Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft
There's nothing as tempting to a thief as a work of art, it would seem, but it wasn't always so. Although Houpt shows how stealing art has been a sport of rulers (notably Napoleon and Hitler) for centuries, he traces the current epidemic of art theft to the inflation of auction prices that began in 1958 and continues to this day. When houses like Sotheby's trumpet their sales records--$104 million for a Picasso!--what's a self-respecting art thief to do? In this brief and lively book, Houpt laments the transformation of art into an international commodity and sketches a series of quick portraits of famous latter-day art thieves and the intrepid detectives who try to catch them. In a few cases, Houpt has already been outpaced by events. Munch'sThe Scream, stolen from a Norwegian museum in 2004, was recently recovered, and the Picasso sales record was eclipsed this year by the sale of a Klimt (once looted by the Nazis) for a reported $135 million.Kevin NanceCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved