Most of us think of art as something pretty hanging on the wall of a museum or gallery (or lately, something hideous and inexplicably expensive). You’re expected to gaze at it while emitting the properly appreciative sounds, then toss off a witty remark that can’t be that witty because lots of people have said it before you. It’s like reliving the most boring humanities classes you’ve ever taken, except that you could endure those if you stayed in the back of the classroom and took naps.
Art is to be endured, like homework; it’s good for you, like raw, bitter vegetables; rich people collect it, so people fall over themselves pretending to “get” it. Art is cold, formal, and distant, like a wealthy childless uncle five times removed whom you find a little creepy but feel compelled to fawn over.
But art is how we reshape the world on our terms so it doesn’t seem so big and scary. How did it come to this?
Could the whole concept of “art” be the problem? It’s fairly recent, all this “profound” stuff: the Old Masters just painted for the money, and they were good. Kings, merchants, bankers hired them to paint portraits, landscapes of their property, colorful pictures to liven up their houses. Cardinals commissioned them to paint scenes from scripture for the benefit of the churchgoers who couldn’t read. They were workmen, and the really clever ones like Leonardo could also be hired to make siege weapons or fortifications, when they weren’t being sent into exile for involvement in political conspiracies or assorted perversions. Or in Caravaggio’s case, killing people over tennis matches. That image of the wild, unruly artist persists to this day: we’re all a bit disappointed when an artist looks like a normal person (as if “normal” exists) and doesn’t break a bottle on someone’s head at dinner. And yet the art is unsullied by its maker’s habits and appetites. The painter is a lowlife, the painting is high art.
This distinction extends even to art criminals. According to the movies, the art thief is a debonair multimillionaire who looks like Steve McQueen or Pierce Brosnan, or an eccentric supervillain like James Bond’s Dr. No. They steal art so they can hang it on their walls and gaze upon it while drinking vintage wine and listening to baroque music. The art forger is portrayed as a talented rebel thumbing his nose at the establishment. We insist they be glamorous because art is so rarefied, those who dare to rip it off must be special. (Or is it that they understand art and must therefore be smarter than we are?)
In reality thieves and forgers are criminals, and they’re in it for the money.
Art crime is the subject of Edward Dolnick’s excellent books The Forger’s Spell (2008) and The Rescue Artist (2004). The Forger’s Spell, which was included in our favorite reads recap in November, is the amazing true story of Han van Meegeren, a Dutch socialite who forged Vermeers and sold them to the Nazi Hermann Goering. He didn’t copy existing works; he painted new ones in the style of Vermeer, figured out how to make them look old, and got the experts to authenticate them.
Van Meegeren was a mediocre painter, but anyone who sells a fake Vermeer to the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany has got cojones. He seems even more courageous when you see the alleged Vermeers: How could he have fooled the experts of his time with those?
The answer is that they wanted to be fooled. There are only three dozen known Vermeers in the world (and some are disputed), and they wanted to believe there were more.
Dolnick’s earlier book The Rescue Artist tackles the theft and search for one of the most recognizable paintings in the world, “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. The hero of this true-life thriller is Charley Hill, the world’s greatest art detective and an altogether fascinating character. Hill, who has done undercover work to recover stolen works by Goya, Vermeer and Parmigianino, scoffs at the notion of collectors who love art so much they have them stolen. It’s not the love of art that motivates these criminals, it’s the love of dirty, grubby money. That, and the fact that it is easy to steal great art from public venues.
Most museums that use public funds to acquire art will not spring for insurance or high-tech security devices on top of the millions they’ve already spent. Ironically the premiums are low considering the value of the art. If a priceless insured painting is stolen, the insurers are compelled to recover it because they stand to lose a lot of money.
If a painting is not insured, the search is left to understaffed police departments who not only lack the expertise and resources to go after art thieves but also tend to treat the matter as low-priority.
Then the police have more urgent tasks than recovering 400-year-old daubs of cracked paint on canvases. It all boils down to the old philo problem: Do you save the Rembrandt from the burning building, or the child screaming at the window?
The Rescue Artist is peppered with stories of high art and lowlife — these two always go together. Dolnick repeats the disputed but riveting tale of Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian laborer who stole the “Mona Lisa” from the Louvre in 1911.
Perugia was hired by an Argentinian con man named Eduardo del Valfierno. As a former employee of the Louvre, Perugia still had his work smock so his presence at the museum was unremarkable. He hid in a closet, came out in the early hours, stuffed Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting under his smock, and walked out. He took the “Mona Lisa” home, hid her under the stove, and waited for Valfierno to contact him.
Valfierno never did. The theft made headlines all over the world, and that was all the con man needed. He proceeded to sell six fake “Mona Lisa”s to six very rich suckers. Each of them believed that he had bought the genuine article snatched from the Louvre. Obviously they couldn’t tell anyone that they were in possession of the painting. It seemed like the perfect crime.
Perugia waited for two years, then he took action. He went to Florence to sell the real “Mona Lisa” to an art dealer, and got caught. At his trial he claimed that he stole the painting because it hurt his Italian pride to see it in France. The public lapped it up. Like van Meegeren, whom many viewed as a hero because he’d duped the Nazis, Perugia was seen as a hero, an Italian patriot. The court gave him a very short sentence.
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The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick, P545, is available at National Book Store. The Forger’s Spell by Edward Dolnick, P699, is at Fully Booked.