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**Cancelled** Book + Art: The Art Forger

Date:
Friday, August 30, 2024
Time:
12:00 pm - 1:15 pm
Cost:
Free for Members or included with Museum admission

Join museum staff for a conversation about the book The Art Forger. Following the book discussion, join us in the galleries for a conversation connecting the book to works on view in the current exhibition Intersections in American Art. Books are available for purchase at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café for a 10% discount.

Book Description

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art worth today over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.

Claire makes her living reproducing famous works of art for a popular online retailer. Desperate to improve her situation, she lets herself be lured into a Faustian bargain with Aiden Markel, a powerful gallery owner. She agrees to forge a painting—one of the Degas masterpieces stolen from the Gardner Museum—in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But when the long-missing Degas painting—the one that had been hanging for one hundred years at the Gardner—is delivered to Claire’s studio, she begins to suspect that it may itself be a forgery.

Claire’s search for the truth about the painting’s origins leads her into a labyrinth of deceit where secrets hidden since the late nineteenth century may be the only evidence that can now save her life. B. A. Shapiro’s razor-sharp writing and rich plot twists make The Art Forger an absorbing literary thriller that treats us to three centuries of forgers, art thieves, and obsessive collectors. it’s a dazzling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.

Book + Art

This discussion is a place to exchange ideas about readings that relate to artworks and the art world, and to learn from and about each other. Books are available at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café for a 10% discount. To add your name to our Book + Art mailing list, click here or call 828.253.3227 x121.

Contact:
Asheville Art Museum
Phone:
828.253.3227