Jonathan Lopez (writer)

Jonathan Lopez (born 1969) is an American writer and art historian. He was educated in the public schools of New York City, including the Bronx High School of Science, class of 1987, and in Cambridge, MA at Harvard University, class of 1991.

Lopez was formerly a correspondent for The Boston Globe and the Associated Press and wrote extensively for ARTnews. He has also written for the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, U.S. News & World Report, Antiques (magazine) and the Dutch newsweekly De Groene Amsterdammer.^[1] Lopez currently serves as an art critic and book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal.

Lopez has lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Louvre, Paris, among other venues.

From 2008 to 2012 Lopez wrote a monthly column for Art & Antiques called "Talking Pictures" and has long been a contributor to London-based Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts. His noted December 2007 Apollo article "Gross False Pretences" related the details of an acrimonious 1908 dispute between the art dealer Leonardus Nardus (a.k.a Leo Nardus) and the wealthy industrialist Peter Arrell Brown Widener of Philadelphia.^[2] Shortly after publication “Gross False Pretences” was praised as “fascinating” and “revelatory” in the British newspaper The Guardian.^[3]

Lopez’s book, The Man Who Made Vermeers (2008), a biography of the Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren,^[4] was praised in the New Yorker by Peter Schjeldahl as “profoundly researched, focused and absorbing.”^[5] The Man Who Made Vermeers, has been made into a feature film The Last Vermeer (2021) starring Guy Pearce and produced by Ridley Scott.

Lopez has written extensively on Van Meegeren in both Dutch and English, including an Apollo article titled "Han van Meegeren's Early Vermeers,"^[6] which revealed that Van Meegeren was behind three Vermeer forgeries of the 1920s that had been floated on the international market by an organized ring of art swindlers based in London and Berlin.

Two of the three forgeries in question were purchased by the art dealer Joseph Duveen who then sold them in good faith to the great Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon. At the time, Mellon was serving as secretary of the Treasury in the administration of President Calvin Coolidge. Unaware of their inauthenticity, Mellon ultimately donated these two "Vermeers" as part of his founding gift to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where they hung through the 1960s as genuine works by Johannes Vermeer, until technical analysis revealed them to be modern forgeries.

These works are now kept in storage, and although rumors have existed about their true origins for many years, before Lopez’s Apollo article they had never before been traced back definitively to Van Meegeren, a figure far better known for his later exploits, which included selling a fake Vermeer to Hermann Goering^[7] at the height of World War II.^[8]

The Apollo article summarizes the conventional account of Van Meegeren's career as follows: "As is fairly well known, the government of the Netherlands arrested Van Meegeren as a Nazi collaborator at the end of the Second World War, charging that he had sold a priceless Vermeer to Hermann Goering during the German occupation. When Van Meegeren revealed that he himself had painted Goering’s prized masterpiece, the news made him quite popular with the general public, and his case was thereafter handled with kid gloves.

Van Meegeren only acknowledged forging the six biblically themed Vermeers that the government already knew to be connected to him through the strawmen who had brought the works to market; two Pieter de Hoochs sold in the same manner; and a few unfinished items that remained in his atelier. Although confidential sources - namely the renowned stained glass artist Max Nauta and the disreputable Nazi collaborator Petrus Jan Rienstra van Stuyvesande^{[9][circular reference]} - informed the investigative team working on the case that Van Meegeren had sold forgeries to 'Englishmen and Americans' decades before the outbreak of hostilities, the matter seems not to have received any official attention."^[10]

Supporting his argument with archival documents and interviews with the descendants of Van Meegeren's partners in crime, Lopez suggests that these rumors about Van Meegeren had a strong foundation in reality and, indeed, that much of what the forger said about himself in 1945 was untruthful.

Not only was Van Meegeren a professional art forger for most of his adult life, but he was also a fascist sympathizer going back as far as 1928. During the occupation, Van Meegeren created propagandistic artworks (under his own name) at the behest of the German-installed puppet government of the Netherlands and even sent an admiring note to Adolf Hitler in 1942 as a token of esteem.^[11] Koen Kleijn, the art and culture editor of De Groene, has stated that Lopez's work "shatters the popular image of Han van Meegeren as a lone gunman or picaresque rogue."^[12]

Lopez is currently under contract with Alfred A. Knopf to write a non-fiction book Art in the Light of God: The Spiritual Origins of Van Gogh’s Genius and Madness,^[13]

Lopez lives in Manhattan with his wife, who is an art critic and professor of art history.

References[]

External links[]

• Apollo Magazine homepage