Art Crime Books

I’ve been reading Simon Houpt’s Museum of the Missing, an attractive coffee table book about stolen art (thanks, Victor). It is the first book I’ve read about art crimes since finishing my own book, The Picasso Ransom. I read several others before and during writing. Submitting a manuscript to publishers involves reviewing similar books. Publishers will always ask what books are similar. If your book or art is unique, it isn’t marketable; what people want is its unique aspects not a unique product.

Most often, I would mention Gabriella Coslovich Whiteley On Trial (Melbourne University Press, 2017), which will be the basis of a soon-to-be-released, two-part documentary to be shown on the ABC. Coslovich’s unique aspect is her focus on one recent art forgery trial.

Houpt’s unique aspect is plenty of images of stolen art. Finding images, getting copyright permission, and labelling them is a difficult job in itself. One I found so stressful with my first book, Sculptures of Melbourne, was that I was determined my next book would be without any pictures.

Houpt starts with the driving factors for crime in the development art market and war before getting down to the messy business of art theft. The problem with writing about art theft is that stories are only complete if the theft has been solved, and most art thefts aren’t. Searching for a satisfying conclusion drives Houpt to the messier business of art detectives and private investigators and the non-reveal of current museum security systems. If only he had stuck to his war and pillage thesis, he could have moved on to the FBI’s art crimes unit (established after the looting during the criminal Iraq War), Tamil Nadu state’s Idol Wing (established post-colonial) and the academics and bloggers working to repatriate stolen gods from national galleries and museums.

Although Houpt is primarily focused on Europe and North America, it is worth remembering that India and Asia have been the primary sites for looting antiquities in the later half of the 20th Century.

Some of Houpt’s stories are well known, and two have been turned into Hollywood movies, The General (1998) and American Animals. The General is about Dublin criminal Martin Cahill, played by Brendan Gleeson, who stole seventeen old masters. And American Animals is about four university students’ theft of rare books. Another story that Houpt tells is that of Rose Dugdale, which is covered in depth by Anthony M. Amore in The Woman Who Stole Vermeer (Pegasus Crime, 2020).

Other books on art and crime that I reviewed and posted on this blog include:

Gideon Haigh A Scandal in Bohemia, the life and death of Mollie Dean (Hamish Hamilton, 2018)

Riah Pryor Crime and the Art Market (Lund Humphries, 2016)

Noah Charney’s The Art of Forgery (Phaidon, 2015) has many true crime stories of art forgeries. Forgers are examined and grouped in chapters by motivation: genius, pride, revenge, fame, crime, opportunism, money and power. This works well. However, it is the usual lineup of art forgers: Lothar Malskat, Alceo Dossena, Han Van Meegeren, Elmyr de Hory, Eric Hebborn, Tom Keating etc.

I’ve also read Eric Hebborn’s The Art Forgers Handbook (1997) and Tom Keeating’s The Fakes Progress (1977). The Art Forgers Handbook is a charming book with many recipes and advice, enough to understand why someone would want Eric Hebborn dead in an alley in Rome in 1996. The Fakes Progress is the authorised biography of Tom Keating, who enjoys portraying himself as a loveable Cockney rogue.

As well as I’ve also reviewed Marc Fennell’s tv series about the Picasso theft, Framed. Fennell’s other series, Stuff the British Stole, is also relevant, even though the British stole more than just art and antiquities.

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Street Comedy

The culture of the street includes politics and promotion, commerce and transport, romance and comedy. My unofficial entry to this year’s Melbourne Comedy Festival.

There is comedy behind a lot of street art; artists like Cel One, the late Sime Thornton and others specialise in that comic images. There are joke posters and other pranks. 

However, it is a humourless mistake to analyse a joke unless you are Sigmund Freud, whose book Humour and Jokes is a surprisingly good read, although the section on black humour is far too brief. So I will post and not comment.

Melbourne Then and Now

Back in 2013, the Director of the NGV, Tony Ellwood, promised that the vast exhibition of the art and design of the metropolis Melbourne Now would return in a decade. Now it has.

Installation view of Design Wall on display as part of the Melbourne Now. Photo: Peter Bennetts

Back then, the exhibition included both spaces in NGV Australia and the temporary exhibition space at NGV International. Now it is only in the NGV Australia at Fed Square.

Back then, I was invited to the opening of Melbourne Now 2013 (see my post). Now, although about a thousand people were at the official launch on Thursday 24th, I’ve been left off such invitation lists for years.

Back then, it was desperate to make the exhibition interactive. It seemed like every artist in the show had been asked if they could make their work interactive, from sticking on birds to a Juan Ford landscape or sketching Julia Deville’s taxidermy creations. Now there are still sketching areas and other viewer interactions in the exhibition, but it is more restrained.

Back then, I was concerned with how street art and graffiti would be represented in the exhibition and how Melbourne’s demographics were represented. Now I’m interested in the curators’ interpretation of what has changed in the last decade.

