100 Books Like Inside the Lost Museum

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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 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 Gatsby or a Grapes of Wrath. Though I think Butterfield 8 and Appointment in Samara stand 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… show more.

Margaret Mead belonged to a rambunctious generation of anthropologists who were trained by Franz Boas at Columbia. His star students were unconventional women—Mead, Ruth Benedict, Ella Deloria, and Zora Neal Hurston—who asked different questions and told different stories than any scholars before them. Were gender and race merely cultural constructions, and what would it take to overhaul them? How did Native Americans and Black Americans understand themselves, without the distortion of the white gaze? Could humans learn to live with their differences, or would the fascists win?

King unpacks the human drama in which these scholars participated on both the interpersonal and the global scale.

Nieboer did groundbreaking research on slavery outside the Atlantic world, and not the least on Southeast Asia. He was the first to propose a universal economic theory for the occurrence of slavery, namely that its existence was the result of a scarcity of labour in relation to the availability of land. After Evsey Domar expanded this argument to serfdom, it became known as the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis and has been widely cited both by historians and economic historians. In any talk about slavery and bondage in Southeast Asia I refer to this thesis to explain why slavery had practically disappeared in densely populated Java in the eighteenth century whereas it probably increased almost everywhere else in the Indonesian archipelago.

This one too takes on a much longer sweep of human history than most, here focusing on the role of resource competition in generating and shaping war among humans around the world. 

LeBlanc is an archaeologist who specialized in the desert Southwest of what's now the United States, and he is very concerned with the academic tendency to "pacify" the past. This is an excellent survey of the long role of war in societal competition, and the likely continued role of resource competition in wars to come.