Myatt was a convicted forger – he served time – and since he’s come out of his English prison, he’s gone legit, sort of. He paints “genuine fakes” for people who know exactly what they’re getting.
But Dolnick’s bigger story is about Vermeer, the painter who successfully copied him for years, Hans van Meegeren, and the prominent people involved in the purchasing … including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. (The two Nazi leaders had a rivalry about art collection; Goering, of course, always deferred to his boss when they both coveted the same painting, many of which they raped Europe to acquire.)
“I’m interested in art and history,” says Dolnick, “but the book turned out mainly to be a book about psychology, played out with art. But the real subject was the psychological manipulation by the forger of the victims.”
      Dolnick started his project with a deep respect for Vermeer’s work, which only grew as he continued. What he found about van Meergeren was a “pleasant surprise – and what I was thrilled to see: His story was different than most forgers. Most do near-identical copies.” Van Meergeren create new “undiscovered” work. “It’s complicated, when you’re dealing with a con man, who bilks people out of life sayings, not trying to say ‘Oh that’s clever,’ because these were such bad guys. But here’s a fella who swindled the Nazis. The way he did the swindling is much different. Everything about the story had more meat on the bones – I hadn’t caught to the industrial scale of the Nazis’ looting. If someone was going to taken down” by a swindle, who better than Adolf and Hermann. Dolnick: “You want to root for van Meergeren. There’s a very strange thing: From the point of view of the forger, it’s not good for their soul, they tend to be bitter. They do their own work and no one will give me time of day, don this ‘disguise’ and I’m a genius. They tend to be quite cynical.” As to those evaluating the art, “the experts are so smug. The whole world of super high priced art is a very strange catty world. The numbers are colossal, and opinion is terribly important. Everyone is proud of their eye. There is this pride and puffery and it’s about art and culture and value.”
As Dolnick researched his story, it expanded in territory. The chapters on Goering are particularly fascinating. “Goering’s personality is an astonishing feature of this story,” says Dolnick. “There was never someone so greedy, and felt so entitled. It happened that art was his thing, snatching it up by the trainload - because he could. He had no qualms. The Nazis were odd in they had legal forms – they’d steal art and say it was taken for ‘safekeeping.’ Goering was complicated because he had elements of buffoon and swagger. He could be charming, he was smart, he was articulate. He was not only a brute. He was terribly complicated, but the bottom line is he was a mass killer on an unimaginable scale.”
    Dolnick previously wrote about the theft of Munch’s “The Scream” in a book called  “The Rescue Artist” – “about detectives, he thugs in an art museum who grab masterpieces and race off with them. Through doing it, I heard lots of stories about art forgeries. The world of art crooks has hierarchies, too - the thugs, the blue collar workers and the forgers are white collar workers and look down on each other.”
   Has Dolnick considered writing about the world’s biggest art theft of all time, right here at Boston’s Gardner Museum in 1990? “It’s the story in the art crime business. The main detective in ‘The Rescue Artist’ was Charlie Hill and the Gardener is his lifelong obsession. He believes he’s close, but he’s believed it for a long while. It’s one of the great stories ever. Charlie has a complicated theory that has to do with Whitey Bulger - his theory is Whitey had them stolen, as his money in bank.” The idea that if Bulger was nailed on something he could barter his way out of it. Then, says Dolnick,  “things fell apart in a giant way, the 21 murders.” Word of the indictment was leaked to Bulger by his FBI confidant and we know the rest: Whitey vanished. “We may not be done with the Gardner yet,” says Dolnick. “The stolen object keeps its value. A Rembrandt is still going to be great, the value has gone up.”
    Dolnick says “The Forger’s Spell” “is meant to be mass market book.  In fact parts of it are kind funny. It shouldn’t be a niche book. If people felt they had to read it out of duty … It’s a book that sounds a bit out of a person’s range, and then turns out to be enticing. Aside from everything else it’s a real yarn. Couldn’t be a bigger and better victim and numbers are huge.”

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