The case of Han van Meegeren, the boldest modern forger of Old Masters (as far as we know), is a grand yarn of twisty deceit, involving prestigious dupes and scads of money, with a sensational trial at the finish. It even has a serious side. Van Meegeren, since his death, in 1947, has become a compulsive reference for philosophical discussions of fact and fraud in art—a subject bound to disquiet art lovers. He became the most original of fakers when, starting in 1936, he put aside mere canny simulations, mostly of the work of Johannes Vermeer, to create wildly implausible pictures which were presented as discoveries of a missing phase in the artist’s conveniently spotty, little-documented opus.

(Only thirty-five undisputed Vermeers exist today. As an added boon to forgers, a few aren’t very good.) Van Meegeren’s tour de force was a feat more of intellect than of skill. He knew whom he had to fool first: an eighty-three-year-old monster of vanity named Abraham Bredius, who had an earned, though moldering, track record as an authenticator of newfound Vermeers. In 1937, in the august British art-history journal The Burlington Magazine, Bredius declared “The Supper at Emmaus,” the first of van Meegeren’s late counterfeits, to be “the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft.” Other Dutch experts concurred, under pressure to keep a national treasure from being sold overseas. It took van Meegeren himself to reveal the truth, in 1945, when not to do so might have put his neck in a hangman’s noose.

Two new books re-spin the van Meegeren saga, one breezily, with entertaining digressions on secondary figures and the arcane of forgery, and the other in profoundly researched, focused, absorbing depth. “The Forger’s Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century”, by the science journalist Edward Dolnick, aggrandizes the story’s abundant hooks, such as the happenstance that van Meegeren’s victims included the art maven Hermann Göring, who, in 1943, swapped a hundred and thirty-seven paintings from his largely ill-gotten collection for a van Meegeren Vermeer. “The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren”, by the writer and artist Jonathan Lopez, brings hard light to van Meegeren’s machinations and (very bad) character. Lopez debunks the myths, savored by Dolnick, which cast the forger as a romantic avenger, and which sweeten the tale in other ways. It seems that Göring, while awaiting trial in Nuremberg, may not have learned that his cherished Vermeer was a phony, as nice as it is to think that he did. This small point is notable because, in time, the fact that van Meegeren had scammed Göring helped him not only to evade charges of collaboration but to become a folk hero. Lopez demonstrates how evidence of the painter’s coziness with the Occupation regime got buried by the single question of whether he had sold Göring a patrimonial cynosure (potentially a capital offense) or a worthless fake. Early in 1947, a newspaper poll found van Meegeren to be the second most popular man in the Netherlands, after the newly elected Prime Minister.

Van Meegeren was born in 1889, in the provincial city of Deventer, the third of five children in a middle-class Catholic family. In 1907, his father, a schoolmaster, sent him to Vermeer’s city, Delft, to study architecture. The feckless lad preferred to paint and draw. He worked as an assistant drawing instructor (the only steady job he ever held) until 1917, when he moved his household to “the city of beautiful nonsense,” as a contemporaneous guidebook characterized The Hague—the home of the royal family and an illustrious strutting ground for the idle rich. There he launched himself as an artist. With “his small, birdlike frame constantly aflutter and his irreverent sense of humor,” in Lopez’s description, van Meegeren beguiled the town. Lopez—who, unlike Dolnick, speaks Dutch and is steeped in the history of the period—records that van Meegeren became the favorite artist of the Liberal State Party of the Netherlands, a fading force of the patrician elite. Reproductions testify that he had a subtle sense of color and a firm gift for telling portraiture. Come to think of it, what are artistic forgeries but portraits of imaginary art works?

Van Meegeren’s first legitimate exhibition in The Hague, in 1917, of work in several genres, reaped positive reviews. His second, five years later, of Christian religious paintings, sold well but repelled critics with its treacly piety—van Meegeren, it turned out, was a student of scripture. (In the show, there was an earlywarning “Supper at Emmaus”—representing Jesus, who has appeared as a stranger to his disciples after his death, being recognized at the moment when he breaks bread for them.) Informed opinion consigned van Meegeren to the always populous ranks of the formerly promising.

He evoked the setback poignantly in his public confession, in 1945: “Driven into a state of anxiety and depression due to the all-too-meager appreciation of my work, I decided, one fateful day, to revenge myself on the art critics and experts by doing something the likes of which the world had never seen before.” That’s rubbish, if only because the “something” to which van Meegeren referred—his invention of a new Vermeer style—was just the latest chapter in a then still unknown, long-running criminal enterprise. Lopez affirms that van Meegeren was dirty before his artistic reputation collapsed. He speculates—reasonably, to my mind—that faking ruined the artist’s creativity. “Slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development,” Lopez writes. The state of being oneself dies when set aside.

