As is obvious from the title, the book recounts the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The story captured the attention of the world, providing constant fodder for newspaper headlines, & yet seems oddly obscure today, especially considering the world's most famous painting was just up & fucking stolen from the Louvre. I recommend reading this cover to cover, & resisting the temptation to spoil things by looking up any information on the case, as the book gives a mystery novelesque account superior to anything available online.
Thanks to the impulse purchasing power provided by the Kindle, I was instantly off to other nonfiction on the art of art theft & forgery, & despite it giving me another excuse to procrastinate from reading the technical books I'm actually suppose to be studying, it's been more than worthwhile.
The Milkmaid, Vermeer, ca. 1657
Christ and the Adultress, Hans Van Meergan, 1943
My next hit was The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez. Living up to the title, Lopez goes to great lengths clearing up misconceptions on both the crime, & the man behind the crime, that have been left by years of inaccurate reporting, nationalism, myth making, & plain old self aggrandizing lies. Van Meergan is a fun, if not lovable character, who to my untrained eye could've been a wonderful, though unremembered, painter in his own right, if it was not for his ego & endless greed. The book is a fun & breezy read, w/ an obvious bonus factor for fans of Vermeer.
Regardless of any interest in Shakespeare, Doug Stewart's The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly seems too bizarre to have actually happened, & yet is completely true. The audacity & desperation of William Henry Ireland led him from a prank on his pretentious, Bardologist father, to producing numerous forgeries which fooled even respected experts. It all fell apart in a fittingly spectacular fashion at the disastrous & surreal opening (& closing) production of Vortigern and Rowena, a "new" play by William Shakespeare.
After being duped by the initial forgeries, Henry's father soon becomes the leader of a mob of Shakespeare fanatics, whose view of the Bard is not that of just a masterful writer, but as a literal god. Demands of more documents from his fictitious benefactor increase faster than he is able to complete his forgeries, & Henry finds himself under the weight of the world, fearing prison or worse, as all of London spreads his flimsy lies around as the biggest find in the history of English writing.
His story is really, really dumb, but I guess if you want something to be true badly enough, critical thinking can take a vacation. I suppopse I'd be more than willing to jump at the idea of a found copy of Loves Labour's Won, but then again, I'm not a expert on Shakespeare. These people really should've of known better. The entire episode strains belief, even as the proof unfolds w/ each page turned, & document cited. Don't worry that I've given too much away in this review/gush, because it is unable to spoil the detailed view of this alien culture & it's eccentricities that this book provides.
My current reading is of Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures , Robert K. Wittman's account of his career w/ the FBI as it's top investigator of art related crime. I haven't finished it yet, but at halfway through it's been a good read. It seemed at first to be a tad self aggrandizing, but after some searching, I've been unable to find a thing on Google to suggest that the man is bullshitting any of it, & my skepticism of anyone this accomplished talking about themselves had to subside upon learning of his contribution to the rescue efforts at Ground Zero on 9/12.
I’m in the market for more good stuff in this vein, so if anyone ever reads this obscure blog, please send any suggestions my way.
Stray thought: Art forgery book titles love to use overly long subtitles almost as much as I love the excessive (ab)use of commas.
