A Lost Art??
The Art Spy by Michelle Young
I cannot say enough about this book by Michelle Young about Rose Valland. I have tried to link an interview with Young, but my computer will not cooperate. If you have a chance, pull up one of her interviews and listen to Young talk about her book. She has done a tremendous amount of research on Valland, a French woman who had been written out of history before now. Valland posed as an art critic who was helping the Nazis with their well-planned art heist, but she was really a spy who ended up saving countless art works. You will also learn why and how Hitler was so determined to take all of the art from Europe.
The below image is of Botticelli’s painting ‘La Primavera’, which now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. It probably would not be there today had not a group of Italians hid it and other paintings from the Uffizi inside a single Tuscan villa. An historical fiction by Laura Morelli entitled The Keeper of Lost Art tells how people at the villa kept the paintings in a secret room to keep them undetected by the Nazis who eventually occupied the villa. Of course the people in this story are not real, but they provide a powerful emotional connection to the actual people at the villa and how the paintings affected them for the short while they were around them.
Six Days in Bombay was written by Alka Joshi, author of The Henna Artist. Joshi uses the life of Amrita Sher-Gill, the “Frida Kahlo of India,” as inspiration for the beginning of the story. In the book, Joshi’s name for the famous painter is Mira Novak. Mira dies after a miscarriage; and Sona, her nurse , is charged with killing her. The rest of the book tells how Sona travels the world to prove her own innocence and unlock the secrets surrounding Mira Novak’s life. The actual artist Sher-Gill also died under mysterious circumstances.
