‘Lost, Stolen or Shredded’, by Rick Gekoski – review

Below the title of this book, engendering immediate distrust, lies the legend ‘Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature.’ ‘Story’ is such a weasel word, implying a tale as much as truth; a fiction that when turned into a narrative develops into the fact that every schoolboy knows; or a real event embroidered with fictitious detail to amuse; even a ripping yarn — as proves to be the case with the first of the essays in this book.

‘Has anyone seen the Mona Lisa?’ Rick Gekoski asks, weaving Picasso into the warp and weft of her temporary absence from the Louvre in 1911-13; Picasso, by then notorious and wealthy, played no part in the theft, and his arrest was nothing but peripheral elimination from police enquiries (the dry, authoritative account is to be found in John Richardson’s second volume of A Life of Picasso, 1996), but Gekoski must give us a yarn worthy of Reader’s Digest.