The Last Judgement - Book Review

The Last Judgement
by Iain Pers
originally published by Victor Gollancz 1993
paperback published by Harper Collins 2001

Iain Pears is an English journalist and an art historian. He has written a number of novels starring Jonathan Argyll (an art dealer), most of which I have read. But I was pleased to find this novel which I had not read yet. So I read this for the Art History challenge.



The last Judgement is a painting by Jean Floret called the Death of Socrates. (He is the one who was forced to eat hemlock). It was one of a series of 4 paintings all shoing the last judgements of Alexander, Solomon and Jesus. (in reality there is a death of socrates painting but it is by Jacques Louis David and the other 3 paintings do not exist)

Jonathan is asked by a dealer in Paris to take this painting to Rome and deliver it to its new owner. When Jonathan arrives at the new owners place, the owner is delighted to get the painting, looks it over and then becomes disappointed saying that he no longer wants the painting. Jonathan takes it home and when he goes back the next day to ask some questions, he finds that the owner is now dead.

The owners name was Muller, a citizen of Canada born in France but raised in Argentina before immigrating to Canada. He had a secret - he was adopted and when he was 10 years old, he found out that his real father had been a hero in France during WW2. After Muller left school, he began his hunt to find his real father.

Mullers killer was traced to Switzerland. His name was Ellman and in his apartment (Jonathans partner) Flavia de Stanio found records that indicated that Ellman was receiving 5000 every months. Meanwhile Jonatahn went to paris to ask dome serious questions of the police and ifnd out who the real owner of the painting was. He is given a name - Jean Xavier Marie Rouxel - a french hero in the reisistance during WW2, who was due to receive a top french award later that month.

It turns out that Mullers mother was an english woman married to a german based in france during WW2. She was having an affair with Jean Rouxel and she gave birth to his child. She gave the child up for adoption and never told Jean he was a father. Her german husband (Hartung) knew that the child was not his. The wife eventually became a member of the resistance against Hartungs wishes.

Jean was the leader of a resistance cell and every time they tried to commit an action against the germans, the germans would show up there and prevent it. Someone in that group was a traitor.

After the war ended some of the group were interrogated by the germans, some were executed and some were released. Proof of the story was inserted into a painting.

The story of the resistance cell that were traitors only came out some 40 years later when muller started looking for his father. He was looking for Hartung. He was killed before he discovered that the war hero Jean Rouxel was his real father.

As for the painting - the last judgement, Rouxel claimed it as his own. It turned out that he had another painting in the same series. This second painting had the proof.

This was a most unusual art history book to read - because it was not all about the painting - no forgeries, no secrets. The secret was what happend in WW2. The painting was not involved except to hold the proof.

I am not fond of WW2 stories but I did read this to the end.

Challenges for 2010

Of all the challenges I have signed up for, in the last 3 years since I started this blog, I have only completed TWO that I know of. The Canadian Books challenge and the In Their Shoes Challenge.

So this year (or next year 2010) I am signing up for 4 challenges.

The First Challenge is the Art History Challenge as I love reading about Art History

This year there will be four levels of participation in the Art History Challenge:

Curious - Read at least 3 books about art, either fiction or non-fiction.
Fascinated - Read at least 6 books about art, either fiction or non-fiction.
Enamored- Read at least 9 books about art, either fiction or non-fiction.
Utterly enchanted - Read at least 12 books about art, either fiction or non-fiction.

I dont know yet which of these levels I will do.



The Second Challenge is my own Great Books Challenge for 2010. This challenge has 2 levels of participation - Easy and Hard
Easy - you read 6 authors from my Great Books list
Hard - you read 12 books from my Great Books list



The Third Challenge is the Relic Novels Challenge Where I must read novels about relic hunting. One example would be Indiana Jones.

There are three levels to this challenge.
Initiate Hunter : Read at least 6 relic novels
In-training Hunter: Read at least 12 relic novels
Master Hunter: Read at least 18 relic novels





The Fourth Challenge is the Bibliophilic Challenge - similar to the Bibliography challenge I hosted a couple of years ago. You have to read books about books.

This challenge has 3 levels -

Bookworm: Read three books
Litlover: Read six books
Bibliomaniac: Read twelve books


For this challenge I am going to read Nicholas Basbanes’ Trilogy – A Gentle Madness, Patience & Fortitude and A Splendour of Letters. At least that is the plan.

