SARATOGA SPRINGS — Where did the Van Gogh go? How did a painting that went missing more than a century ago end up in upstate N.Y.? Who should be allowed to keep an important piece of art by a world-famous artist after it is found?
You may learn answers to these questions by asking them directly of the artist whose just-published book poses these and other inquiries for the curious. On Jan. 17, author and artist Jonathan Santlofer appears at Northshire Bookstore Saratoga as part of his promotional book tour. Do take heed of the answers you may glean however, because as Santlofer points out in his author’s notes at the book’s conclusion: what you have just read is a novel that mixes fact and fiction.
Billed as a spellbinding thriller of masterpieces, masterminds and the mysterious underbelly of the art world, Santlofer re-introduces readers to Luke Perrone, hero of The Last Mona Lisa and a descendant of the man who stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Luke navigates the shadiest corners of the underground art world to track down Van Gogh’s notorious death-bed self-portrait. What he discovers is a consequential history that traces the journey of the painting back to World War II, when agents of the French Resistance protected it from destruction by the Nazis.
With “The Lost Van Go,” Santlofer offers an open invitation of the artists’ domain in verses selected with care: “Late morning sun filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, across my palette and over half-finished paintings leaning against the walls of my Bowery studio…”
The journey name-checks boxes of varying layers of cool: Secreted away in a wine crate with a false bottom and flanked by bottles of Bordeaux is a copy of Celine’s “Mort a Credit” - a novel us U.S.-ers realize as “Death On The Installment Plan” and know enough NOT to read til the end, because then – well, it’s curtains! There are visions of a diner in Queens near Astoria Park (“half-full, but noisy, customers crammed into booths, waitresses shouting orders, Lil Nas X on the jukebox”) Louboutins (“My one and only pair,” says Alex, “they’re going to cripple me but they look good,”) and artful journeys to European destinations.
“My brain was moving at about the same speed as my rented Opel Corsa on a three-lane highway heading out of Paris, commuter cars and trucks cutting across lanes without signaling, horns beeping and me trying to drive,” Santlofer writes.
A visit to the canal houses of Amsterdam meanwhile are besotted and blessed with all the pleasures and perils of a modern-day zipline crossing the globe. “He told me to sit tight and do nothing until he got back to me. Then he took off, leaving me on a street with semi-naked women in windows undulating and beckoning me, like I’d been dumped into ‘Dante’s Inferno’ by way of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’…”
There is admiration, of course, for the artistry of Van Gogh himself, which Santlofer scribes through the vision of his protagonist while perusing the artist’s work. “I moved from portrait to portrait, noting several had been painted in the same year, but all different, as if there was more than one Vincent, and I suppose there was, depending on his mood and mental state,” he says. “And for a moment I could see Vincent, thumb looped through the palette mixing colors. I could have stood there for hours.”
Jonathan Santlofer has taught at Columbia and The New School, been exhibited in more than 200 collections worldwide and serves on the board at Yaddo. “The Lost Van Gogh,” (352 pages, $34.99, published Jan. 2, 2024 by Sourcebooks Landmark) is his seventh novel. He will appear at Northshire Bookstore Saratoga, 424 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 17. For more information, go to: northshire.com.
