The Atlas of Art Crime/Laura Evans

Laura Evans subdivides her engaging review of art crime into three categories:

1) Theft

2) Vandalism

3) Forgery

In regard to theft you have to have quite a lot of chutzpah to steal a painting to enter a gallery, church or museum and appropriate a picture.

The motivation is normally financial but not always.

Famously The Duke by Goya was lifted to promote the cause of free TV licences.

A fine example of chutzpah was the heist of a Willem de Kooning from the University of Arizona museum by Rita and Jerry Alter from New Mexico.

They breezed into the museum and – whilst Rita chatted up the security guard – Jerry cut the picture Woman-ochre from the wall.

They kept the picture behind a door for 30 years only for it to be discovered when their Estate was acquired.  There was evidence from their extravagant lifetime style suggesting that this may not have been the only picture stolen by them.

I found the vandalism category less interesting.

Anyone who thinks their cause so worthwhile that it’s justifiable to destroy or disfigure a work of art is – in my view – deranged.

Many such vandals – such as Lazlo Toth, who destroyed Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican – finished up in an asylum.

Forgery has, however, always interested me. Most forgets are failed artists. However, copying is not the end of the matter – you have to “prove” provenance and that the artwork could have been painted at that time it was.

One of the most controversial forgers was the Dutchman Hans van Mergeren who forged a Vermeer – Supper of Erasmus – in 1936.

He was charged and tried for selling a picture to Reichsmarshal Goering but – at his trial – created a coup de theatre by revealing the picture was a forgery.

Though sentenced to prison, ill health prevented him from actually serving his sentence.

Another essential element is gullibility. This does not always extend beyond the purchaser as dealers are happy to sell on a forgery profitably.

Even experts can be duped. The traitor Anthony Blunt was recognised as an authority on Poussin but his own was a forgery.

This Atlas is never dry. It is well-organised – chronologically and by continent – and is both readable and informative.

I would have like more detail on looting by dictators like Napoleon and Hitler and the controversial topic of Cultural appropriation.