Discussion Leader: Edna Ritzenberg
In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers bound and gagged two guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, and stole thirteen works of art worth today over $500 million. Despite thousands of hours of police work and a $5 million reward, the artwork has never been recovered. Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there's more to this crime than meets the eye. (bashapirobooks.com)
Reviews of The Art Forger
- BookList:
- The catalyst for Shapiro’s classy and pleasurably suspenseful debut is the legendary art heist of 1990, in which 13 masterpieces were stolen from Boston’s strange and wonderful Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum. Claire, a superb but frustrated painter who, like art collector Gardner, has been the target of scandal, supports herself by creating high-quality reproductions of Degas paintings for an online art retailer. So when Boston’s most prominent and sexiest gallery owner brings one of the missing Gardner paintings, a Degas, to her studio and offers her a veritable deal with the devil, Claire cannot resist. But she detects the painting’s stunning secret and turns out to be as fine a sleuth as she is an artist. Shapiro dramatizes Claire’s creation of a perfect forgery in fascinating detail and performs some elegant fabrications of her own in the form of risqué letters allegedly written by Gardner. The result is an entrancingly visual, historically rich, deliciously witty, sensuous, and smart tale of authenticity versus fakery in which Shapiro artfully turns a clever caper into a provocative meditation on what we value most. -- Seaman, Donna (Reviewed 09-01-2012) (Booklist, vol 109, number 1, p47)
- Publishers Weekly:
- Shapiro’s new novel (after The Safe Room) is filled with delightful twists, turns, and ruminations on what constitutes truth in art. Broke and painting copies of famous artists’ work for a reproduction site, artist Claire Roth is enticed by gallery owner Aidan Markel’s request to forge a painting by Degas that was stolen from the Isabella Gardner Museum in 1990 (in the largest unsolved art heist in history). As Claire works, she wonders if the painting she’s forging is legitimate. Meanwhile, Claire steps in when her blocked artist lover can’t finish his work for a deadline, essentially painting what becomes something of an art world sensation. Her lover slips into denial about her contribution and Clair weighs the repercussions of going public, knowing that it will damage her reputation even more badly than her heart. An intricate shell game exploring the permutations of the craft and ethics of art, Shapiro’s novel is a lively ride, melding Claire’s discoveries with fictionalized 19th-century letters from Gardner that hint at even deeper complexities. The wit, Claire’s passion for her work, what it takes to create a piece that can pass modern scrutiny, and the behind-the-scenes look at the lives of working artists and the machinations of the art world overcome an ending that ties things up too neatly. The choice of present tense for much of the book keeps the reader at a remove from the action, but Shapiro’s research, well-integrated into a strong premise, captivates. Agent: Ann Collette, Rees Literary. (Oct. 23) --Staff (Reviewed August 13, 2012) (Publishers Weekly, vol 259, issue 33, p)
- Library Journal:
- By page two of this novel, the reader is fully engrossed into the world of struggling artist Claire Roth, nicknamed "The Great Pretender" who copies famous paintings for a website called reproductions.com. When Aidan Markel, the handsome owner of a prestigious gallery, offers her a show of her own work in exchange for forging a painting, she reluctantly agrees. He brings two paintings to her studio, a supposedly original Degas called After the Bath and a work by an obscure painter of the same size and age. A Degas expert, Claire determines that the Degas in her studio is itself a forgery, and she's the only who knows. Stripping the paint off of the lesser-known work, she creates another forgery, doing such a good job that art authenticators think it is the original Degas, missing from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum since 1990. (Thirteen works worth over $500 million were actually stolen from the museum at that time.) Aidan lands in jail when the copy is seized by the FBI, and Claire will be too unless she finds the original Degas. In this enthralling intrigue, the yearning to own an original work of art is thoughtfully explored, and the text is interspersed with letters from Gardner herself, describing her relationships with the artists whose work she collected. VERDICT This well-researched work combines real elements (though After the Bath never existed) with the understanding that the art world is as fragile and precarious as the art itself, particularly for young hopefuls. A highly recommended debut that would be great for book discussion groups.— Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH --Lisa Rohrbaugh (Reviewed August 1, 2012) (Library Journal, vol 137, issue 13, p88)
- A cleverly plotted art-world thriller/romance with a
murky moral core. That nobody knows anything seems to be Shapiro's (The
Safe Room, 2002, etc., as Barbara Shapiro) assessment of art
authentication, given the number of misdetected paintings strewn through
her engrossing if unlikely story. In Boston, painter Claire Roth has
spent three years dealing with the guilt and scandal of her involvement
with Isaac Cullion, whose breakthrough work, 4D, she painted for him
when he was blocked. After the picture became a success, Cullion refused
to acknowledge Claire's involvement, and her objections plus the
attendant rumors led to his suicide and her vilification. Since then,
she has survived financially by painting reproductions, so when
influential gallery owner Aiden Markel arrives with a bizarre
proposal--her own show if she will forge a copy of a Degas, one of the
pictures stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum--she says yes.
As she works, Claire and Aiden become lovers, but she doesn't tell him
about her discovery that the stolen Degas is itself a copy. This
knowledge is Claire's lifeline when the finished forgery is discovered,
Aiden and then Claire are both arrested, and only she can save them.
Despite a shaky premise, this is convincingly researched, engaging
storytelling. Intelligent entertainment.(Kirkus Reviews, September 15,
2012)
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READ "IN PRAISE OF ART FORGERIES"
