The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery)
Read The Art Whisperer (An Alix London Mystery) Online
Authors: Charlotte Elkins,Aaron Elkins
ALSO BY CHARLOTTE AND AARON ELKINS
T
HE
A
LIX
L
ONDON
S
ERIES
A DANGEROUS TALENT
A CRUISE TO DIE FOR
T
HE
L
EE
O
FSTED
S
ERIES
A WICKED SLICE
ROTTEN LIES
NASTY BREAKS
WHERE HAVE ALL THE BIRDIES GONE?
ON THE FRINGE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2014 Charlotte and Aaron Elkins
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477824559
ISBN-10: 1477824553
Cover design by 4 Eyes Design
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014934575
The Conservation of Art: Methods and Aims. A Brief Guide
By Alix London
Price: $14.95
Paperback: 85 pages
Publisher: International Art Education Institute
Average Customer Rating: 1.2 out of 5 stars
Bestsellers Rank: #2,994,796 in Books
Reader’s Forum Reviews. Newest First
Worse Than Useless
By Kathy Maynard
Why am I giving this book only one star, you want to know? Because there’s nothing lower available. Hey, forum moderator, here’s a suggestion. How about introducing minus-stars? There are worse things than “Poor,” you know . . . and this turkey proves it!
By Helga McGhee
Another derivative, disorganized, incomprehensible, totally unneeded little “guide” that says nothing that fifty other books haven’t said . . . only this one says it worse. If Alix London really learned conservation from her crook of a father, you have to wonder how he got away with all those forgeries. Don’t waste your money.
By Alicia Lampert
Art restorers—Do NOT use this book as a resource unless you want to get sued for willful destruction of property. To put it plainly, the author simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about. As a professional restorer myself, I was flabbergasted by some of her “rules” on the use of solvents and the application of heat. Alix London really should have read a book on this subject before trying to write one.
By Diana Anderson
So now she’s a writer too. Yet another lame attempt on the part of this “expert” to cash in on the seamy notoriety of her father Geoffrey London. Shameful and pathetic.
By Linda Dow
The idea that a reputable organization like the International Art Education Institute would put its name on this unedifying mishmash from the notorious Family London is enough to—
That was as much as Alix could take in one sitting, and not for the first time her fingers itched—literally, truly itched—to send in a response of her own, a fiery rejoinder that would blow these captious faultfinders out of the water, but deep down she knew it wasn’t worth the bitterness of getting into a fight with them. It wasn’t worth reading their “reviews” at all, but despite the self-discipline of which she was justifiably proud, she couldn’t seem to stay away. It was like the hole in your gums left after a tooth extraction; it made you wince to stick your tongue in it, but you couldn’t stop doing it. For two days, maybe, three on the outside, she could manage not to check, but then her curiosity would get the better of her and she’d be at it again. And, naturally, get burned again.
Talk about moths and flames.
It wasn’t as if these were honest critiques from which she might learn something either. They were all part of a malicious, coordinated vendetta. Surely, anyone could see that (she hoped). After all, how could an obscure, limited-market little book like
The Conservation of Art,
with its modest objectives,
be of enough interest to draw so many reviews, negative
or
positive? Who were these people (were they all really different people?) who were driven to register such passionate condemnations? Anyway, what kind of people were given to passion when it came to techniques of art conservation? No, it didn’t add up.
And then, when the book, her first serious try at writing, had come out eight months ago, four reader reviews had come in over the next couple of weeks. All but one rated it four stars or more, the exception being one grumpy correspondent who gave it two stars because “it took two weeks to get here, and when it did it looked like it had been run over by an asphalt paving machine. Intolerable.”
After that, no ratings at all for six months. Then, when the book was ancient history by bookselling standards,
wham!
, these personal attacks—that’s what they were, weren’t they, personal attacks?—started pouring in. Since then the deluge had continued, almost thirty now, one or two almost every day, and every single one of them negative—not even a three-star among them. Did that make any sense? And she had more reviews than sales; what kind of sense did that make?
Not for a minute did she believe that her book
was “worse than useless” or “pathetic.” And she damn well
did
know what she was talking about.
The Conservation of Art
was a good, solid little guide to the history and practice of art conservation and restoration—okay, not especially original, that wasn’t its aim, but it was well organized and readable, geared not to professionals in the field, but to the lay reader who wanted to know a little more about the subject.
When she heard a low growling noise and realized she was making it, she knew a time-out was in order. Coffee. She slammed the laptop closed, sorry that she’d ever opened it, and once more promised herself that she’d never, ever, ever look at the damn review page again. She picked up the empty mug on her worktable and stomped off to the break room, muttering to herself.
Alix London, thirty years old, attractive, capable daughter of a charming and once highly reputed but famously disgraced art conservator, now reformed (she instinctively crossed her fingers or knocked on wood whenever she thought about that), was herself an art consultant and conservator with a growing reputation of her own. Unlike almost every other modern conservator, she had trained in the old-fashioned way, not at a school or institute, but by apprenticing herself for several years to the famed conservator Fabrizio Santullo at his studio in Rome. That had been when Geoffrey London’s sensational conviction and imprisonment for art fraud—serial forgery—was still fresh in the public’s mind, and bearing the name “London” in the American art world was like hauling around a not-so-recently dead, forty-pound albatross. Nobody wanted to get within fifty yards of her. But things were different now; she had proven her merits as a conservator in her own right.
Her current consulting job with the L. Morgan Brethwaite Museum in Palm Springs was proof of that. The museum had flown Alix down from Seattle a few days earlier for her to look at the twenty-eight pieces that they were planning to auction off, in order to determine what cleaning or restoration might be called for, and for her to present her estimate for doing the work. The Brethwaite was only a mid-sized private museum, but as private museums went it was among the crème de la crème
.
It was built from the personal collection of the late L. Morgan himself, and housed in the 12,000-square-foot, one-of-a-kind “Palm Springs Modern” home he had designed for himself and his family (but mostly for his art collection) in the foothills of the San Jacinto Mountains in 1969. The museum’s claim to fame was its world-class collection of British and American paintings: two hundred years of the best, from Joshua Reynolds to Jackson Pollock.