A trio of thieves made off with art from E.G. Buehrle Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. The four stolen paintings are Cézanne’s The Boy in Red Waistcoat, Van Gogh’s Blooming Chestnut Branches, Monet’s Poppy Field Near Vetheuil and Degas’s Viscount Ludovic Lepic and His Daughter. The four paintings are the most valuable of the collection and the museum estimates the total value to be $160 million.
My mother was a big fan of the Impressionists and art in general. We had a calico cat that she names Picasso and she used to keep a drawing pad nearby. She was a student of the that art school that used to advertise in the back of magazines and ask if you could draw a line figure. She never made it as an artist, but she did leave a lot of art books laying around the house for the kids to look at.
I don’t remember the name of the author, but there was a book on how to make money in art and antiques. The author said the best way to make money was to pick the ugliest art you could find and buy all of it. He went on to name Van Gogh, Picasso, and Warhol as prime examples of this strategy. The Dallas Museum of Art has a couple of Van Goghs which have haystacks as the subject matter. I was a bit shocked at how small they are- some of them were like 20×24 inches, which seems pretty small compared the giant canvases of today. It was also odd to see Van Gogh’s painting up close, as they really do look like nothing but random globs of paint at close quarters. Of course, all paintings are just dabs of paint, but it was still a surprise for some reason.
One of Marlon Brandon’s last good movies was The Freshman. It was the story of a very rich and powerful man who was throwing dinner parties which featured the meat of endangered animals. At one point our young hero finds himself in the home of the rich and powerful man, and there before him is The Mona Lisa. He says that it is a very nice copy, and he is told that it is not a copy, it is the real thing. Nat King Cole’s Mona Lisa gentle plays in the background as the painting is viewed.
In the digital age, where you can make an almost exact copy of an Old Master, does it matter if some museum has the original or not? When we go to a museum, are we really looking at a genuine a work of art, or just a really good reproduction? The stolen paintings are going to end up on the walls of some very rich and likely very bad men. There are also going to be a few hundred very rich and very bad men who are sold fakes over the next few weeks. There is nothing that makes a good forger happier than a big art heist. After all, who is the owner of a fake masterpiece going to complain about it to? At least, that’s what happens in all the Lovejoy books.
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