Wednesday November 15

The Museum of the Missing

Categories: In the News , Staff Picks , Nonfiction , Arts & Crafts

Seven paintings, including a Cézanne masterwork, were stolen from art collector Michael Bakwin’s home in 1978. Bakwin recovered the Cézanne, Bouilloire et Fruits, more than 20 years later, when a corporation offered it for sale and a suspicious Lloyd’s of London underwriter called the Art Loss Register. But soon after, Bakwin was forced to sell Bouilloire et Fruits – for more than $30 million – simply because he could never maintain enough security to prevent another theft. He eventually regained four more of his paintings, but two remain missing.

This story from Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft illustrates both the good and the bad news about the current situation. The good news is the Art Loss Register, a London-based organization that maintains a database of stolen works. Since its creation in 1991, the Art Loss Register has done much to compensate for light trade regulation, inadequate governmental resources, and low motivation to identify or report suspect provenance.

The bad news, according to author Simon Houpt: “Art theft is a disease that is slowly eating away at the heart of the art market. And like a parasite that can only thrive on a healthy host, art theft is an epidemic only because fine-art values have skyrocketed over the last few decades.”

Houpt, a New Yorker who writes an arts and culture column for Canada’s The Globe and Mail, explains the dark consequences of the market’s shift from appreciation to overpriced investment. An endless series of record-setting sale prices means that museums, the public, and connoisseurs like Bakwin are losing treasures to the black market, as well as the oblivion of private, finance-focused ownership. In 2004, Picasso’s Garçon à la Pipe was sold for a record $104 million to buyer or buyers still unknown. The stolen contents of the Dutch Room in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum have been gone for 16 years, despite relentless efforts to recover them.

Along with its breadth of coverage, ranging from famous heists to “cultural spoliation” (war plunder), a unique feature of Houpt’s excellent survey is a “Gallery of Missing Art.” This final section of the book consists of photographs of many lost works and accounts of their disappearance. It’s far from complete – tens of thousands of masterpieces have vanished, among them perhaps 150 Rembrandts and 500 Picassos!

For more detailed detective stories about individual heists and the ravages of World War II, try the titles listed below. (I’ll be writing about more recent war looting, the losses from the Baghdad Museum, and antiquities theft in an upcoming post.)

A special report from The Guardian includes another gallery of missing works and links to recovery organizations and recent news stories. And here are some recent National Public Radio stories: “Munch's Masterpieces Said to Be Recovered,” “Russia Struggles to Stem Art Thefts,” “Painting Stolen During WWII Returned to France,” and “U.S. Museums Cope with Art Tainted by Nazi Looting.”

Heists & Rackets

Art Crime by John E. Conklin

The Caravaggio Conspiracy: How Five Art Dealers, Four Policemen, Three Picture Restorers, Two Auction Houses, and a Journalist Plotted to Recover Some of the World's Most Beautiful Stolen Paintings by Peter Watson

The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art by Matthew Hart

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick

Rogues in the Gallery: The Modern Plague of Art Thefts by Hugh McLeave

World War II Thefts

Beautiful Loot: The Soviet Plunder of Europe's Art Treasures by Akinsha, Konstantin

Landscape with Smokestacks: The Case of the Allegedly Plundered Degas by Howard J. Trienens

The Lost Masters: World War II and the Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses by Peter Harclerode

The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art by Hector Feliciano