The Rescue Artist

Peter Wilson’s remark on ethics and auctions appeared in Robert Lacey, Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998, p. 183).

The observation that the prices of art in the past do not match today’s prices and the Robert Hughes quotation beginning “one bought paintings for pleasure” come from a fascinating, two-part article by Robert Hughes. See “Art and Money,” New Art Examiner, October 1984 and November 1984.

Harold Sack’s remark that “money is honey” appeared in “Rewriting Auction Records,” New York Times, January 25, 1990. The art dealer who observed that some buyers wanted to spend $1 million was Arnold Glimcher. See Calvin Tomkins, “Irises,” The New Yorker, April 4, 1988.

S. N. Behrman noted in his brilliantly witty Duveen (New York: Random House, 1951, p. 293) that Joseph Duveen’s clients “preferred to pay huge sums.”

John Walker was quoted on “the cost per square inch” of Ginevra Benci; see William Grampp, Pricing the Priceless (New York: Basic Books, 1989, p. 25).

Christopher Burge was quoted on “a whole new set of prices” in “The Specter of the Billion Dollar Show,” Washington Post, June 9, 1988.

The story about Renoir trading a painting for a pair of shoes appears in Ambroise Vollard, Renoir: An Intimate Record (New York: Dover, 1990, p. 50). Vollard was an art dealer and collector who wrote biographies of Renoir, Cezanne, and Degas. Renoir’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard is at the Courtauld in London.

The New York Times writer who compared the prices of Impressionist paintings to those of Boeing 757s was Peter Passell. See “Vincent Van Gogh, Meet Adam Smith,” New York Times, February 4, 1990.

Pepe Karmel called Boy with a Pipe “a pleasant, minor painting,” and said he was “stunned” that it “could command a price appropriate to a real masterpiece by Picasso. This just shows how much the marketplace is divorced from the true values of art.” See “A Record Picasso and the Hype Price of Status Objects,” Washington Post, May 7, 2004.

Chapter 19: Dr. No

Bernard Berenson’s remark about “a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesus” comes from Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2003, p. 127).

The Hearst anecdote is from W A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribners, 1961, p. 465).

J. Paul Getty’s diary entry is from Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 142).

Robert Hughes discussed “how frenzied the world would be if there were only one copy of each book in the world” in “Sold!” Time, November 27, 1989.

Richard Feigen commented that “masterpieces evaporate” in “Getty Closing in on Acquiring Last Raphael in Private Hands,” by Christopher Reynolds, Los Angeles Times, October 31, 2002.

The argument that “art was priceless” was S. N. Behrman’s formulation of Duveen’s sales pitch. See Duveen, p. 292.

For a fuller discussion of “the complex interplay between art and ownership,” including insights on the distinction between works of art that belong to everybody versus those that one person can own, see “When Thieves Steal Art, They Steal from All of Us” by Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune, December 22, 2002.

Robert Hiscox talked about art thieves on a BBC radio program called “Stealing Beauty,” broadcast on July 8, 2001.

The anecdote about Marshall d’Estrees is from Pierre Cabanne, Great Collectors (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961, p. ix). This classic account of collectors and their obsessiveness is so comprehensive that it threatens to become an example of the mania that it explores.

The specific examples Adam Smith had in mind were gold, silver, and diamonds, whose “principal merit… arises from their beauty” rather than their utility; the same could surely be said of art. Colin Piatt quotes the passage from Smith and draws on it for the title of his excellent history of art and art buying, Marks of Opulence (London: HarperCollins, 2004). Smith’s remarks are from Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Chapter 11.

Macintyre’s remark appears in a stimulating essay called “For Your Eyes Only: The Art of the Obsessive,” Times (London), July 13, 2002.

Chapter 20: “This Is Peter Brewgal”

The Chicago Tribune characterized art thieves as a “cultured coterie of malefactors;” see “When Thieves Steal Art, They Steal from All of Us,” December 22, 2002.

The first and by far the best account of the Courtauld theft was “The Case of the Stolen ‘Christ’ “by Henry Porter, in the Evening Standard Magazine, October 1991. The direct quotations in the account in the text are from Porter’s article and from my interviews with Dennis Farr.

Chapter 21: Mona Lisa Smile

Allen Gore’s claim that Idi Amin collected stolen art appeared in Judith Hennessee’s “Why Great Art Always Will Be Stolen (and Seldom Found),” Connoisseur, July 1990.

The best biography of Georgiana is Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (New York: Random House, 1999).

Chapter 23: Crook or Clown?

Enger joked that he was better at crime than at soccer in an interview that appeared in Keith Alexander’s BBC documentary “The Theft of the Century.”

Chapter 31: A Stranger

Johnsen remarked that Charley Hill looked “too elegant” to be a policeman in an interview in the BBC documentary “The Theft of the Century.”

Chapter 34: The Thrill of the Hunt

Peter Scott described the “sexual, antisocial excitement” of crime in his memoir Gentleman Thief: Recollections of a Cat Burglar (London: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 4).

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

Aasheim, William, 234

Action New Life, Norway, 22

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 116

Amin, Idi, 143

Andreotti, Giulio, 153, 154