Lopez dates van Meegeren’s initiation into The Hague’s underworld of art swindlers to 1920, at the latest. He was mentored by a dealer and painter, Theo van Wijngaarden, who had apprenticed in chicanery with a titan: Leo Nardus. Nardus stuck American millionaires with innumerable old copies, fresh fakes, and fanciful misattributions of famous artists until 1908, when a panel of invited experts, including Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, convened at the home of the Philadelphia streetcar magnate P. A. B. Widener and concluded that his collection was worth about five per cent of what Nardus had charged him for it. The hardly less resourceful van Wijngaarden, on his own, perfected a paint medium, gelatin glue, to finesse a standard test for the age of oil paint: rubbing with alcohol, which dissolves oils that have had less than decades to dry. (The glue weathers alcohol but, as was later discovered—too late for a generation of marks—softens on contact with another chemical compound: water.) Van Wijngaarden maintained a network of well-placed accomplices, extending to London and Berlin, who could pilot fakes into the mainstream of respectable commerce. He lacked only top-drawer product. He himself painted well, but not well enough. He wanted an adept protégé, and he found him in van Meegeren, who was ready.

Alexander Pope was born an only child to Alexander and Edith Pope in the Spring of 1688. The elder Pope, a linen-draper and recent convert to Catholicism, soon moved his family from London to Binfield, Berkshire in the face of repressive, anti-Catholic legislation from Parliament. Described by his biographer, John Spence, as “a child of a particularly sweet temper,” and with a voice so melodious as to be nicknamed the “Little Nightingale,” the child Pope bears little resemblance to the irascible and outspoken moralist of the later poems. Though barred from attending public school or university because of his religion, Pope was eager to achieve and hence, largely self-educated. He taught himself French, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and read widely, discovering Homer at the precocious age of six.

At twelve, Pope composed his earliest extant work, Ode to Solitude; the same year saw the onset of the debilitating bone deformity that plagued Pope until the end of his life. Originally attributed to the severity of his studies, the illness is now commonly accepted as Pott’s disease, a form of tuberculosis affecting the spine that stunted his growth—Pope’s height never exceeded four and a half feet—and rendered him hunchbacked, asthmatic, frail, and prone to violent headaches. His physical appearance made him an easy target for his many literary enemies in later years, who referred to the poet as a “hump-backed toad.” Pope’s Pastorals, which he claimed to have written at sixteen, were published in Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies of 1710 and brought him swift recognition. An Essay on Criticism, published anonymously the year after, established the heroic couplet as Pope’s principal measure. It included the famous line “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” The poem was said to be a response to an ongoing debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to predetermined artificial rules inherited from the classical past. It, attracted the attention of Jonathan Swift and John Gay, who became Pope’s lifelong friends and collaborators. Together they formed the Scriblerus Club, a congregation of writers endeavoring to satirize ignorance and poor taste through the invented figure of Martinus Scriblerus, who served as a precursor to the dunces in Pope’s late masterpiece, the Dunciad.

1712 saw the first appearance of the The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s best-known work and the one that secured his fame. Its mundane subject—the true account of a squabble between two prominent Catholic families over the theft of a lock of hair—is transformed by Pope into a mock-heroic send-up of classical epic poetry. It originated from a quarrel between two families with whom Pope was acquainted. The cause was not very small − the 7th Lord Petre cut off a lock of Miss Arabella Fermor’s hair, and kept it as a trophy. Although Pope did not admit it, the title of the work was most likely influenced by Alessandro Tassoni’s mock-epic The Rape of the Bucket, from 1622.

Turning from satire to scholarship, Pope in 1713 began work on his six-volume translation of Homer’s Iliad. He arranged for the work to be available by subscription, with a single volume being released each year for six years, a model that garnered Pope enough money to be able to live off his work alone, one of the few English poets in history to have been able to do so.

In 1719, following the death of his father, Pope moved to an estate at Twickenham, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Here he constructed his famous grotto. The celebrated grotto was, in fact, an imaginative method of linking the riverside gardens with the gardens which lay on the other side of the road leading from Twickenham to Teddington. Encouraged by the success of the Iliad, Pope went on to translate the Odyssey— which he brought out under the same subscription model as the Iliad—and to compile a heavily-criticized edition of Shakespeare, in which Pope “corrected” the Bard’s meter and made several alterations to the text, while leaving corruptions in earlier editions intact.