I will do my best to compete all 4 challenges in 2010.

And for those of you who wonder where all these challenges come from - they come from the Novel Challenge Yahoo Group. And these are just the up coming challenges for 2010.

Making the Mummies Dance - Book Review

Making the Mummies Dance
by Thomas Hoving
Simon & Schuster 1993

I have been fascinated by Thomas Hoving ever since I read his book King of the Confessors back in the 1980s. That book was totally responsible for my becoming interested in Art History. I have always loved research as well as books, and Art history is a mixture of Research and Bibliography.


Anyway, for many years I have been looking for Hoving's biography of his time as director of the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. When he was chasing the Bury St Edmunds Cross (the subject of the King of the Confessors) Hoving was an asssistant curator at the Cloisters - the Medieval section of the Met museum, located in a different part of Manhattan from the main museum building.

Finally after more than 20 years of searching, I found a copy of Hoving's biography.

Hoving was Director of the Museum from 1967 to 1977. He left when he started getting bored. Hoving was directly responsible for bringing the large exhibitions to the museums and making them part of museum life.

If you really want to know what life is like in a museum, then this is the book to read. Hoving writes about dealing with the board of trustees, and with other museum directors as well as with his staff. He wrotes about how he seemed to never be able to hire good staff. In one department, he had to hire a new department director every year until after 6 years, he finally found the right person - Philippe de Montebello. Montebello went on to become Director of the Met Museum after Hoving left.

In this book, we learn all in the inside stories of various exhibitions Hoving was responsible for, including his last and biggest one - King Tut. He even wrote a book about Tutankhamen.

As director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a decade, Thomas Hoving brought art to a new level of public awareness by pioneering such blockbuster shows as the King Tut exhibit. Early in his career, Hoving was introduced to the "curator's game." Each week, he and his contemporaries met to examine details of larger museum masterpieces. Whoever correctly identified the detail in context won free coffee: the losers paid. Hoving has sicen transforms this game into a book called Masterpieces. This book I have yet to find.

After Hoving left the Museum, he worked as an art consultant for a few years, and then he was editor of Connoisseur Magazine from 1981 to 1991. I read a few issues that I found in the Library. I found this to be a very interesting magazine. I was disappointed when they disappeared from the library shelves.

Hoving has written a number of books on art related subjects including forgeries, Grant Wood, Andrew Wyeth, Tutankhamen, and he also wrote the text for Art For Dummies book in the "...For Dummies" series.

I read this book for the Art History Challenge.

Waiting for Hannah - Book Review

Waiting for Hannah
By Dave Clarke
Hologram Publishing 2008
Website
Another Blog Review

This novel is about a painting. The past when the painting was created, and the present when the painting was found. The artist who painted it, was Marc Chagall.

The sitter who sat for it was a young Jewish woman who was destined to do what her father said and marry whom her father chose. She was not allowed to live her own life or make her own decisions. BUT that was the culture in Europe in the early 1900s before the first world war.

Hannah Kessler is the daughter of Jacob Kessler, a rich jewish man who owns and runs an Insurance company. Hannah has been raised to take her fathers place and learn the business of Insurance. She is on ger way to Prague to attend Insurance school. BUT she has dreams of growing and selling flowers. while the specific careers were not named, her dreams did describe a florist and a landscape artist. Hannah's father just kept tekling her that she ciould not make a living selling flowers. NOONE will buy them, he said. Hannah and her father board to train to Prague.

She meets Marc Chagall on thr train to Prague. Marc is a young jewish painter from back east. He is on his way to Paris to study painting.

In prague the two teenegrs meet whenever they can. They are good kids and do not get up to nay hanky panky. The closest they come is when Hannah asks Marc to paint her in the nude and covered with flowers.

Wrapped around this story is a modern day story of Kate McBride who found the painting in the attic of her mothers home, and it is the story of how she tries to find the family of the young girl in the painting.

The painting concerned is most likely not a real painting. (see cover picture)
After all this is a novel. And I cannot find it on any art sides online despite several hours of looking.

I did not see any comparison to the story of the movie Titanic while I was reading it - see blog review link above.

I enjoyed this novel purely for the art and for the fictionalised story of Marc Chagall's early life. I also read this book for the Art History challenge.

New Art History Challenge

I have just discovered a new Art History Challenge. I absolutely LOVE Art History. There are 4 gorgeous and lovely buttons you can use. I have uploaded two of them. I do plan on doing this challenge in 2009.








