I wasn’t always an art forger. I went to art school (an old-style academy), studied painting, drawing, color, even perspective and anatomy, and learned how to draw and paint just about anything. After school, I pursued an art career and was surprised by my success, even started to take it for granted—never a good idea.…
PART I: THE HEIST At 3:20 a.m. on October 16, 2012, the Trigion Security control center dispatched two guards to investigate an alarm trip at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. While Trigion supplied onsite guards for the art museum’s visiting hours, after closing, the museum made do with visits by roving security patrols. By the…
SoHo Sins by Richard Vine is an intriguing debut novel about the underworld of the New York art scene (now available in paperback!). Read David Cranmer's review of SoHo Sins by Richard Vine, and then make sure to sign in and comment below for a chance to win a paperback copy! “You can’t deal successfully…
Knoedler & Company began in 1846 as the Manhattan outpost of the French printmaker Goupil et Cie. It was America’s first storefront art gallery; it predated the Metropolitan Museum of Art by 24 years. During the Gilded Age, Knoedler moved from peddling inexpensive prints to dealing Old Master artworks to the likes of Vanderbilt, Morgan,…
A crowd gathered outside the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, on the morning of January 24, 2008. They weren’t museum junkies; they were federal agents raiding the place. By the end of the day, 500 FBI, IRS, and Customs agents had hit the Bowers and 12 other targets, including the Los Angeles County Museum…
Crime and the Art Market by Riah Pryor brings together the author’s direct experience from both fields to present an accessible, informative, and realistic overview of art crimes in today’s society. Art-related crime is a busy book genre these days. Most of these books are very specific—one case, one career, one theme—which isn’t necessarily a bad…
In December 2002, two burglars broke into the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They didn’t use helicopters or lasers or any of the stuff art thieves use in the movies; they climbed a fifteen-foot ladder to the roof and got into the second floor (European first floor), where the main display halls are. They…
The Scientist and the Forger by Dr. Jehane Ragai outlines the advanced forensic techniques being developed to help thwart art forgery. If you’ve watched CSI or any of the other TV forensic procedurals, you know that science has jumped into the crime-solving pool with both feet. Advances in DNA analysis, latent-print recovery, forensic botany, and…
What have you done, mother!? Is there a more iconic scene than the shower stabbing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)? Is there a more iconic art piece that Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreen prints? Seems only natural to combine the two and make the ultimate icon! Well, that’s just what UncleGertrudes has done. Measuring 12”…
Aryan Art? A bizarre lawsuit has been filed against the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The New York Post reports that 33-year-old Justin Renel Joseph is suing The Met for their “offensive aesthetic whitewashing” in several paintings depicting Jesus Christ as pale-skinned with blond hair. Joseph claims that this “Aryan” Jesus caused him “personal…