Back then, it was all living artists. Now it includes some of the artists who have died in the last decade. This appears to go against the exhibition’s meaning, for if ‘now’ mean anything, it does not mean ‘not now’. However, for the NGV, “Melbourne Now” is just a series of letters with no intrinsic meaning, just a title for a series of exhibitions. But this only raises the question of why include only some of the artists that have died and not all. (A similar degree of curatorial linguistic flexibility was applied by the “Gallery of Victoria” to the location of “Melbourne” in both exhibitions.)

Back then, I might have been one of a few online voices writing about the arts in Melbourne. Now I have to wonder what to write when there are already six reviews of it in Memo. Cameron Hurst points out the supersize of the works in the show designed to fill the white spaces. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-cameron-hurst Chelsea Hopper examines the sound and music and complains about how it leaks in the gallery. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-chelsea-hopper, Which leads neatly to Giles Fielke pleading for the NGV to have a proper cinema. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-giles-fielke Amelia Winata writes about the artists in the exhibition hoping to get into the NGV’s permanent collection. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-amelia-winata (In her examination of the free market aspects, she could have included the emails from the usual commercial galleries boasting about the inclusion of artists they represent. If there was a conflict of interest statement anywhere, I missed it.) Paris Lettau looks at some of the young artists in the exhibition. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-paris-lettau And Tristen Harwood presents Calia O’Rourke and Indi Jennings’s “younger/fresher/more energetic take”. https://memoreview.net/reviews/melbourne-now-2023-by-tristen-harwood-indi-jennings-and-calia-o-rourke 

So that was Melbourne Now. Back then and now.

Kait James, The KLF (Koori Liberation Front). Photo: Black Mark

Cthulhu in Brunswick

Saw Cthulhu at the Brunswick Mechanics Institute, not the Great Cthulhu that Lovecraft wrote about (I’m not mad), but one of the lesser Cthulhus. Presented by the Centre for Projection Art as part of Frame: a biennial of dance 2023 Cthuluscene by transmedia artist Megan Beckwith was a combination of dance and technology.

The Centre for Projection Art is best known for presenting the Gertrude Street Projection Festival. The Centre’s objective is to activate spaces, and the Mechanics Institute’s forecourt is one of the closest things to a civic square in Brunswick. Various things have been tried for decades to activate it with more or less success. They probably discussed this in very different terms when it was a Mechanics Institute in the 1890s.

Cthuluscene is a dance and video work looping on four screens in the front windows of the white neo-classical building. The windows hadn’t been cleaned, and there were a few cobwebs, but that was the spookiest aspect. If only a spider had crawled out while I was watching.

The animation and motion capture was attractive, but the dance part was the weakest aspect, with conventional moves that contributed little to any meaning. The dancer’s gold tentacles and golden robot form spoke more of absurd luxury rather than cosmic horror. But then considering the “transformative nature of the digital to discover different notions of gender, physicality, and the post-human” is an absurd luxury.

I’m familiar with the horror stories of H P Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, as will some of my readers. So at least that gave me something to write about. Often I neglect to write about exhibitions like this because there is little to say about them. Sometimes, there is so little to them. Either way, it is a painful exercise to put into words with no pressing reason. It is not as if there is a need to warn people to stay away from a monster—the curse of the two-star review.

Renn, Adams and Morton

Two exhibitions: Vas Renn and Garry Adams’s “New Works” and Callum Morton’s “Inside Out”.

Vas Renn

Vas Renn and Garry Adams “New Works” in the Gallery at the City Library. Two series of hard-edge abstractions with intense colours working on a grid that entertains the eyes.

Vas Renn’s collaged textiles, the pinstripes and other textiles form geometric patterns. They look like microprocessor designs. I first thought with all the detail that these were digital prints, but looking closer; I could see that they were fabric; they are recycled fabric sourced from charity shops with some additional printing.

All those lines of thread, the warp and weft, are woven into a larger pattern that takes Renn’s work from the micro to the macro.

Garry Adams’s series of seven paintings are all about the arrangement of colours. There are filtered colours and contracting combinations in balanced geometric compositions. These aren’t one series of paintings (the difference in framing gives it away), and Adams has been painting like this for many years.

The title “New Works” is misleading since both artists have exhibited these series separately in the last couple of years at Four Eight Four Gallery in North Carlton. 

Garry Adams

Also geometric, colourful and entertaining for the eye is Callum Morton’s “Inside Out” at Anna Schwartz Gallery. And, unsurprising for Morton, with conceptual and architectural elements. What is surprising is that they are paintings, when Morton is best known for his sculptural work (see my post on Morton’s Monument Park).

Six large paintings the size of the windows in the Sirius Building in Sydney, images where the representational appears to be an abstraction. Along with a series of preparatory like works on paper, with a central “missing image” image. For there is a studied vacuity, an empty architecture, to Morton’s work.

The cartoon-style mouse holes in Morton’s drawings of skirting board reminded me of the one in the shared house I lived in Pascoe Vale, the arch of a genuine mouse hole is flatter.

These and other holes through architecture from the inside out.

The book launch

I’ve been busy with publicity and marketing my book The Picasso Ransom for the last couple of weeks. And this blog post is another aspect of that.

