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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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

Art Forgery Book

In Forged Jonathon Keats looks at art forgery with the usual stories of art forgery. The first part of the book Keats tells a short history of art from Ancient Egypt to the present day from the perspective of his thesis of the greatness of fakes. In this loose history Keats doesn’t distinguish between fakes, forgeries, copies, appropriation and piracy. In an odd version of the artistic skill verses originality argument Keats argues that forgeries are the great art.

However, Keats’s argument only works when the fake is discovered or revealed because part of the greater quality that Keats believes exists in them is that they have fooled people in the past. There is little else to prove any quality aside from the fact that they fooled people who wanted to be fooled, like Nazi’s supporting the forgery of medieval turkeys because the Vikings could have brought them back from America. When the fake has not been discovered it remains a mediocre to poor example of the supposed artist’s work.

The second part, and the bulk of the book, tells the story of several famous forgers in the twentieth century: Lothar Malskat, Alceo Dossena, Han Van Meegeren, Eric Hebborn, and Tom Keating. All of these forgers have been extensively written about in many other books.

It is in these biographical chapters that Keats argument of technique over anything else flounders. Even when cherry picking examples of famous forgers their technical ability appears over-rated. The Australian forger Pamela Liberto’s fake Rover Thomas works proved that you don’t need any artistic talent or technique to make and sell fakes.

These famous forgers are not really an appealing lot and Keats doesn’t help them; he even compares Van Meegeren’s aesthetics to Hitler’s. The famous forgers that Keats writes about are bitter, thwarted anachronisms; they certainly don’t appear to be the great artists of our age.

In the third part Keats continues his history of art that he started in the first part. He doesn’t look at forgeries at all but rather at copies. The closest that this part gets to forged is the art of J. S. G. Boggs who hand-draws pictures of money and exchanges it for goods of that value. There is an examination of copies of Mona Lisa by Warhol, Banksy and Duchamp before wandering into contemporary art.

It feels like the meat of this book, art forgers, has been sandwiched between an essay on originality in the history of art and I don’t think that they go together.

Jonathon Keats Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age (Oxford University Press 2013)

Perth’s Fake Pollock Exhibition

Considering that there was an entire fake Kusama and Murakami exhibitions in China earlier this year; remember there was a fake Jackson Pollock exhibition that toured Australian in 1978. 

Bohdan Ledwij from Alfred Cove in Perth claimed to be an entrepreneur and art dealer who had amassed a collection of Pollock paintings alleged insured for $4.1 million.  Lewdij presented an exhibition called Paintings by Jackson Pollock in Perth. The exhibition was opened by Elwyn Lynn, the then Curator of the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sydney University. Many other people were taken in by the exhibition including Andrew Saw, The Australian art critic in Perth, who reviewed it for the paper.

It is hard to comprehend that people were taken in by the exhibition, but remember, the people of Perth were amongst the last Europeans to encounter modern art and that the first exhibition of actual modern art in Perth had only been a few years earlier. The name of the American painting Jackson Pollock, if not his paintings, were familiar because of the massive publicity in 1973 when the Australian National Gallery purchase of Blue Poles (Jackson Pollock’s Number 11, 1952).

However, the exhibition didn’t just fool the hicks of Western Australia.  Lewdij then offered Ken Reinhard, principal of Alexander Mackie College of Arts, a teacher training college in Sydney to transport the exhibition to Sydney. Ken Reinhard later told reporters: “I have to admit I wouldn’t have known an original Pollock from a bull’s foot in 1978 but to get a chance to put on a free exhibition of Pollocks seemed too good to pass up.” 

It was only when the Sydney exhibition about to open that Sydney critics express doubts about the authenticity of the decoratively paint dripped canvases. Terry Ingram the arts correspondent for The Australian Financial Review was one who doubted “surely are not those of the great Jackson Pollock, we have come to know, the untidy, neurotic genius who lived in a pigsty and painted Blue Poles.” 

New York Experts were contacted; an incredulous Clement Greenberg and Lee Krasner were shown photographs of the fake Pollocks. The Sydney exhibition cancelled and Bohdan Ledwij claiming that they were going to the US for authentication. It is hard to know what was going on, was it a practical joke or a scam. Unlike the fake exhibitions in China there was no attempt to scam the public or venues and the exhibition appears but it would have been an expensive joke considering the transport, venues and materials.

For the full story, read my book The Picasso Ransom and other stories about art and crime in Australia.

Crime and the Art Market

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

How corrupt is the art market?

Riah Pryor is an art history graduate who worked as a researcher at New Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit. Her experience should have provided more  to the reader. Instead there is a tiny dab of narrative at the start of chapters to suggest something of the author’s experience.

It is difficult to define art crimes; Pryor mentions a Nth Ireland police report where a stolen tube of paint was classed as an art theft. Pryor’s focus is on the economic side of art crimes: stolen art, illegally exported antiquities, art forgery and art fraud rather than art vandalism, art censorship and art as criminalised protests. However, in this did introduce me to other ways that art can be used in crime; one of these is ‘elegant bribery’.

‘Elegant bribery’ where an official is given a fake of little value, the official then puts the fake up for auction, where it is sold at a high price that a genuine work would attract to another member of syndicate acting as if he mistook the fake as a genuine. In this way all the transactions appear legitimate. I can only assume that elegant bribery was detected only through data matching because Pryor doesn’t give many details about this or other the crimes.

No particular crimes are looked at in any depth in the book. The lack of detail might be deliberate in order not to assist in crimes, as attested in an anecdote from an art authentication lab expert but the lack of details makes the book read like a colourless report about art crime from the perspective of law enforcement. It is as dry as a policy paper and her conclusions, although reasonable, are not particularly useful nor informative.

