil paints with a very 20th century material, phenol formaldehyde, a resin that when gently cooked for two hours turned into the robust new material known as baker light. No wonder the paint was hard and unyielding. It was infused with industrial plastic. Bradius had half a dozen subtle reasons to believe that Emmaus was of Amir. They were enough to dismiss one glaring reason to believe otherwise. That the picture doesn't look like anything else for me ever painted. I'm no art critic, but to my eyes the painting is drab. The eyelids in particular catch my attention, their droopy and strange and very distinctive of Van Megeren's other work. But then, I'm looking for a Van Megeren. Bradius was looking for Amir. Listen again to that extraordinary rave review from Abraham Bradius. We have here, I am inclined to say, the masterpiece of Johannes Viermeer of Delft, quite different from all his other paintings, and yet every inch of Viermeer. Shouldn't that be a warning? The old man desperately wanted to believe that this painting was the Viermeer he had been looking for all his life. The one that would provide the link back to Caravaggio himself. Van Megeren set a trap into which only a true expert could stumble. Wishful thinking did the rest. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into is something useful. 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His early biographers made him out to be a misunderstood trickster, hurt by the unjust rejections of his own art, but happy to outsmart his country's occupiers. One oft-reported story is that, going, awaiting trial in Nuremberg and told he'd been duped by Van Megoran, looked as if, for the first time, he had discovered there was evil in the world. And the authorities responsible for bringing Van Megoran to justice unwittingly helped make his story world famous. Forensic chemists quickly verified that as Van Megoran claimed, the paintings were hardened with bacolight and aged with India ink. But in an absurd stunt, prosecutors challenged Van Megoran to prove that he was the forger by painting a picture in the style of a maus. And of course, he did. One breathless headline reported, "He paints for his life." Newspapers in the Netherlands and around the world couldn't tear their gaze away from the great shaman. By the time the trial came in 1947, the charge was forgery, not treason or collaboration. Everything was set for a media circus in which the charismatic Van Megoran was the ringmaster. - Call the next witness, Mr. Ren Strebes. - Your honor, I'm a little nervous. I don't know anything about art. - Don't worry, these lawyers don't know anything either. (all laughing) - Silence, Mr. Van Megoran, please. - When Van Megoran himself took the stand, he spun his story that he'd only forged the art to prove his worth as an artist and to unmask the art experts as fools. - But Mr. Van Megoran, you sold these fakes for high prices. Your honor had they sold them for low prices. It would have been obvious that they were fake. - And Megoran had them all spelled out. (all laughing) - Order, order in the court. - In his closing statement to the court, he claimed again that he hadn't done it for the money, which had brought him nothing but trouble. The newspapers in the public lapped up his story. Van Megoran was found guilty of forgery, but was cheered as he left the courtroom. A Dutch opinion poll found that, apart from the Prime Minister, Han Van Megoran was the most popular man in the country. And that was his final bow. A few days after being sentenced, Van Megoran was admitted to hospital with heart trouble. A few weeks later, he died, a hero, without ever serving a day of his prison term. For a while, there was even talk of putting up a statue of the man who fooled gurgling. There's just one problem with this picture of Han Van Megoran as a lovable rogue. He was, in fact, an enthusiastic Nazi. Takeningan one is a book illustrated and published by Han Van Megoran. It's so sinister looking that Jonathan Lopez, Van Megoran's biographer, has hidden his copy away so that visitors don't see it. It's an evil book full of grotesque, anti-Semitic poetry and illustrations using Nazi iconography and colors. It's lavish, with no expense spared in the printing of the book. No wonder, given whom Van Megoran hoped might read it. The copy was hand-delivered to Adolf Hitler with a handwritten declaration in artist's charcoal to all my beloved fury in grateful tributes, Han Van Megoran. Remember where we began our cautionary tale? Herod Bone came to Abraham Radius with a maus, at a story about an anti-fascist family with an old canvas in a back room, desperate to escape from Mussolini's Italy and hoping that the work might be worth something. They were a figment of Van Megoran's imagination. Bone was just another victim of the forge's cynical gift for pushing all the right emotional buttons. Bone had spoken out against fascism and anti-Semitism and Van Megoran, the secret fascist, cruelly Spanemyan about heroic dissidents as a ruse to get the painting into the hands of Abraham Radius. Of course, Bone fell in love with the idea. After the war, the Dutch didn't have much time for collaborators. There were too many of them, and some of their crimes, such as colluding in transportation of Jews to death camps, were too awful to ignore. There was little sense of reconciliation or forgiveness. The traitors were shamed in the streets, or worse. So what would have happened if Hitler's personally inscribed copy of Take a Ningen One had been discovered before Van Megoran's trial? The discomforting truth is that it was discovered. A Dutch resistance newspaper had published the news that Van Megoran's personally dedicated book had been found in Adolf Hitler's library. Van Megoran waved it away, claiming that it signed hundreds of copies of the book and the dedication must have been added by someone else. It's a ludicrous excuse, but people believed it. That seems incredible. Van Megoran had prospered mightily under Nazi occupation, buying up a portfolio of expensive properties and holding those decadent parties. You don't get to act like that in German-occupied territory unless you've made friends with a few Nazis. But Van Megoran sensed that the Dutch people needed a new story, something upbeat, a light-hearted tale of boldness and trickery in which a Dutchman had struck back against the Nazis. And he gave it to them. A man who should have been viewed as a traitor reshaped his reputation into that of a patriot, even a hero. He manipulated the emotions of the Dutch people as he'd manipulated the emotions of Abraham Radius before the war. Abraham Radius desperately wanted of a mere. The Dutch public desperately wanted symbols of resistance to the Nazis. Wishful thinking is a powerful thing. Han Van Megoran knew how to give people exactly what they wanted. If you'd like to hear another cautionary tale about a trickster who captivated a nation, one of my favorite episodes is cautionary tale. Tales Season 1 Episode 2, The Rogue Dressed As A Captain. Enjoy! Key sources for this episode include The Man Who Made Vermeers by Jonathan Lopez, The Forges Spell by Edward Dominic, and my own book, The Data Detective, 10 Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics. For a full list of references, see TimHalford.com. Bushnery Tales is written by me, TimHalford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilly and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of cautionary tales, a hell and a bottom-cater, and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Eldorazi, Ed Gohan, Melanie Guthridge, Rachel Hanshaw, cobbin' a holdbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Masea Monroe, and Rufus Wright. This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarrs, Carla McGleory, Eric Sandler, Emily Roster, Maggie Taylor, Anniella LeCarn, and Maya Caining. Corsionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. 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