100 books like The Venus Fixers

Noah Charney is an art historian and has written several interesting books that I have read. Even though this book, Stealing the Mystic Lamb, came out too late for my novel, the “altarpiece” of my book is in fact the “Mystic Lamb” otherwise known as the Ghent Altarpiece. My quasi-obsession with this monumental piece of art is matched by Charney and he describes how often it has been stolen and nearly destroyed. No other piece of art has had a history quite like this one. 

The Faustian Bargain is all about the art world inside Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Petropoulos chronicles the artists, art dealers, art professors, art journalists, and many others who were forced to live under Hitler’s cultural rules, which forbade modernist art of any kind. Some profited from this arrangement, others subtly fought against it. This is an inside look at a culture choked and suppressed by its own leadership.

If you want to know about art thefts in Europe during World War II, this is the book to read. This is the Bible!

Lynn Nicolas provides an exhaustive account of why the works were taken, where the looting took place, how it was done, how many artworks were plundered (the answer is in the hundreds of thousands), and what attempts were made after the war to recover the works and restore them to their owners.

I was awed by the extent of her research, which is truly groundbreaking. Before The Rape of Europa was published in 1994, little was known about the means and scale – and even the fact – of Nazi looting.  

Without the Monuments Men, the artworks plundered by the Nazis might never have been recovered. A lot might still be missing.

The Monuments Men were art experts, scholars, and historians who had volunteered for a specially-formed military unit. They followed the Allied armies through Europe and made sure no historical monuments or irreplaceable artworks were inadvertently destroyed. Using Rose Valland’s notes from the Jeu de Paume, they tracked down stolen treasures in castles, monasteries, and even a salt mine!

Engaging and well-written, this book is a must-read. I borrowed it from the library, but ended up buying my own copy. I had to have it!

I chose photo books for my list because I often use photos to help me as I write—either to construct a scene or to provide detail. Because my books are set against the backdrop of the Monuments Men’s work, this book was really the starting point for my writing the trilogy.  

Edsel presents a methodical overview of the vast scope of Nazi art theft in Europe, the destruction wrought on its monuments, and the enormous task of restitution and rebuilding. Seeing the sheer quantity of looted art stacked ceiling-high in endless rows and the faces of the men and women charged with making it right helped me put their work into my fictional work.

Hermann Goering’s art dealer was a Nazi stormtrooper with a PhD in art history and an athletic build. And Bruno Lohse always made sure the champagne was on ice whenever Hermann Goering arrived at Paris’ Jeu de Paume museum in order to examine the latest in stolen masterpieces.

Although Lohse was arrested after the war for his ties to the Nazi party and spent several years in prison in Germany and France, he was never convicted for his role in stealing art, and went on to make a good living as an art dealer in Munich after the war. Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at Claremont McKenna College and expert on the Holocaust, interviewed Lohse several times for this fascinating book.

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.

The long history of pillage as an act of colonial conquest – Napoleon looting Egypt, Britain looting Greece, among many others – is well-told in this solid, historically grounded account. Why are so many of the world’s great museums filled with treasures from ancient civilizations? This book tells you how it happened, while also showing why countries stripped of their heritage are demanding it back. There are a few books out there entitled Loot: this is the one to read. 

Adam von Trott was a Prussian aristocrat who studied at Oxford, worked for the German resistance, and was executed by the Nazis in August 1944. I discovered Trott when I was researching wartime Berlin. Christopher Sykes’ biography gives a fascinating portrait of an intense and charming man. His deep loyalty to Germany led him to oppose its government, attempt to reach an understanding with its enemies and participate in an effort to kill its leader.

Adam and his contradictions continue to intrigue me – and I’m not the only one! He pops up regularly in other people’s novels under various aliases: as Hartmann in Robert Harris’ Munich, for instance, and as Axel von Gottberg in Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung.  

When a famous stolen Velazquez painting from a truck that went missing back in 1945 turns up in present-day Boston, this fast-paced thriller to recover the rest of the “loot” begins. By me, a girl can’t have too many stories about the infamous Nazi theft of priceless art during WWII. The set-up for this kind of tale is just about the opposite of the intimate crimes in a closed community of “stranded” victims and suspects, which I also really like. Here it’s a big canvas: many works of art stolen during wartime by armies (sometimes during the grunt work, with masterminds off planning). It’s the scope of the art crimes themselves that is so compelling – whole swaths of cultural history disappearing from view. These are enormous crimes with dire implications – even before the murders begin. Loot is the kind of story that slams my heart (in a good… show more.