“There is no ‘correct’ reason to care about art crime, or at least no reason which all will agree on. However, determining why someone does or does not care is probably the most effective way to go about working with them to agree on future ways of tackling it.” (p.88)

Dividing the book into “Villains” and “Heroes” is a simplistic strategy and shows Pryor’s police mind set from time her New Scotland Yard. It also fails to work with Pryor’s own solution to get all sectors of the arts industry involved with stopping art crime for their own benefit. 

Art crime is a hot topic, at least for publishers, art historians and the general public, although not for the police who seem to prefer their criminals violent, stupid and intoxicated. Only if you are obsessed with the subject should you read Pryor’s Crime and the Art Market as it is simply the most boring book on the subject. If this has whet your appetite for more about art and crime then please read some of my other posts on the subject.

The theft of La belle Hollandaise

Forgery Trial Book

The Forgery Trial

The Case of Art Forgeries

True Crime and Art

Whaley’s Stolen Paintings

Forgery Trial Book

When the authenticity of two million dollar paintings comes into question the stage is set for a major legal battle. Were the two large paintings forgeries or were they innocent? Was it an elaborate art fraud? Or were they by the Australian superstar artist Brett Whiteley’s whose tragic death from a heroin overdose meant that he wasn’t around to dispute its authenticity.

In her book Gabriella Coslovich takes the reader step by step through this complex case of art forgery. From the first suspicions and the police investigation, through the committal hearing in the Magistrates Court to the trial in the Supreme Court and the subsequent appeal. She interviews, or attempted to interview, everyone involved in the story from the artist’s widow Wendy Whiteley through to witnesses, millionaire victims, police and defence lawyers. Not surprisingly not everyone want to talk but surprisingly one of the defendants, Peter Gant does. Not that she was the only journalist that he talked to; Gant seemed to bask in the media attention that his trial brought.

In the book Coslovich considers the difference between the art world and the laws assessment of the authenticity of the paintings. The issue of connoisseurship, of having “a good eye” is important to the art world but provenance is also important. People repeatedly say about Gant that he had a good eye for saleable art. Was this the same as selling a fake Rolex watch? As one of the lawyers in the case posited. Or is there a difference that the law should recognise? The damage to art history is rarely considered.

By the time it got the trial in the Supreme Court Coslovich had been investigating Peter Gant’s dodgy art deals for six years, both as the arts reporter for The Age newspaper and as an independent writer. So it was not surprising that she is passionately that she wants to see a conviction. It is her depth of knowledge of the case that made her bristled with anticipation every day of the four week trial. I know because I was sitting next to her. I am referred to once in her book as “one of my fellow scribes” (p.151) discussing with her how the dock influences juries.

I think that Coslovich may have solved one piece of the puzzle with her careful analysis of the various versions of the catalogue. The difference in gallery address and the missing printer corrections are crucial details. She doesn’t make a big thing about it in the book and unfortunately her discovery comes too late.

Gabriella Coslovich Whiteley On Trial (Melbourne University Press, 2017)

True Crime and Art

I am working on my next book about true crime and visual arts in Australia. (My first book  Sculptures of Melbourne was published last year.) This has involved sitting in court, searching archives as well as, my usual activities, looking at art and talking to artists.

Melbourne, like all metropolises has artists, public art galleries, private art galleries, art collectors, art dealers and criminals, everything that is needed for art thefts. Everything that is needed for a lot of other crimes involving art and art involved in crimes.

There are many true stories about the intersection between the worlds of art and crime. I will be writing about the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman, of course and also other stories involving art thefts, vandalism of art, vandalism that is art and criminals who do art.

Earlier this year I spent days sitting in the Supreme Court watching the trial of Peter Gant and Aman Siddique for the forging of Brett Whiteley paintings. I learnt a lot about courtroom procedures and how Brett Whiteley’s paintings are framed.

Both Gant and Siddique have been found guilty by the jury but the judgement for that trial has still not been given, so I can’t finish that chapter just yet (both Gant and Siddique were acquitted on appeal in 2017). Coincidentally it was one of the last trials to be conducted with a judge in a wig.

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at original documents in the State Library’s Heritage Collection Reading Room. I had heard that they had the sketch book of the bushranger and sculptor, William Stanford. When I investigated I found that there were two books. They were waiting for me on the desk with the pillow on it. The pillow was to cradle the spin of the delicate old books, its cover half falling off, pages coming out. I was surprised that I was not required to wear white gloves to handle them but there was enough grim on the pages already from when Stanford was in Pentridge.

I was not allowed to take photographs of Stanford’s notebooks, nor was I allowed to photograph the tags on Supreme court’s press bench where the crime reporter have cut their names. Not that I am worried as my next book is going to be an unusual book about art, one without many pictures.

Mostly my historical research has involved searching old newspapers scanned on Trove. You would not believe the number of paint brushes stolen in Victoria in the nineteenth century but before mass production made them inexpensive. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that anyone actually stole a painting.

Readers maybe able to help me if they:

• Any serving or retired member of Victoria Police who has investigated any art theft, fraud involving art, vandalism of art or is interested in art crimes.
• Knew the painter Ronald Bull
• Has any information about Phillip Richmond O’Loughlin of Sydney from around 1946
• Has any information Timur Grin or Anthony D’Souza
• Has any information about John Allen Haywood of Mount Druitt
• Knew Ivan and Pamela Liberto in Toorak
• Taught visual arts at any prison in Victoria
• Studied visual arts in prison in Victoria
• Has a criminal conviction for graffiti in Melbourne
• Was a victims of art theft or forgery in Melbourne
• Has been arrested and/or convicted of any crime due to their art practice in Melbourne
• Was a member of the Australian Cultural Terrorists (ACT)

If you want to contact me about this or any other information about art involving crimes or crimes involving art in Australia I can keep your identity confidential.