Provenance by Frank McDonald (1979)

Provenance
by Frank McDonald
Publisher:  Little, Brown and Company / An Atlantic Monthly Press Book
Copyright:  1979
Book Club Edition

Paris, 1895:  Aaron Rostand buys his first painting -- a Vermeer -- at auction for 200 francs, founding his gallery and the family fortune.

Paris, 1940:  Paul Drach, warned that his name appears on a Gestapo list of suspected subversives, conceals his family's precious collection of Impressionist paintings in the false front of a truck and attempts to flee the city.  He is caught and tortured by the Nazis, and soon afterwards Jewish art collections all over Paris are seized.

New York, 1979:  Andre Rostand tries to regain his father's painting in an auction at Sotheby Parke Bernet.  Fearful that rival dealers might be conspiring against him, he retains Alex Drach, a young art investigator to whom he has long acted as guardian and friend.

Provenance is a sweeping and powerful novel about a hoard of art masterpieces stolen by the Nazis during World War II -- those who collected the paintings, stole them, and now propose to sell them.

Provenance is also the story of how big money gradually enters and corrupts the trade, and how paintings, which begin as a reflection of the highest aspirations of the human spirit, end by evoking its lowest.

In the galleries, offices, apartments, restaurants, and discos of New York, Paris, London, Zurich, and Rome, a host of glamorous and sinister figures mix their business and pleasure.  With and around Alex Drach move detectives and security operatives, auctioneers and dealers, titans of buying and selling, bankers who control their credit, gorgeous narcissistic kept women, and the men who display them as they would a prized Monet or van Gogh.

Here are those who, to this day, are still in possession of some of the paintings that disappeared into the collections of Hitler and Goring.  Here, too, are the appraisers, the curators, the restorers, the disco freaks and drug dealers -- the influential and the hangers-on of the art world.  Theirs is a fast-paced and sophisticated world that is larger and richer -- much richer -- than life.

Condition:  Used.  Hardcover.  Dust cover is lightly discolored and darkening from age and shows shelf wear.  Pages are tanning from age.  Previous owner's "Library Of" stamp on the front endpaper.

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