Do you love art? Do you love reading about art? Join The Art History Reading Challenge and challenge yourself to read at least 6 books about art in 2009. These can be either fiction or nonfiction, and can span every genre from historical fiction to graphic novel.

And I have also discovered the website of Karen Essex. I have never heard of her before, although she appears to have written some excellent historial novels. I must find them - maybe even read Leonardo Swans for this challenge.

Art Thief - Book Review

Art Thief
by Noah Charney
published by Atria - September 2007
Amazon website
Video You Tube (3 minutes)

I LOVE Art History. I love reading books about Art, Stolen art, Art crimes and Art auctions.



The premise of the novel is that three paintings are stolen from 3 different countries at (more or less) the same time. A Caravaggio disappears from a church in Italy. One Malevich disappears from the Malevich Society in Paris and another Malevich is stolen from the National Gallery in London. Also a small unnamed Suprematist painting disappears from a collector's house in London. All of these thefts are related somehow.

The key characters in this book are the French police, in the form of Jean-Jacques Bizot, as well as Genevieve Delaloche, the Director of the Malevich society in Paris and Elizabeth van der Mier, Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in London. Other major characters are Gabriel Coffin (an American art professor presently teaching at Cambridge University), and lastly Profesor Barrow.

There is a lot of art history done in the form of lectures by Barrow and Coffin, but I enjoyed them very much. Barrow does art history and iconography. Coffin does art crime and profiling.

One very detailed and interesting lecture was about the iconography of The Marriage Contract by Jan Van Eyck. Another lecture was about oil paints and how to tell which families (who comissioneed the painting) were rich and who were poor. The answer is lapis lazuli.I apologise for going on about the details, but I do love art.


Back to the novel. Do these three missing paintings ever turn up? Well...Yes and No. It turns out that two of the main characters were involved in the thefts. But the author did a very good job of not giving things away until the very last moment. The twist was totally unexpected - by me anyway.

The Amazon reviews say that this book is written very chunkily. If that means there is a lot of long boring parts done in the forms of spoken lectures, well yes of course there is. The author is an art historian himself, educated at Cambridge. Of course he wants to show off his knowledge. IMO only a person who really likes Art History would enjoy this novel. I certainly did.

Theft of the Master - Book Review

Theft of the Master
By Edwin Alexander
Garev Publishing
February 2008
Author Website

Most of my regular readers will know that I love art history. And I might have mentioned that I am fascinated with stories of the numerous art pieces that were stolen and hidden by the Nazi's during World War two. So that is why I chose to read this novel.


This novel opens in Poland in 1493 where German born Veit Stoss works as a sculptor. He made sculptures amd altars for the church. The novel begins when he is commissioned to make a sculpture of Christ sitting down and preaching as it says in John chapter 8v2. This sculpture was later installed in the Church of the Holy Ghost, in Tallinn, Estonia.

The novel then moves to the recent past - 1992. In Half Moon Bay (on the west side of the peninsula, across from San Mateo in Califonia) a young student arranges a party with her godfather for the July 4th celebrations. During the party the young woman, Megan, disappears. Her body is later found in the surf. The authorities call it a tragic drowning, but Megan's parents refuse to accept the accidental drowning verdict. So they hire a private detective (Al Hershey) to investigate.

The rest of the novel follows Al around the world searching for Megan's killer. And yes, Megan's murder is connected to the sculpture in Tallin that was stolen by the Nazis during World War 2. I started reading this book at 9pm. I could not put it down, and stayed up past 1 o'clock to finish it. An excellent novel.

The Madonnas of Leningrad - Book Review

The Madonnas of Leningrad
By Debra Dean
Published by William Morrow 2006
Paperback from Harper Perennial 2007

This is a beautiful story, about Marina, an elderly Russian woman who, in the 21st century is slowly forgetting her family, due to the ravages of Alzheimers. In her mind, Marina keeps returning to the Seige of Leningrad in the Second World War, some sixty years previously.


During the seige, Marina was a tour guide at the famous Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. During the seige, the museum employees are charged with removing the artworks from their frames, and being packed away and then sent to a safe place. After they were removed to safety, the employees are hidden in the Museum basement along with their families, where they survive that first terrible winter of the seige. (winter of 1941).

