Art & Crime/Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm

Art & Crime is an account of looters, forgers, and fraudsters in the art world by two German journalists.

They concentrate on Germany, though a small player in the art market.

In 2018 the global art market was valued at $67 billion of which Germany only represented 1%.

The book begins with the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.

This was not for gain but rather an Italian worker in the Louvre wanted its return to Italy.

Nowadays the Art Register of Stolen Art makes any re-sale all but impossible.

The picture of the stolen Goya of the Duke of Wellington in Dr No’s hideaway in the James Bond film is fanciful.

The book proceeds to fake Modiglianis and Nazi memorabilia.

Modigliani is particularly easy to forge and attribution facilitated by his surviving daughter sitting on the adjudication committee without any art education or background.

The book covers cultural appropriation of archaeological finds from which certain well-known museums do not emerge well.

Then it proceeds to dictators like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos who creamed off millions of dollars from their native Philippines and invested inter alia in art.

Donald Trump gets a whole chapter to himself for buying art for his personal art and profit though his charitable foundation.

He is also castigated as an ignoramus.

The Rheinland art advisor Helge Achenbach deprived the Aldi heir of many millions by such practices as increasing his commission by altering invoices from galleries.

After a high life of luxury he finished in prison cell.

The writers’ list of malpractice is not exhaustive.

They do not refer to the open and prevalent practice of auction houses offering dealers a guarantee to bid up to certain figure and, if the auction exceeds that, a percentage of the hammer sum.

Nor the ways that dealers will ”big up” an artist through articles and books emboldening his/her reputation.

Further a dealer will buy up all the art of a well-known art school prize winner discreetly, then often through an intermediary put one in auction and ensure it goes for a high price, thereby enhancing the value of his/her stock

Strangely the well known German forger Wolfgang Balthatchi does not get a chapter though there are references to him.

Big money and fine art have always been bedfellows.

Along with ownership of thoroughbred racehorses, super yachts and football clubs, art acquisition is a badge of wealth and status.

It can also be a sound investment: British Rail Pension Fund invests 3% of its fund is art.

The Impressionists (Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro) the post-impressionists (Manet, Degas, Cezanne and Gauguin) and early modernists (Picasso. Matisse and Modigliani) will always rise in value.

Other art is more cyclical: you could buy a Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon for £100 in the early 1960s, though Graham Sutherland has now declined in price and reputation.

L.S. Lowry has preserved his value.

The writers are highly critical of wealthy buyers.

Yet art history is full of collectors from rich families like Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim or those that acquired both great riches and art – Walter Frick, Alfred Barnes and the Russian textile magnate Sergei Morozov – whose fine collection of early 20th century art is currently exhibited in Paris – but was once sequestrated by the Soviet government and re-housed in the Pushklin museum in Moscow.

For all its prejudices and omissions this book rightly sheds light on the lack of regulation and the transparency of the art market and the saying “a fool and his money are easily parted” has never been more true.