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A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
by Edward DolnickThe little-known world of art theft is compellingly portrayed in Dolnick's account of the 1994 theft and recovery of Edvard Munch's iconic painting The Scream.
In the predawn gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the
National Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world's most famous
paintings, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and fled with their $72
million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter
Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning. Baffled and humiliated,
the Norwegian police called on the world's greatest art detective, a
half-English, half-American undercover cop named Charley Hill.
In this rollicking narrative, Edward Dolnick takes us inside the
art underworld. The trail leads high and low, and the cast ranges from
titled aristocrats to thick-necked thugs. Lord Bath, resplendent in ponytail
and velvet jacket, presides over a 9,000-acre estate. David Duddin, a
300-pound fence who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, spins exuberant
tales of his misdeeds. We meet Munch, too, a haunted misfit who spends his
evenings drinking in the Black Piglet Café and his nights feverishly trying
to capture in paint the visions in his head. The most compelling character
of all is Charley Hill, an ex-soldier, a would-be priest, and a complicated
mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm. The hunt for The Scream
will either cap his career and rescue one of the world's best-known
paintings or end in a fiasco that will dog him forever.
Edvard Munch, Norway's most popular artist, died in 1944, aged 81. He was a painter, lithographer, etcher and wood engraver, most famous for his paintings of The Scream. . He created five different variations of The Scream (4 paintings and one lithograph) which is fortunate as the Norwegians do seem to have a habit of losing them. In 1994 one was stolen from Oslo's National Gallery, and then in 2004 another version was stolen from the Munch Museum (a tempura on cardboard version) along with Munch's Madonna....
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