In addition to his translation of the “Odyssey,” which he completed with Broome and Fenton in 1726, Pope published “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” and the “Epistle of Eloïsa to Abelard” in 1717. Also, in 1725, he published an annotated edition of William Shakespeare.
Other works include: “Essay on Man” (1715),”Epistles” (1732- 34), four “Moral Essays,” and other epistles, all of which explore the philosophy and metaphysics. Pope’s uprightness had everything to do with his artistic merit. He wrote satire in the service of virtue – not simply self-defense.

Why are kids so outrageously bad at gratitude? While it is true that some children can respond by some degree to diligent upbringing, and can on occasion manage something close to gratitude, most children seem innately predisposed to a level of ingratitude that borders on the infuriating. Between the ages of about four and twelve, children are near impossible to train to say thank you as though they mean it, when given a gift. When they get into their teens, their gratitude to their parents usually manifests as seething resentment, a desire to be socially disassociated from their parents, and a reminder to their parents that they never asked to be born.

In the early years, before a child can speak, he is totally dependent on adults to care for him. He demands food by crying, yelling and screaming, and he demands his every other need attended to by similar methods. The usual reward for attending to these needs is that the screaming stops. Gratitude at this age one would not expect to find. Later on, however, one might expect children to develop excellent skills at gratitude, for several reasons.

Between the ages of four and ten (very roughly), a child is still largely dependent on adults to survive and thrive. In these years, he will depend steadily less on his own parents, and will interact more and more with people from other families. In these formative years, an ability to win people over will be a great asset. Gifts from uncles and aunts may be forthcoming, and popularity amongst his peers could set him up well for adulthood. In order to stay liked by the child’s parents, and in order to impress everyone with their generosity, non-relatives might care for, gift, and teach a child. Cuteness seems to be important in children. Adults have an innate weakness for it. It can be very difficult to remain angry with a cute child, and most children are blessed with some degree of it.

My explanation for the ingratitude of children is not a cheery one. I suspect that children benefit most consistently from a general policy of expecting gifts, demanding gifts, being self-centred, stubbornness, and threatening to throw tantrums, and that an instinct for gratitude would conflict with this. That children do benefit from “bad” behaviour is shown by the fact that they do behave badly. We know from our experience of life, that parents do continue to feed and clothe ungrateful children, and to love them and come to their aid even after the traumatic teenage years. The instincts of parents are strong enough to endure the bad behaviour of children, and therefore adults have to endure, because children have evolved to exploit this fact. The genes of parents are obsolete. The genes that matter are those of children. A child is a selfish being, which has evolved to exploit the parental generation and milk it for all it can get.

Gratitude would of course often be useful to a child, but evolution plays the odds. If ingratitude nets a child 100 favours a week, and gratitude would net 20, while losing 40 of those gained by emotions incompatible with gratitude, then the casualty is gratitude. If the costs are greater than the benefits, a trait will not evolve. Children with an innate predisposition to be grateful will be out-competed by the ungrateful swines we see in the world today.

If this were the whole truth, however, then we would expect never to see any glimmerings of gratitude in any child. The world would be populated by ungrateful children who grew into ungrateful adults. Fortunately for us, gratitude is something which is useful for an adult, and it is a skill which has to be learned. In adulthood, we cannot expect other people to help us out all the time. Eventually our parents die, and we must fend for ourselves, and strike deals with those around us. We have little respect for “spongers” – people who take from others all the time and give nothing. As adults, we cannot get pieces of cake by threatening to hold our breath until we pass out. We must learn some gratitude. If the adult is to be any good at this useful skill, it pays to get some practice in before it is needed all the time.

All people are not the same, and we would expect some people to start practising courtesy and gratitude earlier than others. The most efficient way to be is probably to have an ability to learn gratitude quickly, but to suppress the actual learning of gratitude until the moment when ingratitude stops being beneficial. We might expect socially talented but ungrateful teenagers to learn gratitude double-quick soon after they storm out of their parents’ cosy semi-detached house, and get a room in a shared flat in a dodgy part of town. Interestingly enough, it seems that this is precisely what happens, but with one refinement: whereas these young adults become skilled at being grateful to most of the people they meet, they retain an ingratitude towards their parents. When dealing with someone who loves one unconditionally, it pays to exploit this and to remain demanding. Most co-operation, most love, is conditional upon reasonable behaviour in return.

