Art & Crime

In this engrossing account, Koldehoff and Timm (False Pictures, Real Money) survey the link between art and crime, starting with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and including such recent sensational cases as the 2017 theft of a 220-lb. Canadian gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum. The authors make the case that in today’s unregulated art world, many crimes are committed for laundering drug money or hiding stolen assets. (To this day, the FBI suspects the Mafia was behind the unsolved 1990 robbery of 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.) While most readers know about the art stolen by the Nazis during WWII, it will be news to many that forgeries of Hitler’s own paintings, most of them fake according to one expert, remain a lucrative business. One chapter, “The Fakes President,” describes how President Trump siphoned funds from his charitable fund to buy art, including a portrait of himself. The authors also cover how, when Trump had the Bonwit Teller building demolished to build Trump Tower, he reneged on his promise to preserve the building’s Art Deco friezes and donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—which was technically not a crime. Assured prose bolsters these fascinating tales. True crime fans and aficionados of culture will appreciate this dive into the dark side of the art world. (Dec.)