Lost, Stolen or Shredded: Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature
(2013) is a collection of 15 incidences in history that detail the what, when,
where, how, and why a piece of culture has been compromised.
Gekoski commences in 1911 with the theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’
from the Louvre in Paris – painted between 1503-1505 and ‘the most famous
painting in the world.’ Why did more people visit the gallery to see the empty
space (where the painting had been) than had visited when it was hanging there?
Stolen on 21 August 1911, even writer Franz Kafka queued for hours to see the
empty space. When Italian picture framer, Vincenzo Peruggia, who stole the
artwork, tried to sell it two years later, he was promptly arrested.
Another story is set in New Zealand in 1997. Colin McCahon’s ‘Urewera Mural’
(1975) was a portrayal of ‘the mystery of man in the Urewera’ among the forest
community of the Tuhoe (People of the Mist) in the North Island. Stolen on 5
June 1997, patron-of-the-arts, Jenny Gibbs, negotiated its return over a year
later.
Graham Sutherland’s life-size 1954 portrait of British politician Sir
Winston Churchill was initially liked by Lady Churchill for its ‘truthfulness’
but later despised. Commissioned for Churchill’s 80th birthday, he said it made
him look ‘half-witted’ and his wife vowed ‘it would never see the light of
day.’ After he died in 1977, the family admitted that the painting was
destroyed at Lady Churchill’s request. Did she have the legal right to destroy
it?
Another interesting story is the loss of the jewelled-bound version of ‘The
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ (The Great Omar), which British bookbinder, Francis
Sangorski, encrusted with 1,051 precious stones in 1912. As it was being
shipped to its owner in America, it was lost with the sinking of the ship. The
ship was The Titanic.
Gekoski covers a missing James Joyce poem of 1891 (which he wrote at the
age of nine), the burning of two volumes of Lord Byron’s Memoirs on 17 May 1824
(‘the most famous sacrificial scene in literary history’), Franz Kafka’s
destroyed manuscripts, the missing library of musicologist Guido Adler, the
destruction of the library of Herculaneum in Pompei in AD 79 (due to the
eruption of the Vesuvius volcano), the looting of the National Museum of
Baghdad over time but specifically in 2003 (‘the death of history’), the lost
kingdom of Benin, forged documents, and a murder.
He does not include one of the biggest unsolved art heists in American
history – the theft of 13 paintings in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
on March 18, 1990. There is no conclusion to this story, which is probably the
reason for its exclusion. Degas, Flinck, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer – still
missing 26 years later!
Within each story, Gekoski is extremely liberal with his comments and opinions
as a rare book dealer – at times even being involved in the hunt for lost
literary treasures. He discusses at length the demise of written drafts, earlier
versions, rudimentary works, or unfinished pieces, showing the development of
an artist’s work, but states that ‘all that really matters is what the writer
finally chooses to publish.’ He concludes with a quote from Amin Maalouf’s ‘Leo
the African’ in which Astaghfirullah says: ‘let us celebrate loss, so that
presence is to have meaning.’
The style is easy-to-read, as if he is speaking to an audience. Art and
literature lovers will find something of interest in these 15 stories.
MARTINA NICOLLS is the author of:-
The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends
(2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan
Curse (2009).
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