Here are 100 books that Inside the Lost Museum fans have personally recommended if you like
Inside the Lost Museum.
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I’m a Distinguished Professor of art history at CUNY and biographer of artists. I grew up in Atlanta, attended college in Boston, and have worked in New York since my twenties. With a new Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, I began as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum, assigned to produce a definitive catalogue of all Edward Hopper’s authentic art. His papers were missing except for his record books that recorded every time a work left for sale, loan, or gift. I traced each work as it left Hopper’s possession and discovered a massive number of undocumented artworks stolen from the estate, which the Whitney still wants to cover up.
This very well-researched and gripping book taught me the meaning of the term “laundering” in the art market and revealed the duplicity of the late art dealer, Larry Fleischman, who both collected and sold stolen antiquities and marketed undocumented works taken from Edward Hopper’s estate.
He didn’t care about provenance or history of ownership and is quoted in this book as saying: “Everything comes from somewhere.”
Although I knew and dealt with Fleishman, I trusted him and was tricked by him.
A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist).
In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall…
I’m a Distinguished Professor of art history at CUNY and biographer of artists. I grew up in Atlanta, attended college in Boston, and have worked in New York since my twenties. With a new Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, I began as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum, assigned to produce a definitive catalogue of all Edward Hopper’s authentic art. His papers were missing except for his record books that recorded every time a work left for sale, loan, or gift. I traced each work as it left Hopper’s possession and discovered a massive number of undocumented artworks stolen from the estate, which the Whitney still wants to cover up.
Esterow, then employed by Larry Fleischman, assessed hundreds of Edward Hoppers that an unknown minister offered to sell.
The book’s dust jacket advertises “a lively history of certain fabulous art thefts—and the strange breed of thieves who perpetrated them.” Esterow’s book inspired one reviewer to comment that few of his criminals “are very ingenious.”
Sanborn, who must have seemed to Esterow like a character that belonged in his narrative, told me that Esterow offered him a consignment deal for what he was shown, which later turned out to be just a small part of Sanborn’s loot.
Had he known Sanborn’s story, Esterow might have added his scheme of befriending the aging sister of a famous artist, whose early works were jammed into the attic of the family home.
I’m a Distinguished Professor of art history at CUNY and biographer of artists. I grew up in Atlanta, attended college in Boston, and have worked in New York since my twenties. With a new Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, I began as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum, assigned to produce a definitive catalogue of all Edward Hopper’s authentic art. His papers were missing except for his record books that recorded every time a work left for sale, loan, or gift. I traced each work as it left Hopper’s possession and discovered a massive number of undocumented artworks stolen from the estate, which the Whitney still wants to cover up.
This book shows the importance of provenance or history of ownership in tracking the authenticity of works of art.
We learn about criminals, who not only can forge art, but they can also fake or hide archival materials. For me, this sheds light on the case of Edward Hopper’s papers, because we will never know what the minister removed or destroyed from what he took.
Since he was using these papers both to pose as an expert on Hopper and to hide his possession of hundreds of undocumented artworks by one of the most documented of all artists, he might well have removed any incriminating evidence.
A tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries-many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections today
Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices.
Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted…
I’m a Distinguished Professor of art history at CUNY and biographer of artists. I grew up in Atlanta, attended college in Boston, and have worked in New York since my twenties. With a new Ph.D. in art history from Rutgers, I began as curator of the Hopper Collection at the Whitney Museum, assigned to produce a definitive catalogue of all Edward Hopper’s authentic art. His papers were missing except for his record books that recorded every time a work left for sale, loan, or gift. I traced each work as it left Hopper’s possession and discovered a massive number of undocumented artworks stolen from the estate, which the Whitney still wants to cover up.
I really like the discussion of the Metropolitan Museum’s celebrated acquisition of the ancient Greek Eurphronios Krater, which turned out to have been stolen from a tomb and had to be returned to Italy.
We read that even taking less valuable items “damages archaeological heritage, thereby compromising or weakening historical scholarship.”
I appreciate how this also applies to the unrelated minister who got into the Edward Hopper estate and who hid Hopper’s papers—5,000 documents—for 50 years, damaging their context, perhaps destroying some.
I wrote my biography and definitive catalogue of Hopper’s art without access to most of these papers. Now that I have seen most of them, I am relieved that my work retains its value. Fortunately, I found another source that provided many of Jo Hopper’s diaries.
In the world of law enforcement art and antiquity crime has in the past usually assumed a place of low interest and priority. That situation has now slowly begun to change on both the local and international level as criminals, encouraged in part by the record sums now being paid for art treasures, are now seeking to exploit the art market more systematically by means of theft, fraud and looting. In this collection academics and practitioners from Australasia, Europe and North America combine to examine the challenges presented to the criminal justice system by these developments. Best practice methods of…
I’m obsessed with travel, and have spent years ambling the planet. I’m also an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University—I spend lots of time reading books, and occasionally writing them. Travel and philosophy can help us make sense of our magnificent, peculiar world.
How can travel help us find the good life?The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.
From the author of the Number One bestseller, THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY, this is an inspirational and witty guide to how to make our travels go better. Calling upon such guides as Hopper, Flaubert and Ruskin, de Botton accompanies us on an eye-opening and entertaining tour of the philosophical questions behind our desire to travel - and the capricious nature of our thoughts and emotions when we do.
