A new book by Noah Charney shows the precarious nature of creative output
The Museum of Lost Art. By Noah Charney. Phaidon; 295 pages; $35 and £19.95
IT COULD be the plot of a Hollywood action film. On an ice-cold day in Stockholm, two cars suddenly burst into flames in the street. Police swarm to what seems to be a terrorist attack as a car speeds up to the Swedish National Museum, a grand building that fronts onto the city’s bay. Three gun-toting men jump out and sprint inside. Shouting threats through their balaclavas, they force visitors to lie down. They run through the gallery, grabbing paintings off the wall. With a haul that includes two Renoirs and a Rembrandt, they make their getaway on a speedboat, moored just outside. Five years later, in an elaborate heist, an FBI agent poses as a collector looking to snare a rarity in Copenhagen, and Rembrandt’s “Self-Portrait” is recovered.
Art theft is not always as cinematic as this real-life tale. But it is surprisingly common. In a new book Noah Charney, an art historian, cites American Department of Justice figures ranking art crime as the country’s third-highest-grossing criminal trade. In Italy roughly 30,000 artworks are reported stolen annually. And in 2013 police in Britain reckoned that stolen art brought criminals a total of more than £300m ($405m) per year.
But this is not the only way art can go missing. Mr Charney catalogues what he calls the “negative space history of art” filled with “more masterpieces than all of the world’s museums combined”. For Mr Charney, the art that endures is not always the art that is the best. “Our understanding of art is skewed, inevitably, towards works that can be seen,” he writes. “Numberless dangers…can befall a work of art that is often as brittle as piece of paper.” His encyclopaedic and engaging book is structured around those different dangers, the many different ways art is lost (and sometimes is later found).
Take war, for instance. The book recounts how 15,000 objects disappeared from the National Museum in Baghdad during the Iraq war in 2003, and how Napoleon’s 1792 Modena armistice was the first treaty in modern times to demand art be handed over in exchange for a ceasefire. In a chapter on vandalism and iconoclasm he describes how the Taliban obliterated two huge 4th-century Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan, in 2001.
These are the obvious sorts of culprits, but the book also shows how artists themselves are just as likely to destroy something they’ve made. Michelangelo burned most of his preparatory drawings and sketches. In 16th-century Italy artists didn’t want anyone to know how hard they worked to create their masterpieces. True genius was defined by a quality of sprezzatura, creating brilliant work without any toil. He threw away all evidence of struggle so that, as Giorgio Vasari, a contemporary and famed chronicler of Renaissance artists’ lives, wrote, “he might not appear less than perfect.”
Unsurprisingly, fire features in other places throughout Mr Charney’s book. In 1734 a huge blaze at the Alcázar palace in Madrid turned hundreds of works to ash, including many by Velázquez, Rubens and Titian. Three centuries later, in 2004, a storage warehouse in east London burnt down, incinerating Charles Saatchi’s £50m trove of contemporary art by artists including Damien Hirst, Paula Rego and Chris Ofili.
Tracey Emin’s “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995” was one of the works destroyed in the fire. A blue tent covered in 102 patchwork squares that chronicle the names of all the people she’d ever shared a bed with, the highly flammable synthetic fabric never stood a chance. At the time snarky critics barked things like “didn't millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?" and “you’d have thought that, with the will and the funding, many of these works were perfectly replaceable.” To that end, the Saatchi Gallery allegedly offered Ms Emin £1m to recreate the work. She turned it down: “My work is very personal, which people know, so I can’t create that emotion again—it’s impossible.”
There are also artists who create works never meant to last, instead intended to live on in the photographs or films that document them. Mr Charney devotes space to ephemeral pieces like Jean Tinguely’s “Study for an End of the World”; an 8.2-metre-high contraption he constructed with the help of Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1960s. Designed to destroy itself automatically, the work exploded in front of 250 spectators in the Nevada Desert: a flaming and transfixing mess of intentionally faulty mechanics.
Half a century later, in another intentionally destroyed piece, Heather Benning, a Canadian artist, spent 18 months building a life-sized dollhouse called “The Dollhouse”. A surreal stage-like creation with one brick wall replaced with plexiglass, it was a magnified vision of a childhood toy. A picture-perfect scene of a serene but eerily empty household, it looked frozen in time like a mausoleum.
When the building’s foundations finally became unstable, Ms Benning set fire to her creation. This was always her plan. She took photographs as the fire blazed (pictured), making a new work from the old. The images lay bare the frailty of the dollhouse she had built, and are a fitting metaphor for art’s inherent fragility.
“The Museum of Lost Art” carefully documents how the violence and vagaries of war, looting, accidents, vandalism and natural disasters will always wreak havoc on art—and why the protection of works against these kinds of dangers is vital. But for some artists like Tinguely and Ms Benning, the destruction itself is where creation can also be found.