Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Cultured Crime

Art theft is a glamorous, intellectual sort of crime – or at least it is in our collective imagination. Thieves who specialize in stealing art objects, jewelry, and the like are generally portrayed in fiction and drama as clever, humane individuals who practice theft as a skilled trade, eschewing violence and intimidation – picture Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Robert Redford in Hot Rock, or Nick Nolte in The Good Thief. The reality may be quite different, but crime is not a business that operates in public, so it's hard to know. Certainly I have little idea what art thieves and art theft are really like – but reading last week that more than two dozen works of art had been stolen from a private villa in the south of France – the second major art heist in less than a week – I began to wonder more about what motivates art theft, who pays for it, and how it works. And so, of course, I turned to the library.

I found a good place to start with the coffee-table book Museum of the Missing. Art journalist Simon Houpt starts with a basic premise: art objects are only worth stealing if you can command a high price for them, and that's why art theft has been on the rise since auction and sale prices began to rise dramatically in the 1950s. Houpt relates the stories of noted art thieves and those of the detectives who hunt them down, and talks about what the loss of an art object means for a museum or collector. Every single page is illustrated with reproductions of stolen art pieces and photographs of the human element: collectors, curators, gallery owners, art detectives, and thieves.

To get a little more in-depth, I turned to investigative journalist Peter Watson's rather sensational Sotheby's: The Inside Story. It's an exposé of borderline shady deals done by major museums, auction houses, and collectors – in particular, Watson makes the case that Sotheby's has systematically participated in smuggling, helping to transport antiquities and artworks across international borders in violation of the law. This is real, old-fashioned gumshoeing, and although sometimes Watson and his investigatory colleagues seem nearly as shady as the art smugglers they're tracking, it does make for a fascinating story.

The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous painting in the world, and at this point, one of the most challenging to steal – but it has been stolen and recovered before. When it went missing from the Louvre in 1911, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the top suspects (darn those pesky radical artists!). The public mourned the painting's loss deeply, thronging to the Louvre to visit the blank space where it had hung, and expressing their sorrow with flowers and other tributes. R. A. Scotti's The Vanished Smile examines how the Mona Lisa came to be such a meaningful symbol, and along the way, tells the story of its theft and recovery.

Looking for information on this topic, I found myself almost overwhelmed by the huge number of interesting-looking books on various aspects of art theft. As I mentioned above, there are many novels and films about art thieves and the detectives who investigate their crimes. But there are also lots more true-story books, on grave robbery, the theft of antiquities and archaeological artifacts, and the systematic looting of European art by the Nazis during World War II, among other things. Perhaps one of these books will be just what you're looking for! Of course, if not, you can always ask your friendly librarian for more suggestions.