Art, greed, and stealth make for a lively tale of intrigue.
The journey of a Renaissance painting reveals secrets of the contemporary art world.
Art critic and documentary filmmaker Lewis (Horizons, Zones and Outer Spaces: The Art of John Loker, 2019, etc.) crafts a richly detailed mystery surrounding one striking 15th-century portrait—“a piece of junk, a thrift-store picture sold at a rock-bottom price”—bought by two dealers in 2005 for $1,175, sold for $80 million in 2013, and, in 2017, auctioned at Christie’s New York for $450 million, making it the world’s most expensive painting. The work is Salvator Mundi, depicting Christ, his hand raised in blessing, holding a glowing orb: Christ as the Savior of the World. The mystery is its creator. To prove that the artist was Leonardo da Vinci, the dealers spent years investigating the work’s provenance, a record of ownership that shows how it was identified, the esteem in which it was held, and its value through the years. They also consulted with da Vinci experts, art historians, and an esteemed restorer who took on the challenge of painstakingly bringing the relic back to life. The work of restoration proved central to the painting’s fame and value. “The restorer,” Lewis notes, “spends hours at a stretch in a closed-off world, peering through magnifying visors, engrossed in the most minuscule details of a painting.” With the Salvator Mundi, though, the restorer’s work broached a border “between conservation and invention.” Controversy over attribution raged, inflamed by concern over the extent of the restoration, experts’ evaluation of brushwork and style, and, not least, professional rivalries, academic ambitions, and financial interests. Even after London’s National Gallery placed it in a da Vinci exhibition, some believed it at most da Vinci–esque, perhaps emanating from his studio. As Lewis chronicles the quest to attribute the painting to da Vinci, he uncovers an astoundingly dysfunctional world of museums, galleries, auction houses, collectors—a Russian oligarch and a Saudi prince among them—and unscrupulous middlemen, a world plagued by mistrust, suspicion, and the irresistible lure of financial rewards.
Art, greed, and stealth make for a lively tale of intrigue.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984819-25-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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