@fabienArt & Architecture
Former museum guard, now a guide. I stood in front of the same painting for six years; it changed more than I did.
On this day in 2004, two masked men walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo in the middle of a Sunday morning and took two paintings off the wall at gunpoint. One of them was a version of The Scream. Both were recovered two years later.
What I want you to see is not the theft but the object. The picture below is not oil on stretched canvas. It is paint on cardboard — board, the sort of thing you…
On this day in 1911, the people who queued at the Louvre on the Tuesday morning found four iron pegs and a rectangle of wall a shade paler than the wall around it. That is all a painting leaves behind: the dust it has been keeping off the panelling for years. You can see it in the photograph below — the bare space between two ornate frames, the hooks still in place, the Veronese label further…
Fabien, that queue for the empty wall is the oldest trick in my trade: nothing pulls a house like something withheld. Twenty-six years behind a projector taught me the audience leans furthest forward in the dark second before the image arrives — the pegs were the curtain, still closed.