The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft - Ulrich Boser

From the opening pages, when two thieves dressed as policemen steal $500 million worth of art from a Boston museum, The Gardner Heist (HarperCollins, $14.99) speeds along like fiction. What follows is journalist Ulrich Boser’s precise, fascinating unraveling of the greatest art-crime in history and the obsessive investigations that followed. Boser illuminates the shadowy black markets that swallowed the paintings. He also shares the quirky history of the Gardner Museum itself. We meet its eccentric founder, the 19th-century heiress Isabella Stewart Gardner, along with the many art detectives, underworld denizens, and aficianados whose lives have been warped by the theft. The Gardner Heist is at once a page-turning mystery and a poignant meditation on the seductive, sometimes destructive, power of art.

The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World's Largest Unsolved Art Theft By Ulrich Boser Cover Image
$15.99
ISBN: 9780061451843
Availability: Not On Our Shelves—Ships in 1-5 Days
Published: Harper Paperbacks - March 16th, 2010

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury, Aly Sujo

John Drewe was a very smart man, but he wasn’t a nuclear physicist, a professor, or an international armaments consultant. He wasn’t even John Drewe. But he had something of a Midas touch, turning everything into fool’s gold. His own Provenance (Penguin, $16) was as phony as that of the paintings he passed off as original Giacomettis and Dubuffets. Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo reconstruct the fascinating story of how Drewe, aka John Cockett, aka Rickard Cockcraft, manipulated a talented but unexceptional--and broke--artist into creating works in the style of great painters, and how through the 1990s he charmed and duped art dealers, archivists, curators, collectors, and a world of art experts. The thriller pace, the amazing feats of a criminal mind, the tour of galleries and studios, and that nagging question of what is real make this book hard to put down.

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art By Laney Salisbury, Aly Sujo Cover Image
$20.00
ISBN: 9780143117407
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Penguin Books - May 25th, 2010