Tag Archives: art history

Thinking About Thinking #29 – The Art Thief – Stealing art from the rich – victimless?

Leave a reply

In novels and movies about jewel thieves, the burglar is a lovable rogue.

Noah Charney is a professor of art history and an expert in fine art forgery and theft. And in this novel he proves himself to be a sly spinner of detective yarn. The Art Thief is a tale of brain-teasing complexity involving multiple, interconnected forgeries and thefts of historic paintings from several institutions. And its resolution necessarily involves multiple detectives and forensic experts, each as colorful and eccentric in his own way as Inspector Clouseau. The victims – museum curators and aristo collectors – are a classier bunch who tend to both snobbery and hypocrisy – not the most admirable human beings. Classiest of all are the scheming thieves and forgers. You see, in today’s genre fiction, perpetrators of  these presumably victimless crimes against the upper class have the cachet of winners at Wimbledon. Well played, chaps! In a previous generation, this place of honor was held by jewel thieves who connived to execute intricately plotted heists. Remember Cary Grant – never more dashing than in his role as John Robie in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief? Or Melina Mercouri and her artful crew in Topkapi?

Along the way, Prof. Charney is going to teach you a lot about art history and criticism. And that’s even if you consider yourself well versed. He’s never happier or more entertaining than when his donnish characters tear off on rants to their dunderhead students about how to study paintings.
Here’s an example. His Professor Barrow pontificates: “I speak of observation, looking in order to gather information, rather than merely looking. Look deeper. Observation followed by logical deduction leads to solution. You shall see.”

And isn’t this just what the reader of a detective story must learn to do? Observe and deduce?

The Art Thief is great fun, but my advice would be to keep a scratchpad handy. The plots, the players, the crosses and the double-crosses are so intertwined you’ll want to make a diagram to keep track.

  A century-old scandal locked in a painting. This edition of the novel includes the author’s research whitepaper published in The Journal of Art Crime.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #5 – The Map and the Territory – Does genius boggle the mind?

Leave a reply

It’s perhaps a stereotype that great artists are tortured souls. Here’s a murky book by a quirky novelist. And it’s fascinating, even if I don’t quite understand it all.

Here’s my review of The Map and the Territory by contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

This author is unabashedly and unashamedly literary and intellectual. Those of us on this side of the pond who fret about novels and commercialism and fads and attention spans and the general lack of receptiveness for ideas can only envy the opportunity to wax philosophical and not only get away with it, but also actually sell books.

This is the story of a fine artist, Jed Martin, and the rationale behind various distinct phases of his work. It is also a police procedural about a ghastly murder. One connection is that the murder was performed in such a way as to create a work of art. This second story has very little to do with the main plot line of Jed’s work life. Jed’s difficult relationship with his aging master-architect father is a subplot upon which many heady sub-themes are hung, including the history and philosophy of architecture, the relationship between habitation and quality of life, and no less than the fate of civilization.

In perhaps the most stunning stroke of hubris in a work chockfull of it, occurring some way into the narrative so it’s a surprise when it comes, Houellebecq makes himself a principal character. By name. The relationship between life and art is open to question – that is, between the physical description of the French novelist, his eccentricities, and his volatile temperament. The Houellebecq in the narrative is not what you’d call a nice person – and certainly not someone you’d probably consider taking on as a friend. The author seems proud he’s alienating you, else why talk so unashamedly of his body odor and atrocious manners?

Main character Martin’s life is well-to-do Parisian, but mundane. He has an extended affair, off and on, with a Russian media executive named Olga. She is one hot babe, apparently, but even she can’t hold his interest. She did abandon him for a time, and perhaps an infantile ego can never forgive the ultimate insult of abandonment.

I’m somewhat mystified. I may reread it someday to study what I missed on first reading, which is probably a lot. I do know that, based on his descriptions of Martin’s paintings, I’d love to see them. I expect they would be photorealistic and iconic – like the old Chinese Communist propaganda posters. One of the delights of the book is imagining what these fictional works would look like.

My mystery-thriller about art history, which centers on a scandal rather than a forgery, is Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.

A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.

Thinking About Thinking #3: The Forgery of Venus – Is art forgery a victimless crime?

Leave a reply

Thinking About Thinking #3

Is art forgery a victimless crime? The owners of paintings valued in the millions of dollars are either high-net-worth individuals or or cathedrals or museums. And, yes, international mobsters and oligarchs have been rumored to use them as mediums of exchange in drug deals and money-laundering schemes. Some would argue that a truly masterful forgery, aside from being a fraud, actually preserves cultural history and works that might otherwise be lost or deteriorated. That is – for the museum patron or the visitor to an aristocratic household – what’s the difference in the thrill of seeing it?

What do you think?

Here’s my book review of The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber. Thanks to Judy Wisdomkeeper’s comment on Goodreads for recommending this book.

Gruber’s writing style has a voice, and right away that puts him at the top of my list. Besides the plotting, which goes back and forth in time in ways I’ve never experienced in a book, The Forgery of Venus fascinates in two other ways – its meticulous description of painting technique and its depiction of mental illness. Peter Carey’s Theft, which I also enjoyed, also has these two elements. The neurological issues are reminiscent of another masterpiece novel, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which I reviewed in Thinking About Thinking #2.

The protagonist of this novel is Chaz Wilmont, an accomplished fine arts painter. He’s a brilliant technician but insecure about his creativity. His insecurity is rooted in the emotional abuse he received from his father, who was also a famous painter and intensely jealous of his son.

Wilmont is also pretty much a failure in his personal relationships. He’s divorced two wives, and he’s not a particularly attentive father to his children. Then a bizarre thing happens. Chaz volunteers as a patient in a pharmaceutical research study. He’s given a psychoactive drug that induces hallucinations. But in Chaz the effect is unique and disturbing. He seems to bi-locate physically as well as mentally into another person’s body at another time in history. He finds himself living in Madrid in the 1650s. Having assumed the identity of Diego Velazquez, one of the most supremely gifted painters who ever lived, in this past life Chaz learns all Velazquez’s techniques, one brushstroke at a time.

Back in the present day, international criminals discover Wilmot’s talent and blackmail him into forging a Velazquez painting that has been missing for centuries.

I find two things remarkable about this book: First, perhaps because Gruber is married to a painter, his descriptions of painterly techniques are vivid and detailed. Second is the theme of altered mental states. As Chaz shuttles back and forth between the centuries, he begins to wonder, What is reality? What is personal identity? How can you be so sure you are the person you think you are? And what difference would it make if your favorite painting by an old master just a masterful forgery? 

Gruber also hints, as other writers of art-history novels have, that many great painters of yesteryear made a living forging the works of their predecessors as they studied and then copied their techniques. A painting the experts think is a Titian could be from Rembrandt’s workshop of apprentices, for example.

My mystery-thriller about art history, which centers on a scandal rather than a forgery, is Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.

A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.