Museum of the Missing: The High Stakes of Art Crime

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University. She is the author of several books, including The
Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret
Laurence: The Long Journey Home.

In his foreword, Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register,
calls the trade in stolen art “a global problem” whose seriousness
the general public fails to recognize. Radcliffe argues that an
international database should be established to help recover stolen art
and to reduce its attractiveness to criminals. Currently, the art trade
remains unregulated. However, organizations such as the Art Loss
Register are raising global awareness of art theft and of ongoing
efforts to thwart it.

A three-page introduction justifies the book’s intriguing title and
introduces readers to the major individual losses that Boston’s
Gardner Museum has suffered. These include The Concert by Dutch artist
Johannes Vermeer and 12 other treasures including three Rembrandts. The
painting had been placed on a wide-backed chair upholstered in green
Victorian fabric. Today the empty chair presents a sad tableau. In the
Gardner Museum, all the empty frames testify to the losses of this
museum and stand as a metaphor for the tens of thousands of artworks
missing from galleries and private homes worldwide.

The five chapters that follow are all enriched by full-colour
photographs of famous paintings that have been stolen. Smaller
black-and-white photographs supplement the text, such as one of an
American soldier in 1945 inspecting treasures confiscated from Jewish
owners during World War II and uncovered in the Heilbron Salt Mines
after the end of the war. An appendix, “Gallery of Missing Art,” is
described by Houpt as “tinged with tragedy.” Some of the missing
works are priceless, since their values are so high that they have not
yet been determined. They include paintings by Henri Matisse, Pablo
Picasso, Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, and Leonardo Da Vinci.

In this painstakingly researched book, Houpt has done justice to his
complex subject.