High art and lowlife
Reading The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, a true story of art thieves and the hunt for a stolen masterpiece, The Scream by Edvard Munch. Dolnick also wrote The Forger’s Spell, the true story of Han van Meegeren who faked Vermeers and sold them to the Nazis (You have to admit the man had cojones).
I like reading art history but what I really enjoy are stories of art theft, forgery, looting, and dramatic discoveries of Old Masters under sooty old canvases. The thing about art crime is that the victims are rich and hardly to be pitied, the dupes always refuse the evidence of their eyes because they want to believe they’re holding a masterpiece, and the value of the stolen items is created by public opinion.
Edvard Munch, Norway’s most famous artist, was a tormented soul who painted emotional states rather than external nature. Reputedly “the handsomest man in Norway”, he was hypersensitive and obsessed with disease, insanity (many of his family members lost their minds) and death (many of his family members died very young). Look at his second most famous painting, Love and Pain
more popularly known as The Vampire because the woman looks like she’s biting her lover.
His most famous work The Scream has been stolen a few times. Dolnick’s book covers the 1994 theft. The hero of the tale is Charley Hill, the world’s greatest art detective.
Look at that wild sunset. In 2004, physicists accounted for that spectacular sunset. Half a world away, the volcano Krakatoa exploded, sending dust and gases into the atmosphere and causing blood-red sunsets such as the one Munch witnessed. The artist was prone to hallucinations but he may not have hallucinated this one.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 5th, 2010 at 13:13
In case you’re interested (or on the off chance that you haven’t read them yet), here are two newish novels on art theft/forgery that I read recently: ‘Theft’ by Peter Carey (pretty enjoyable) and ‘Athena’ by John Banville (not so much).
If you’re still cataloging Filipino extras in fiction, here’s a line from Julio Cortázar’s ‘Rayuela’ (Hopscotch): ‘Y otra vez yo salía del metro Mouton-Duvernet, y vos estabas sentada en la terraza de un café con un negro y un filipino.’