Simon Houpt

I really love reading about art history mysteries---I can't get enough! This book was super interesting and will be going straight into my permanent collection. I found myself looking up each work and notating in the book whether they'd been recovered since publication. Happily, I found quite a few that had!

I was pretty disgusted with the way museums and governments refuse to give up obviously stolen property. The British handling of the art property of other nations, in particular, is despicable. I'm planning a trip in March and Selah really wants to see the Natural History Museum/V&A/etc. --- not so sure I'll enjoy it as much now as I have in the past. As the author points out, how many pieces in our museums are even the spoils of war? Quite the moral dilemma there...

Even though I'm always rooting for the good guys, I do have to admit several of the heists were pretty genius. The whole story surrounding the fictional Thomas Alcock collection was pretty impressive.

Great read---glad I took the time!… (meer)

"This museum of the missing would hold perhaps one hundred and fifty Rembrandts and five hundred Picassos. You could stroll through the Renaissance galleries to admire Raphaels and Titians, da Vincis and Durers, Rubenses and Caravaggios, the The Impressionist section would include works by Renoir and Dega, Monet and Manet and Matisse, Pissarro and his friend and sometimes student Cezanne. You could skip your way through the history of Western art via Vermeer and van Gogh, Constable and Turner, Dali and Miro, Pollock and Warhol. If the pieces hanging in this imaginary museum are not literally ours, they are the Western world's collective cultural heritage, and their absences renders all of us much poorer."

Museum of the Missing is about stolen art. The numerous individual pieces snatched off the walls, cut out of their frames or severed from their bases. The large-scale cultural looting of Egypt by the British and Napoleon, the same of Europe by Hitler and the Germans, and even the ransacking of the Middle East after Saddam's demise. The coffee-table book is full of behind the scene photos as well as beautiful color and black-and-white plates of never-seen-since stolen art and also some of damaged, recovered pieces. Much of the text goes towards the political, legal and ethical issues faced by museums and collections that discover they have stolen pieces or even forgeries in their holdings. There's also a discussion of why art is stolen - not so much for the enjoyment of the piece but increasingly as a way to make a very large sum of quick money. Also, the author petitions for methods to make stolen art less easy to sell and therefore, to deter the theft in the first place. The book is not a rock star of the non-fiction world but was definitely an afternoon's enjoyment.… (meer)

As much as I enjoyed reading this book, I don't think that it quite lived up to its potential. It could have been a grand overview of the major conflicts in history that led to wide-scale pillaging of cultural history, a diary exploring the psyches' of the world's greatest art thieves (caught or otherwise), and a collection of tales of mystery which tell of all the works not yet found and the detectives who hunt for them. It dabbles in all of these topics - covering subjects like the reign of Napoleon, the recovery of the Mona Lisa, and the role of auction houses in the case of fencing stolen art - but none of these topics are covered in any sort of depth, which resulted in this book serving as a mere warning to the general public about the problem of art theft. My appetite is whetted, though, so I will certainly seek out more books on this topic (fictional, semi-fictional, with the hope that some of the nonfiction will live up to the storytelling potential of the others).… (meer)