I step back and scrutinize the paintings.
There are eleven, although I have hundreds, maybe thousands. My plan is to show him only pieces from my window series. Or not.
Description:
The theft of thirteen paintings in 1990 from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is still an unsolved crime. Art from Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Manet, and others worth an estimated $500 million was taken one night by two men dressed as Boston police who were able to handcuff and duct tape the two museum guards and leave them in the basement while they carefully selected and removed various paintings, sketches, and art sculpture to take to their car. The men and art were never seen again.
The Museum still offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the safe return of these paintings.
B.A Shapiro's The Art Forger novel picks up this story twenty years later. When one of the missing paintings shows up in the small studio of Claire Roth, a struggling artist with a skill in duplicating the works of masters, the old theft comes alive albeit with a new turn. Claire is asked by a highly-reputable dealer to secretly forge a new version of this original Degas. In exchange he will give her a one-woman show of her own paintings in his high end gallery. It is a deal she cannot pass up.
Alone in her studio with the Degas painting, she spends hours studying the mastery of the artist, the brushstrokes, lighting, perspective, and paint itself before she can even attempt to duplicate it. But as she examines the painting more and more closely over the next days, doubts creep into her mind. Can this wondrous painting be an extremely skilled forgery? If so, what is the reason for its creation, what is its purpose, who will benefit from passing it off as an original, and who will feel the repercussions?
There are multiple twists, turns, lies, betrayals, duplicity, and greed in the next chapters to keep pages turning and guesses flying. Claire, a young artist who had already suffered a blow to her reputation that derailed her rising future, faces not only the technical challenges of creating a perfect forgery but also the risks to her artistic future should this under-the-table commission be discovered.
While I am not artistic, the details that author Shapiro supplies in The Art Forger to describe the beauty of these masterpieces, the mixing of paints, details of brushstrokes, and intricacies of composition all help make the artistic process and final product fascinating to me. Having visited the Gardner museum in Boston and seen the empty frames still hanging on the walls with descriptions of the stolen works, I was able to understand the background of this novel, the goals of the ambitious characters, and the hopeful and possibly criminal results that await at the conclusion of the story.
A fascinating read, wonderfully conceived and told. Highly recommended, both for lovers of art as well as those who enjoy the details and intrigues behind one of the unsolved mysteries of history.
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Absolutely riveting true account of the life of a master forger in the 20th century who sold hundreds of fake paintings and sketches of Vermeer, Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and more to many major museums and collectors, including Nazi leader Hermann Goering.