Marina keeps herself sane by walking through the Museum rooms and creating a memory picture in her head. She tries to remember the details of every picture in every frame. It is a lot of mental work, but somehow Marina knows it will help her survival.

The author does an excellent job of describing what it is like to live with Alzheimers - her grandparents both suffered from it. She also did a lot of research about the Hermitage Museum, and the artworks they hold. In fact Debra was not able to visit the Museum until after the book was published.

Marina knew lots of artists names - Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Gainsborough, etc. I personally love art, and art history, which is why I purchased this book.

I am writing this at my brother-in-laws house, and will upload some pictures on Xmas day.

Mystery Books Challenge Book Review

I don't normally read Jeffrey Archer, but I can never resist an Art History Mystery. So when I found False Impression on a sale table on Saturday, I grabbed it for 50 cents. Then I stayed up until 3am Sunday morning because I could not put it down. So this is the first Book in my Mystery Challenge.

The Blurb and the back cover asks questions like

Why was an elegant lady brutally murdered the night before 9/11?
Why was a successful New York banker not surprised to receive a woman's left ear in the morning mail?
Why did a top Manhattan lawyer work only for one client, but never charge a fee?
Why did a young woman with a bright career steal a priceless Van Gogh painting?
Why was an Olympic gymnast paid a million dollars an assigment when she didn't have a bank account?
Why was an honors graduate working as a temporary secretary after inheriting a fortune?
Why was an English Countess ready to kill the banker, the lawyer, and the gymnast even if it meant spending the rest of her life in jail?
Why was a Japanese steel magnate happy to hand over $50 million to a woman he had only met once?
Why was a senior FBI agent trying to work out the connection between these eight apparently innocent individuals?

Let me see if I can answer these questions.

The FBI agent has 3 unsolved murders - all with their throats slit and their art collections recovered by the New York banker to cover their debts. The elegant lady becomes the 4th victim.

The english countess and the elegant lady were related which is why she wants to kill the banker, the lawyer and the gymnast. Actually I dont recall that she even knew the lawyer's name.

The FBI agent thinks the brilliant young women with a promising career who stole the Van Gogh is the murderer, so he puts surveillance on her. He thinks she is in league with the banker. After all she is an Art History professional with a Ph.D. And she and the banker both come from the same East European country.

The honors graduate working as a temporary secretary - well she was the surprise twist. We dont discover her story and how she ties into all this until the very last chapter.

The Japanese magnate - like all art collectors - he's willing to pay $50 million for a "stolen painting", once he is told of the reason for the sale.

The Olympic Gymnast? She also comes from the same East European Country and she uses her gymnastics to escape from a locked room. No bank account means no way to be traced - supposedly.

And by the way, the painting was never stolen. The banker just wants what he claims is his property in order to recover his debt. The english countess says the banker is a swindler and refuses to give up without a fight. The art historian just does a bit of switch & bait to fool the banker and get justice for the countess after the elegant lady was murdered.

And I think I'll leave it at that. You got to read the book to find the answers. But it really is a riveting story. Like I said, I stayed up until 3am reading it.

One last thing - the elegant lady was murdered the day before 9/11. The banker, the lawyer and the art historian are all in New York and were in the North Tower when it was hit. The description of walking down over 90 levels of stairway is very nicely detailed and really makes you feel like you were there. Then the running to escape the dust & ash cloud when the first tower went down is also riveting.

I was sitting at my doctors office on the morning of 9/11 waiting for a diagnostic test. I watched the towers fall on the TV in his waiting room.

Fine Books & Collections and Connoiseur Magazines

My very first copy of Fine Books Magazine arrived in the mail today. It is of course the May/June 2007 issue featuring Antique Miniature Books. I have not been so wowed by a magazine since reading Connoisseur Magazine back in the 1980s and early 1990s.

I loved the Connoisseur magazine. Since I couldnt afford to buy them, I always used to borrow them from my local public library. For those of you who may remember that magazine, it was about Art & Antiques, and the editor (at the time I was reading it) was Thomas Hoving.

I met Mr Hoving for the first time in the pages of his excellent book "King of the Confessors". I fell in love with art history courtesy of this book. I have loved maps since I was a child, and now I have come full circle by adding antiquarian books to the list as well.

I do remember seeing a few antique map advertisements in Connoiseur, so there were probably some antiquarian bookseller ads in there as well. Then the library stopped stocking it. I'm still wondering what happened to Connoiseur.