Art heist tale draws on a broad canvas

The Rescue Artist

A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece

Edward Dolnick

HarperCollins: 270 pages; $25.95

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In the frigid predawn of Feb. 12, 1994 -- the first day of the Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway -- two men propped a ladder against the front of the National Gallery in Oslo and climbed to a second-story window, smashing it with a hammer. An alarm went off, but the lone guard, who glanced at the security monitors while doing paperwork in the museum’s basement, missed the one that showed the thieves. One crook proceeded to snip the single wire that held Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on a wall within a yard from the broken window. He then slid Munch’s most famous painting, valued at about $70 million, down the ladder to his companion waiting below.

In “The Rescue Artist,” an intermittently riveting and choppy book about art theft, Edward Dolnick uses the story of what happened to Munch’s rawest Expressionist work “as the thread we follow through the labyrinth” of the art underworld. But by repeatedly interrupting his narrative with digressions about other art thefts, he exacerbates rather than clarifies the labyrinthine qualities of his subject.

Dolnick’s book is peppered with stories about Irish gangsters who preyed on masterpieces by Vermeer, Goya and Rubens, among others, at Russborough House, an isolated 100-room mansion outside Dublin; about the Victorian thief Adam Worth, the model for Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty, who kept Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Lady Georgiana Spencer hidden, for his eyes only, for 25 years; about an Italian who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911 to return it to Italy; and about the French waiter whose mother chopped up a painting by Lucas Cranach and 60 other oils and threw them out with her kitchen garbage after her son’s arrest.

Much of this ancillary material is fascinating, but “The Rescue Artist” runs into trouble when Dolnick strains to make Charley Hill, a temperamental half-English, half-American undercover detective in the art recovery unit of Scotland Yard, the wire on which he hangs his book. Dolnick marshals colorful prose to describe his eponymous rescue artist’s “zigzag life” as a former Fulbright scholar, Vietnam veteran and beat cop whose “biography sounds as if a careless clerk had stapled together pages from several different resumes.” It is not enough, however, to make up for the zigzag structure of his book. Waiting for him to get on with his tale of “The Scream,” the reader’s patience eventually snaps.

We do learn that only 10% of stolen art is ever recovered and that many paintings are stolen repeatedly. Shortly after Dolnick completed his manuscript in August, one of three other versions of “The Scream” was seized at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo -- and is still missing. That museum was reopened last month after a 10-month, $5.2-million security overhaul that some complain has turned it into “Fortress Munch.”

Dolnick writes that a “Museum of the Missing would fill endless galleries; the collection of paintings and drawings would include 551 Picassos, 43 van Goghs, 174 Rembrandts, and 209 Renoirs.” And as values have risen, so have thefts. Most art is woefully underinsured; both private owners and museums reason that works of art are irreplaceable anyway. “The lone bit of good news,” Dolnick comments, “is that the better the painting, the better the odds it will someday be found” -- because of the difficulty of selling well-known masterpieces.

The biggest art heist in modern times was of 12 paintings and drawings valued at $300 million from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. Dolnick dubs this “the holy grail” of art crime. None have been recovered.

Strewn throughout Dolnick’s book are tales of Hill’s earlier art recoveries, more than $100 million worth in 20 years. Hill is now a freelance detective-for-hire who no longer does undercover work. But when he joined “The Scream” team, his undercover guise was a curator for the Getty Museum, which “spent money like a lottery winner on a binge ... a kind of ATM to the art world.”

We also learn that art detectives, including Hill, are more concerned with recovering stolen masterpieces than with catching crooks, whereas police in general do not consider missing art a priority. Even when detectives do nab art thieves, prison sentences are shockingly short.

At the heart of “The Rescue Artist” is a compelling detective story, the makings of an excellent magazine article. But in his eagerness to create a wall-size mural out of a work better suited to a small frame, Dolnick dilutes his story’s impact considerably.

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Heller McAlpin is a regular contributor to Book Review and other publications.