If I am right, then I would predict that children who start showing gratitude later in life, might actually be more socially talented than those who start practising this skill earlier. The ability to recognise when it is time to get grateful, and the ability to master this new art quickly, is something that a person might be born with. For those less perceptive, and less good at acting, starting younger might be advisable.

Aesthetics in this central sense has been said to start in the early eighteenth century, with the series of articles on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” which the journalist Joseph Addison wrote in the early issues of the magazine The Spectator in 1712. Before this time, thoughts by notable figures made some forays into this ground, for instance in the formulation of general theories of proportion and harmony, detailed most specifically in architecture and music. But the full development of extended, philosophical reflection on Aesthetics did not begin to emerge until the widening of leisure activities in the eighteenth century. By far the most thoroughgoing and influential of the early theorists was Immanuel Kant, towards the end of the eighteenth century. Therefore it is important, first of all, to have some sense of how Kant approached the subject. Kant is sometimes thought of as a formalist in art theory; that is to say, someone who thinks the content of a work of art is not of aesthetic interest. But this is only part of the story. Certainly he was a formalist about the pure enjoyment of nature, but for Kant most of the arts were impure, because they involved a “concept.” Even the enjoyment of parts of nature was impure, namely when a concept was involved— as when we admire the perfection of an animal body or a human torso. But our enjoyment of, for instance, the arbitrary abstract patterns in some foliage, or a color field (as with wild poppies, or a sunset) was, according to Kant, absent of such concepts; in such cases, the cognitive powers were in free play. By design, art may sometimes obtain the appearance of this freedom: it was then “Fine Art”—but for Kant not all art had this quality. In all, Kant’s theory of pure beauty had four aspects: its freedom from concepts, its objectivity, the disinterest of the spectator, and its obligatoriness. By “concept,” Kant meant “end,” or “purpose,” that is, what the cognitive powers of human understanding and imagination judge applies to an object, such as with “it is a pebble,” to take an instance. But when no definite concept is involved, as with the scattered pebbles on a beach, the cognitive powers are held to be in free play; and it is when this play is harmonious that there is the experience of pure beauty. There is also objectivity and universality in the judgment then, according to Kant, since the cognitive powers are common to all who can judge that the individual objects are pebbles. These powers function alike whether they come to such a definite judgment or are left suspended in free play, as when appreciating the pattern along the shoreline.

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist theorists often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the development of “New Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism.”

The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as “Critical theory,” one of the constituent components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. “Critical theory” held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. “Critical theory” sees in the structure of mass cultural forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace. Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation.

The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in Great Britain and the development of “Cultural Materialism” and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating in the 1960s at Birmingham University’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory. Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture, architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

It is not every day that well-maintained 28-acre palaces are disposed off for a mere Rs.10 lakh. Many eye brows were raised in Srinagar when the picturesque palace of the former maharaja of Jarnrnu and Kashfmir, Hari Singh, on the up market Boulevard along the Dal Lake, was sold for a throw away price which would not have fetched even a three-bedroom house any where in Srinagar.

The sale deed was executed by the heirs of Hari Sirngh, including former Sardar-l-Riyasat and Rajya Sabha member 'Dr. Karan Singh and his family. The palace has been sold to Narinder Kumar Batra, younger son of influential Kashmir busfness magnate Dharma Veer Batra. However. it is alleged that the 'sale' was carried ~ utot p rovide a legal cover to the real owner, LaAt Suri 07 Bharat Hotds, who being a non-Kashmiri cannot, by law, purchase immovable propetty in Jammu B Kashmir.

Businessmen as well as local citizens in Srinagar are aghast over the silence of the state government and other agencies concerned on the sale of a historical site. Infact, the former chief minister was present at the bhoomi puja held by Suri at the hotel complex early last month. Interestingly, the state government had already put in place some norms on the sale of properky to put a check on the practice of undewaluing it for evading taxes and stamp duty. The buyer has to approach the deputy commissioner concerned who directs the engineering department for valuation of the properly and in case the value is higher than what is stated in the papers, the sale deed is not registered. But, in this case, this provision was ignored.

The sale is the envy of other hoteliers in Srinagar, Says Bashir Ahrned, who is also in the hotel business: "I am prepared to pay Rs.20 crore for the same property. Let Suri or his front man Narinder Batra come forward. They are good businessmen looking for profits and this should be an attractive proposition - Rs.20 crore for what they purchased for Rs.10 lakh.