(photo by Linda Elly)

On Saturday, I had a book launch at my local pub, The Woodlands on Sydney Road. I made a bit of a speech, read a bit from the book, did a bit of show and tell with an antique art magazine the NSW vice squad confiscated, and had an extensive Q&A session about writing the book and art crimes led by Neil Kerlogue. Thanks, Neil, for that and your introduction. And thanks to Linda Elly for the photos of the launch. So many people to thank, including the Woodlands Hotel, for providing the venue in their decorative upstairs bar. They said they’d keep the bar open for the first hour, but they kept serving drinks until 6 pm when just my table was left. And I’m not the only author who would recommend them for a book launch.

My book is The Picasso Ransom and other stories about art and crime in Australia. I must try to emphasise that most of it is more stories about art and crime, not just the famous theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the NGV.

One of the other stories is the Peter Gant and Aman Siddique trial for forgery. I hear rumours about a two-part documentary being made for the ABC. The documentary will have illustrations by Bill Luke sitting beside me in the reporters’ box during the trial.

On the subject of documentaries on stories I cover in my book. Whatever happened to the one Jacob Obermann was making about Paul Yore?

Will my next book be The Picasso Ransom 2, more stories about art and crime in Australia? There are already some stories developing. Including the protests in museums, the attempted decapitated of a banana skull statue, stolen garden sculptures and more of the continuing statue wars. Ronald Ferguson told me about a guy shot in the back stealing some paintings in the 1970s – I must look into that. Will I include a story about an art dealer stealing work from artists? The police don’t often get involved in what is, to some extent, a business dispute, but if the right story comes along. Contact me if you can add details or know of a crime involving art in Australia that I have missed.

My book is available from the usual online sellers (Amazon), but please ask your local bookstore to get it and ask your local library to buy a copy. (Unlike the sales, the library reading copyright royalties for my first book, Sculptures of Melbourne, continues to grow). 

Available in Australia and New Zealand through: 

• Brunswick Bound
• Dymocks Nowra
• Readings Doncaster
• Booktopia

In Canada and US through:

• Barnes & Noble 
• walmart.com
• Chapters / Indigo (Canada) ebook only

And in Europe and UK through:

• Adlibris  
• Agapea
• Blackwells
• Book Depository Ltd
• and others

Street art is dead

Will Coles, the street art sculptor of cast concrete, was at the opening of This is Not a Toy Store’s new location on Lygon Street. He was handing out postcards with an Apocalypse Now meme: “I love the smell of street art in the morning. The smell, you know, that graff smell. Smells like … a fashionable investment opportunity.”

Coles reminded me that none of the street art sculptors I wrote about in my book Melbourne’s Sculptures is still working on Melbourne’s streets. Seven years after, where are they now? Coles is living in Spain. Mal Function is busy with his foundry. CDH is reproducing genetically similar life forms. GT Sewell was selling NFTs. And Junky Projects lives wild and free from this dirty old city.

And it is not as if a new generation has come along that has been so prolific over an extended period or as audacious. Golden head has yet to make an appearance for over a year. So please correct me if I’m wrong, but I think street art (not just street sculpture) in Melbourne is dead, or, instead, to employ a less morbid metaphor, street art is tailing off, markedly declining. Declaring an art movement dead is such a 20th Century thing when a progressive art theory meant the next movement would logically replace previous movements.

I can’t say I’m surprised. I could always hear the sound of cash registers ringing with street art. And both major politic parties in Australia have moved further to the right, militarising and persecuting dissenters and whistle-blowers. Like all love affairs, I’m just disappointed it didn’t go on for longer and had to end like this.

When I fell in love with street art, I saw a utopian aspect where art from the people and by the people decorated the city’s least attractive features. People are taking action to make their lives more meaningful. People who want to make art, to be something other than a consumer or a worker. Psy-ops for civilians, a form of free and public expression. A creative and joyful response to being alienated in an ever-changing city. A way of connecting place with identity. Propaganda by deed, encouraged more street art—a subversive counterforce against mainstream advertising.

Others saw it as a commercial opportunity for themselves, like promoting NFTs or some other product. Consider Time-Rone show (see Giles Fielke’s review in Memo https://memoreview.net/reviews/timerone-by-giles-fielke). Rone did not promote his exhibition at Flinders Street Station with the old-skool method of a blitz of new street art. No, he abandoned the street once the business objective is achieved.

Adrian Doyle writes almost entirely about the commercial opportunities of how “nu-muralism” has replaced street art (see the CBD News). https://www.cbdnews.com.au/nu-muralism/ There is little consideration of these murals’ aesthetics or content because they are conservative in both style and content, especially when compared to Melbourne’s murals from the late 20th century. Geoff Hogg’s Melbourne Central Station Mural http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/search/nattrust_result_detail/65289 is radical, especially compared to the kitsch sentimental ANZAC biscuit tin art and uncritical Australiana of “nu-muralism.”

Street art didn’t die under the gaze of academics, from street art festivals, or from being preserved in art collections. Nor was it killed by government regulations or policing. No, it largely poisoned itself, assisted by social media likes, to subvert a progressive vision. That said here is some recent street art from Melbourne.