Review by New York Times Review
ON MARCH 18, 1990, at 1:20 in the morning, two men dressed in police uniforms demanded entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. When the guard at the front desk complied, they bound him and his partner in handcuffs. "This is a robbery," the intruders announced. "Don't give us any problems, and you won't get hurt." The senior guard was quick to respond. "Don't worry," he said. "They don't pay me enough to get hurt." Inadequate funding was just one of many problems undermining security at the museum when it was hit with the greatest art theft in history. Bequeathed to the city of Boston by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1924, the art-filled palazzo had scarcely been renovated since her death, restricted by a will prohibiting significant changes. Nor were the guards well chosen: One of the night watchmen often conducted rounds while high on marijuana. His partner used the vacant museum for trombone practice. As Stephen Kurkjian shows in "Master Thieves," the museum's inadequacies were matched only by the thieves' carelessness. Major artworks by Rembrandt, including "The Storm on the Sea of Galilee," were thrown on the floor to break their protective glass, and then sliced out of their frames with knives. Though a first-rate Vermeer was also part of the haul, the Gardner's most valuable work, Titian's "Rape of Europa," was completely ignored. Instead the thieves nabbed some of the museum's most trivial objects, like an ancient Chinese vase worth a few thousand dollars. "This was not a surgical strike," Kurkjian writes with understatement, dismissing the popular notion "that there was a 'Doctor No' figure who had commissioned the heist to get his hands on a favored painting." Working as an investigative reporter for The Boston Globe, Kurkjian has spent much of the past couple of decades trying to figure out who the crooks were and what they were after. He's hardly been alone in this endeavor. Ranking the Gardner theft as one of the world's Top 10 art thefts, the F.B.I. has continuously investigated the heist for the past 25 years. Yet despite countless manhours and a $5 million reward offered by the Gardner's trustees, the paintings have stubbornly remained out of sight. More than just a summation of all that's publicly known about the case - from the thieves' false mustaches to the F.B.I.'s sting operations - Kurkjian's book is an impressive attempt to solve the crime by reconsidering the evidence. Kurkjian does so by focusing on potential motives, starting with a bit of Boston street wisdom, supplemented by an anonymous tip. "During the Mob's heyday in Boston," he writes, "just about every criminal in the city believed that the return of a valuable stolen artwork could shorten a prison sentence or even make it go away." In 1989, that wisdom was put into action when a powerful gangster named Vincent Ferrara was convicted of racketeering. Needing his protection from a rival Boston gang, a fellow mobster named Robert Donati orchestrated the heist, Kurkjian believes, in order to put Ferrara back on the street. However, according to Kurkjian, the overwhelming response to the theft forced Donati to hide the stolen art. Then he was murdered, and the paintings have been missing ever since. And so when it comes to locating them today, Kurkjian surmises, the intricacies of longago gang warfare "might just unlock the mystery." It's a plausible theory, if not incontrovertible, and Kurkjian has shared it with the F.B.I. and the Gardner Museum's head of security, Anthony M. Amore. There's reason to believe that Amore might be sympathetic, judging from how he characterizes art theft in his own new book, "The Art of the Con": "High-value paintings are rarely stolen by crooks that can be characterized as professional art thieves," he writes. "The reason for this is simple: Highly valuable and recognizable masterpieces ... are exceptionally difficult to fence." From the thief's perspective, priceless art is worthless. "The art of art theft is said to be in the selling of the art, not the thievery," Amore elaborates, comparing it with the art of fraud, which he claims "is in the back story, not in the picture itself." AND FRAUD IS the central subject of "The Art of the Con." Following the formula of his first book, "Stealing Rembrandts," Amore has compiled an assortment of old cases, rehashing past crimes. Some will be familiar to newspaper readers. (One chapter recapitulates the forgery scandal that led to the 2011 closure of Knoedler & Company, one of New York's most venerable galleries.) Others are obscure for good reason. (Another chapter describes how a Los Angeles art dealer named Tatiana Khan passed off a forged Picasso pastel, claiming it came from the Malcolm Forbes collection. She was caught and convicted, end of story.) Amore brings little insight to these case histories, assembling his narratives from newspaper articles, court records and the occasional interview with law enforcement colleagues. Nevertheless, some frauds are so interesting that even Amore's bland retelling can't quash them. For the manipulation of back story - or provenance, as art professionals call it - few can best Ely Sakhai. In the 1990s, Sakhai began buying second-rate paintings by first-rate Impressionists, purchasing at auction in New York. He would have each of these artworks meticulously replicated (including the back of the canvas and frame) by a team of Chinese copyists. Then he would sell the copy with the original certificate of authenticity and auction record to a Japanese collector. Later he would have the original reauthenticated and resell it in New York. Wolfgang Beltracchi was even more creative in his fabrication of provenance - as he had to be, since his forgeries were never direct copies. Beltracchi specialized in Modernists. Studying their style and using period materials, he would paint the masters'"unpainted works" (as he provocatively phrased it), contributing new art to their oeuvres. In order to explain the sudden appearance of undocumented masterpieces, Beltracchi cast his wife's deceased grandfather as a prewar German collector, claiming that the seller was the German Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim, whose records were lost during the Third Reich. (Beltracchi supported this provenance by sticking fake Flechtheim Gallery labels on the back of his paintings.) Hundreds of Beltracchi's forgeries were sold in the 1990s and 2000s, often at public auction, for prices as high as several million dollars. One fake was exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What brought Beltracchi down was neither connoisseurship nor historical research but the detection of an anachronistic pigment in one of his paintings. Amore attributes Beltracchi's feat of deception to skill with paint and cleverness with provenance. Less obviously, he credits Beltracchi's all-encompassing ego. "In fact, his hubris may have been the essential part of his success," Amore writes. It's a point worth considering: Can a kind of greatness be attained through delusions of grandeur? But if hubris is intoxicating to the art forger, it's toxic for an art investigator. All of Amore's stories end in punishment, an unrealistic representation of criminal activity. More misleadingly, Amore presents scientific analysis as an infallible new weapon against fraud. In fact, investigators' overconfidence in scientific detection techniques has been exploited by forgers for at least the past century. Hubris may even be what's holding up the Gardner Museum investigation. Kurkjian revealingly shows how the F.B.I. has systematically shut out lower echelons of law enforcement like the Boston police, despite their superior knowledge of local gangs. Journalists are held in equal contempt: Kurkjian reports that neither the F.B.I. nor Amore has bothered to follow up on his investigation of Robert Donati's surviving contacts and family. What makes Kurkjian's book so gripping is precisely the quality lacking in Amore's: an accomplished investigator's sense of open-minded humility. JONATHON KEATS is the author, most recently, of "Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age." His new book, on the legacy of Buckminster Fuller, will be published in 2016.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 28, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
As head of security and chief investigator at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Anthony Amore (Stealing Rembrandts) is privy to more information on the subject of forgeries than the average art collector or dealer, and he shares a number of those stories in this engrossing account. According to Amore, art forgery has been part of the American art scene since the country's inception, most famously illustrated by the rampant copies of Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington that circulated at the turn of the 19th century. (That portrait now graces the $1 bill.) Rather than simply offering a laundry list of forgeries and hucksters, Amore shows the lengths forgers will go to in order to fool their patrons and the public, such as hunting down historically accurate materials (e.g., pigments), commissioning artists ("copyists"), and attempting various weathering techniques (even using a blow dryer in some cases to weather the paint). One shocking example involves surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who as part of a lawsuit was ordered by the court to sign 17,000 blank sheets of paper, ultimately putting the provenance of his entire body of work up for debate. This is a bracing and highly informative assessment of a very real problem, sure to resonate with art fans and curators alike. Agent: Sharlene Martin, Martin Literary Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Art scams are so common today that many specialists shy away from authenticating artworks, which in the past ensured the works' authorship or originality, and thereby value. Amore (coauthor, Stealing Rembrandts), director of security at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and internationally recognized expert in the field of art theft and security, relies on interviews and newly released court documents to reveal some of the most notorious cons and their histories: the fakes, frauds, forgeries, Ponzi schemes, double-dealing, telescams, and more. Eleven chapters cover at least one case each in great detail. The author's clear and mostly factual approach examines the various mind sets and motivations of the criminals, art brokers, collectors, dealers, artists, and other individuals involved. Fascinating and at times spellbinding, this book reads like a series of case studies, setting forth the crimes of many well-known and lesser-known miscreants and entities. VERDICT Of significant interest to art world aficionados, brokers, collectors, dealers, lawyers, professionals, and general readers, this ambitious, well-presented and well-documented survey belongs in public as well as academic and special libraries.-Cheryl Ann Lajos, Free Lib. of Philadelphia © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The big business of art fraud. Former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving once declared that 40 percent of art in museums is fake. The FBI has a special, highly trained Art Crime Team, and the London-based Art Loss Register has compiled a database of nearly 200,000 stolen artworks. Amore (co-author: Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists, 2011, etc.), head of security at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, offers riveting profiles of ingenious con men and women who have duped gallery owners, collectors, museum officials, and appraisers to pass off forged paintings as originals by the most famous artists in the world. Among them are Pei-Shen Qian, a talented Chinese immigrant in need of money who produced abstract expressionist paintings complete with the signatures of Pollack, Rothko, and de Kooning; and the brilliant Wolfgang Beltracchi, who claimed that he "channeled" the spirits of the artists whose works he imitated. Forgers, Amore notes, are usually "middle-aged men frustrated by their own failures as artists (or perhaps the failure of the art world to recognize their greatness)." They tend to produce impressionist or abstract expressionist paintings since they are easier to make than old masters; and they work in oils, not the more delicate watercolors. To sell forgeries, they must come up with each work's provenance, or record of ownership, producing documents that themselves are fake. Art scams require buyers: one con man who auctioned worthless paintings on eBay believed that buyers were motivated by "optimistic self-delusion" that "they have found something good." That self-delusion might even explain why the head of New York's famed Knoedler Gallery was taken in by forgers: probably, writes the author, "she was intoxicated by the prospect of being part of the unleashing of a heretofore unknown collection on the world." An engrossing read about brazen, artful scams. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
