The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick

Author:Edward Dolnick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Theft from museums, Individual Artists, Fiction, Investigation, Art thefts, Norway, Organized Crime, Art thefts - Investigation - Norway, Murder, True Crime, Munch, Law, Mystery, Theft from museums - Norway, Edvard, History, Art, Modern, Contemporary, General, Art thefts - Investigation, Contemporary (1945-)
ISBN: 9780060531188
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2006-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Charley Hill relishes such stories, partly because they buttress his view that the human race is composed largely of ninnies but mainly because he takes personal offense at the widespread belief that art thieves are masterminds who spend their days plotting elaborate heists. “The thieves who steal works of art,” he says, “were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier.”

Hill’s hubcap remark was, in one £2 million case, the literal truth. In 1982 a thief ran out of London’s Courtauld Institute Galleries clutching Bruegel’s Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery to his chest. (Bruegel produced a great many paintings, but in the nearly four and a half centuries since his death all but forty have been lost.) For the next eight years, the painting passed from thief to thief.

Somehow it fell into the hands of four small-time crooks. Two were failed businessmen who had run into debt; a third stole cars and credit cards; the fourth stole hubcaps.

One of the four had stumbled on the Bruegel, but he’d had no idea that it was special, no inkling at first that here in his hands was the big ticket he and his mates had all been dreaming of. The painting is an odd one, quite unlike Bruegel’s famous, sprawling, colorful depictions of everyday life. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery is a small, somber work painted in grisaille, entirely in shades of gray. Christ and the other figures look almost like stone carvings. A layman might glance at the dark biblical scene and quickly pass by. “Our great fear during all those years,” recalled the director of the Courtauld, “was that whoever had it would get bored of the whole thing and chuck it into a dustbin.”

The four crooks rounded up an art expert to tell them whether the painting was worth anything. At this point some of the gang had yet to lay eyes on it. One of the four, a car dealer named Bobby Dee, took his first peek. “I picked it up to look at it and said, ‘You got to be joking!’ I was worried because I thought these people would think we were idiots. I thought this picture was nothing, just a wind-up.”

The art expert arrived. “Then this old bloke came in. He was blabbering on about something. He turned round to look at the picture and then he fainted. I thought, ‘Bleeding hell, it must be something proper.’ “

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