For whatever reason, I have always been interested in sad men. Successful men can be boring. It is failure, and how men manage it when success is the primary marker of masculinity, that I find interesting as a subject for fiction. Even when I was in my 20s, I liked reading novels about men suffering mid-life crisis. And now that I am squarely in middle age, novels that were about the future are now novels about the present.
I have returned to many of these stories over and over again through the years—for Cheever’s prose, for his sense of what makes men tick. On one level, I can’t quite relate to white suburban husbands in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s. And yet, somehow, they seem profoundly familiar.
John Cheever's Collected Stories explores the delicate psychological frameworks of 20th century suburbia.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HANIF KUREISHI
This outstanding collection by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Cheever shows the power and range of one of the finest short story writers of the last century. Stories of love and of squalor, they include masterpieces such as 'The Swimmer' and 'Goodbye, My Brother' and date from the time of his honourable discharge from the Army at the end of the Second World War.
I'm a New Yorker with a background in the performing arts. Though a lifelong reader and bookstore loiterer, my early writing career was focused on the stage as well as the pursuit of a career in screenwriting. This led to many years writing and producing theatre as well as working in film and TV both as a writer and in production. The books I've chosen, I feel influenced the American language in the last century, an influence reflected in the tone of the novels and films from that period described by scholars as “Between the Wars.” It's a period that fascinates me for it exists now only in books and movies and is therein preserved.
John O’Hara’s name should be spoken in the same breath as Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Hemingway. Maybe it isn’t, because he never had that one homerun book that stood out in the canon, like a Gatsbyor a Grapes of Wrath. Though I think Butterfield 8 and Appointment in Samarastand up to either of the above, I have chosen this collection of short stories. He wrote more short stories for the New Yorker than anyone ever did and is credited with inventing that particular style that the periodical became known for. Each of these stories – all short and fast as an uppercut – shows the flawed humanity striving in the city from the 30s to the 60s – from ad men to secretaries, to bums and soda jerks. With his trademark crackling dialogue, this collection of gritty Americana will leave you feeling like you are standing in an…
'Superb... These thirty-two stories inhabit the Technicolor vernaculars of taxi drivers, barbers, paper pushers and society matrons... O'Hara was American fiction's greatest eavesdropper, recording the everyday speech and tone of all strata of mid-century society' Wall Street Journal
John O'Hara remains the great chronicler of American society, and nowhere are his powers more evident than in his portraits of New York's so-called Golden Age. Unsparingly observed, brilliantly cutting and always on the tragic edge of epiphany, the stories collected here are among O'Hara's finest work, and show why he still stands as the most-published short story writer in the history…
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
Still exciting after all these years! Perhaps because it is politically incorrect and unself-conscious.
The cover blurb says it is an "investigation of the sex lives of the men and women of the Trobriand Islands and deals with prenuptial intercourse, marriage, divorce, pregnancy, erotic psychology, ritual, morals, and manners" – forbidden territory nowadays.
I do not excuse the sexism and racism occasionally detectable, but think the detail, intimacy, and authorial reflexivity about a disappeared world are more valuable now than ever. A century ahead of his time, Malinowski included himself in his observations and ideas about others.
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
I am deeply persuaded by psychoanalysis as arational scientific theory of the unconscious mind which, if it exists as Freud describes it, has a determining role in nearly every aspect of individual and social life among ourselves and exotic others.
But most scholars, feminists especially (of whom I consider myself one), even when they acknowledge Freud's genius, "then proceed to dismiss the whole business as hopelessly out of date and culture-bound."
This collection of essays, a series of paired expositions by classic thinkers and eminent scholars in many fields in dialogue with each other, provides an in-depth overview of the debate about 'women and analysis.'
I grew up in a family of beautiful, accomplished women at a time when most women stayed home. But the spectacular women in my mother's family also suffered spectacularly, and I was determined to understand family life at its very roots. I studied anthropology and, over a 15-year period, lived in a remote part of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea among a group of Gimi women who spent most of their time apart from men. I shared women's difficult daily lives, participated in their separate rites, learned their myths, and, through my writing, have devoted myself to giving them voices of their own.
A classic of ethnographic description and symbolic analysis based upon fieldwork among the Ndembu of Zambia—a must read for anyone interested in sociological and psychological implications of ritual belief and practice in a small-scale, non-literate, kinship-based society.
A stellar example of what is lost by cancelling "colonialist" literature and discarding the very concepts of "culture" and "religion" as relics of Western intellectual imperialism.
In 10 essays on color symbolism, circumcision rites, rites of passage, social dynamics, and more, Turner lays the groundwork for his proposition that ritual is the key to religion and religion is the key to culture.
A pioneering work of high quality, this collection of anthropological studies provides one of the most detailed records available for an African society-or indeed for any group-of the semantics of ritual symbolism. It combines unusually detailed ethnographic description, based upon field work among the Ndembu of Zambia, with remarkable theoretical sophistication. Professor Turner describes the ritual phenomena in terms both of practice and of their sociological and psychological implications within a preliterate society.
Case histories illustrate the function of ritual in creating community harmony. Data on circumcision rites and medical practices and an essay on color classification have wide implications…
