[MSN] Missing art turns out to be the currency of the day: Museum of the Missing, A History of Art Theft .

[Museum Security Network Mailinglist]

Missing art turns out to be the currency of the day 
By JOHN MASSIER 
News Book Reviewer
9/17/2006  
 
Edward Munch's masterpiece "The Scream" was recently returned. Its two-year
absence caused an upsurge in attendance. 
Museum of the Missing 
A History of Art Theft 
By Simon Houpt 
Sterling, 192 pages, $24.95 
 
In the introduction to "Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft,"
author Simon Houpt drops some compelling details about aesthetic thievery.
First, he notes the 1990 theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in
Boston of 13 paintings, most notably "The Concert" by Dutch artist Johannes
Vermeer. One of only 36 known works by Vermeer, its theft establishes the
requisite gravitas to Houpt's subject matter, made even more weighty when
we're told that Interpol rates the market for stolen art and antiquities
third on the list of global illicit activities. Cultural losses estimated
between $1.5 and $6 billion annually are behind only drugs and arms trading.

That's a jaw-dropping fact dropped on the second page and gives rise to all
sorts of questions about how art functions as collateral in the murky world
of black market economies. Houpt whips his subject into a thicker froth when
he finishes his introduction by alluding to the hypothetical museum of the
book's title. Were we able to collate all the missing works into Houpt's
"accidentally curated" museum, we would find enough old masters to weaken
the knees of any ardent art lover: da Vinci, Durer, Caravaggio, Rubens,
Renoir, Degas, Monet, Manet, Matisse, Cezanne, Vermeer, van Gogh, Turner,
Dali, Miro, Raphael, Titian - well, you get the picture. 

"The museum of the missing," Houpt writes, "would hold perhaps 150
Rembrandts and 500 Picassos." Five hundred Picassos? Houpt doesn't come
close to adequately supporting this claim. An illustrated appendix at the
end of the book lists about 85 works and there is, surprisingly, no
text-only list. He mentions that works by Pollock and Warhol are among the
stolen, but we never find out what they are. 

The most contemporary work mentioned is Henry Moore's 2.7 ton bronze
sculpture "Reclining Figure," snatched in 2005 by three thieves with a
crane-equipped flatbed truck and, it is feared, melted down for scrap metal.
"Museum of the Missing" is more of an "Old Masters, Where Art Thou?"
exercise that too often falls back on a cloying sentimentality. "When a
painting goes missing," Houpt waxes at the beginning of his book, "we all
lose a piece of our common heritage." You can almost hear the violins. While
he tries to make a point about the value of cultural heritage and suggests
that he and the reader "put the money aside for the moment," it's a
short-lived moment. Most of the works cited in the book are framed
predominantly by their cash value. 

Houpt deals effectively with certain aspects of the issue. He clearly
describes the impact of auction houses in the late 1950s and the genesis of
the spiraling art market we know today. Creating an environment in which art
lovers and many museums are priced out of the market by ever-larger sales at
auction has, in one sense, served to draw the attention of criminals to
potentially-valuable and often poorly-guarded commodities. 

Time and again in the book, one is struck by the relative ease with which
artwork is stolen. Most intriguing perhaps was the case of compulsive art
lover/thief Stephane Breitwieser who, over the course of about five years in
the mid 1990s, stole 232 works from 139 museums across Europe. Stunningly,
Breitwieser nabbed most of his booty during regular museum hours and with no
help other than a girlfriend to occasionally serve as lookout or distract a
guard. 

"I need these objects and they need me. I was nearly a slave," he claimed.
Houpt deals with the more nefarious situation of war-time theft by
contrasting the relatively discerning plundering of Napoleon to the
unbridled rapacity of Hitler's art collecting. Napoleon, Houpt notes, "was
no philistine" and his chief curator/thief at least recognized the aesthetic
value of their booty. 

Hitler had an astute curator as well, but one hobbled by the need to indulge
Hitler's fairly pedestrian art tastes. Houpt also does well talking about
the complications that surround museum acquisitions and the questions of
provenance that continue to arise. Plenty of time is given to describing a
lineage of gentleman thieves, a little less to the few art detectives out
there. But an issue which seems even more urgent - the looting of the Iraq
National Museum in 2003 - receives merely a passing reference. 

Even more grating is Houpt's suggestion that the black market in antiquities
"likely helps support terrorist activities both in Iraq and elsewhere"
without any further details or follow-up. The book returns to pure Hallmark
triteness to close: "What will it take before the world gets serious about
our bewildering collective losses? How many more empty frames must we
contemplate in sorrow and despair and frustration?" 

Tellingly (absurdly? poetically?), Houpt has already reminded us that the
current level of fame enjoyed by the Mona Lisa only really developed after
its theft from the Louvre in 1911 and attendance at the Munch Museum in Oslo
shot up dramatically following the notorious theft of "The Scream" in 2004.
It's a reminder that artwork, like any other loved one, should be
appreciated when it's in our presence. 

So let's not cry in our art soup and wistfully imagine how much better the
world would be with those 500 missing Picassos. Let's get out there and
commiserate with all the artworks that haven't been stolen, that are being
produced as we speak and anxiously await our attention. 


John Massier is the visual curator of Hallwalls.