[CPProt.net] Book review: Traveling a Bumpy Road to Recover Stolen Art

[MSN CPPnet]

Traveling a Bumpy Road to Recover Stolen Art
By JANET MASLIN 

June 30, 2005

On the first day of the 1994 Olympic Games in Lillehammer, Norway, thieves
in Oslo upstaged the main event. They climbed a ladder, used a hammer to
smash a window, entered Norway's National Gallery and made off with a
painting so famous it is known even to teenage horror movie fans: "The
Scream." They left behind a note reading "Thanks for the poor security." 

The theft of Edvard Munch's much-mimicked masterpiece (the Halloween mask
favorite) is the basis for "The Rescue Artist," a nonfiction half-book by
Edward Dolnick. But even allowing for the fact that "The Scream" was stolen
all over again in 2004 (in a slightly different version; there are four),
the book's account of its heist history is insubstantial. 

Mr. Dolnick must take this story - essentially the basis for a long magazine
article - and spread it out in as many different directions as possible. He
explores the eccentric history of art theft. He describes a wide range of
great paintings and brazen crooks. He offers all too brief insights into the
character of Munch, whose other work includes paintings entitled "Hatred,"
"Anxiety" and "Despair." Munch's habit of working while his radio hissed
static, not to mention his beating recalcitrant pictures with a horsewhip,
are proclivities mentioned briefly but worth a closer look.

Mr. Dolnick is also on the hunt for something else: a hero. He opts for a
conventionally dramatic approach in trying to hang "The Rescue Artist" upon
the cleverness of Charley Hill, a half-American, half-British undercover cop
involved in the "Scream" hunt and other art theft cases. Since "The Rescue
Artist" includes not only Rembrandt, Vermeer and Goya reproductions but also
a photograph of Mr. Hill's grandfather in front of an Oklahoma log cabin,
it's visibly evident that the detective takes up a lot of the book's
attention.

"If Prince Valiant and Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe shared custody of a
single body, the amalgam might resemble Charley Hill," Mr. Dolnick writes
wishfully. It is the book's lack of a true center that forces him to draw
Charley in these hyperbolic terms. "He is a leading man," maintains Mr.
Dolnick - although the colorful, Vermeer-stealing Martin Cahill, nicknamed
"The General" and central to John Boorman's top-flight film by that name, is
the best art-heist participant in recent memory. Whatever Mr. Hill's renown
may be, he is not well served by the book's breathless assessments of his
gifts.

As he conveys the results of informative but flat-footed research, Mr.
Dolnick cannot keep "The Rescue Artist" from drifting. No wonder: art
thieves work in such different ways that their stories have little in
common. Not even a love of great painting unites them. For every Adam Worth,
the Victorian thief cited as a model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor
Moriarty, who kept a stolen Gainsborough with him for 25 years, there is a
Stéphane Breitweiser. After this French waiter robbed 179 small museums, his
mother turned oil paintings into kitchen garbage to hide evidence of her
son's crimes.

Since many of Mr. Dolnick's readers will already be familiar with these
high-profile cases, he does what he can to put them in new perspective. And
he measures the gap between real and romantic versions of these stories.
While the myth of the dashing thief is easily promulgated, he says, not many
of them have great personal flair, let alone ingenious tactics. Sometimes
it's the thieves' very ineptitude that makes them interesting; sometimes
news coverage of the crimes is equally bumbling. There have been examples -
for instance, when the BBC covered the theft of Vermeer's "Guitar Player" in
1974 - when even paying the small fee for using a color slide of the stolen
picture was too much trouble for news organizations.

Behind this kind of journalistic indifference lies a deeper antipathy, the
author says: "Ordinarily, the police are quick to sympathize with crime
victims. But a little old lady who has been knocked on the head is an
entirely different creature from Lord Pifflepuffle, whose estate has a
hundred rooms and whose grounds stretch a thousand acres, and who has lost a
painting purchased by his great-grandfather a century ago." Compound that
with Lord Pifflepuffle's reluctance to pay for a burglar alarm when he must
also shoulder the expense of a two-acre slate roof, Mr. Dolnick writes, and
the crime is easy. Security can be so lax that the art thief needn't do much
more than show up. 

In investigating these crimes, Mr. Hill, who worked for Scotland Yard but
has since become a freelancer, has faced challenges of varying difficulty.
The book describes an assortment of sting operations that he has clearly
enjoyed. "I matched him tassel for tassel," Mr. Hill says, about trying to
con a "South Dublin businessman" with flashy clothes and a mysterious
background. The "Scream" investigation led him to impersonate a crass
American representative from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, willing to
ransom "The Scream" quietly in exchange for the chance to put it on display.

Had "The Rescue Artist" been able to read more into this particular gambit
and follow it more colorfully, it would surely have been more exciting. As
it is, the reader must take the word of Peter Scott, a British cat burglar,
for what the thrill of art thievery is like: "a sexual, antisocial
excitement unobtainable by other means."