[CPProt.net] Book review: A lesson on how (not) to steal art

[MSN CPPnet]

A lesson on how (not) to steal art
  
By David Kirby
Special Correspondent

June 5, 2005

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing
Masterpiece. Edward Dolnick. HarperCollins. $25.95. 288 pp.

It's hard to imagine a story, real or fictional, that contains more
fundamental human qualities than this one: greed, impulsiveness, stupidity
(on the part of thieves); lack of foresight, tightfistedness, boneheaded
decision-making (museum directors); cunning, imagination, patience (the
police). Throw in the element of luck and the fact that the crimes involve
the theft not of cash or diamonds but fragile, one-of-a-kind paintings, some
hundreds of years old, and you have a book you'll hang onto more tightly
than some museums do their objets d'art.

The last sentence refers to plural crimes because the 1994 theft of Edvard
Munch's The Scream is too slight a story to justify an entire book:
boneheaded museum officials leave painting where anyone can grab it, stupid
thieves snatch same, patient cop gets it back. So Dolnick uses the Scream
story as a textbook example of art theft and retrieval and then writes the
textbook around it. Depending on which category you fall into, The Rescue
Artist will tell you everything you need to know to be a crook, curator, or
cop. 

The facts of the Scream theft are these: at 6:29 a.m. on Feb. 12, 1994, two
men lean a ladder against the wall of Norway's National Gallery in Oslo,
smash a second-story window, snip the wire that holds the Munch painting to
the wall, and sail it down the ladder the way a parent would send a kid down
a sliding board. The theft could be seen on the museum's security monitors,
but the guard was tending to paper work, allowing the thieves to make off
with a $72 million masterpiece in less than a minute.

Enter Charley Hill, an undercover member of Scotland Yard's Art Squad on
loan to the Norwegians and a master of his trade. Deeply knowledgeable about
art, Hill himself listed for Dolnick the unattractive character traits
("arrogance, bullying, self-importance") that enabled him to play a
loud-talking American wheeler-dealer eager to buy a hot painting.
Ultimately, though, it's Hill's patience that gets the painting back. In
addition to being stupid and greedy, art thieves are not especially polite,
and Hill is stood up frequently before he meets the guy who knows the guy
who introduces the guy who got the painting from the guys who stole it.

Over time, an incredible amount of art has gone missing, and most of it
stays that way; 551 Picassos, 43 van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts, and 209 Renoirs
are out there somewhere. But not in the collection of some Dr. No figure:
thieves persuade themselves that a billionaire collector will snap up a hot
Cézanne at a fraction of its price, but only because they've been watching
too many James Bond movies. The plutocrat cackling in a basement gallery
stuffed with stolen masterpieces is a figment of Hollywood's imagination
(rich people like to show off their possessions, not hide them). 

The lessons of The Rescue Artist are these: if you're a crook, don't steal
art, because nobody wants it. If you're a curator, for heaven's sake, put
some bars on the windows, will you? Nobody wants that masterpiece, but
stupid crooks are going to grab it anyway. And if you're a cop on the Art
Squad, think about taking up Buddhism or some other practice that cultivates
calm: if the latest theft of The Scream is any indication, crooks and
curators are going to be up to their old tricks for a long time to come, and
you're going to need all the patience you can muster. 

Poet David Kirby lives in Tallahassee, where he teaches English at Florida
State University. His latest collection is The Ha-Ha.