Blog II: Art & Crime Fiction
During a recent visit to Ithaca, I ran into an old friend, the retired director of Cornell University’s Johnson Museum. When I mentioned a visit to the Gardner Museum in Boston, our conversation drifted into the topic of international art theft. He reminded me of the famous 1990 robbery of several very valuable paintings, which were never retrieved. I asked him whether he had experienced a serious theft while he was in charge of the Johnson collection. This was not the case, but he had to deal with a severe robbery while he was the director of another museum. As he put it, it was a truly disturbing experience.
On the one hand, there was the intense public attention with press conferences and official statements, not to mention reporters calling during the middle of the night, asking for updates. On the other hand, there was the demanding search for the thief. How could the theft happen in the first place? Was it someone from the outside or an insider, who had the advantage of knowing the building and the security system.
As he pointed out, the first suspicion is always an inside connection, possibly a guard who either needed money or was persuaded by an outside actor to cooperate. In his case, the thief turned out to be a student who had been a night guard at the museum. He had fallen in love with a precious drawing by an old Dutch master. He removed it from the collection to keep it at home.
As my friend reminded me, the black market for stolen art is difficult for criminals. Stolen paintings are drastically discounted because they have been reported world-wide by the police. The buyer will never have an opportunity to exhibit the work in public. Not surprising therefore, the paintings stolen from the museum in Boston never showed up again. In her novel The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt made use of this fact by showing how the extremely valuable painting “The Goldfinch” is circulated among criminal gangs as a security for loans.
Listening to my friend, I became intrigued by the subject. Could a stolen painting become the center of my next novel? And what kind of painting would it be? If I chose a well-known, highly valuable painting, as did Tartt, I would have to persuade the readers to believe that it was actually stolen, while they knew that this was not the case.
It might be easier to invent a painting but provide a good background story. It would have to be a work that the broader reading public would understand and appreciate. An abstract painting by Klee, for instance, would remain an abstract and therefore uninteresting object for most readers.
Thinking about a suitable artist, it occurred to me that the Hudson River School has never received the international recognition its members deserve. Their works have remained in the shadow of European painters, especially the French impressionists. One could think of an imaginary work by Albert Bierstadt and assign this work to a museum where it would be stolen. Bierstadt came to the US as a small child, but as a young man he returned to Germany, where he was trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In short, there is an international background to be explored. It would become the task of my private detective to retrieve the work, but without focusing on the criminal aspect of the theft, which would be at the center of the FBI investigation. What happens when the stolen painting is offered on the black market? Who would be involved in the process of finding a buyer? What kind of buyer might be interested in a valuable stolen painting? One could think of very rich, potentially dangerous and violent actors who don’t care about the law. For the narrative, they would be important but nevertheless marginal figures. The focus of the action would be the world of the middlemen, the galleries that might be involved in illegitimate sales, the experts and advisers who know potential buyers, the copyists who are willing to produce a counterfeit, if the pay is right. One could imagine a European middleman with an international reputation. He has an office in Prague or Vienna but also maintains an office in Manhattan. He is what one may call “everyone’s darling” of the art world. While the plot begins in America, it would extend to other countries. The stolen painting could show up in London or Berlin, exposing the detective to dangerous encounters with violent actors.
How would the story end? Realistically, the stolen object would probably be lost, but for a crime novel that outcome would be unsatisfactory. The reader could likely want to experience the success of the private detective, which means that the missing painting must be found and restored to the legitimate owner. And what about the thief or the group of thieves? If they were violent criminals, they could be eliminated in the process of the narrative. A more interesting solution would be a problematic figure with positive and negative aspects, a figure with whom the reader can even identify, at least up to a certain point.
Thanks so much for your time and interest!
Questions, comments, or feedback? Feel welcome to leave your comment below or reach out to me (Thomas) at thomas.griffin.crime@gmail.com.
