January 8th
7pm
"Ingeniously plotted, irresistibly readable, brimming with inside information about the high-stakes art world of theft, forgery, and murder...Also included are brilliantly rendered drawings by the author, who is as accomplished an artist as he is a writer of suspense thrillers." —Joyce Carol Oates
From the author of the much-praised The Last Mona Lisa comes another thrilling story of masterpieces, masterminds, and mystery.
For years, there have been whispers that, before his death, Van Gogh completed a final self-portrait. Curators and art historians have savored this rumor, hoping it could illuminate some of the troubled artist's many secrets, but even they have to concede that the missing painting is likely lost forever.
But when Luke Perrone, artist and great-grandson of the man who stole the Mona Lisa, and Alexis Verde, daughter of a notorious art thief, discover what may be the missing portrait, they are drawn into a most epic art puzzles. When only days later the painting disappears again, they are reunited with INTERPOL agent John Washington Smith in a dangerous and deadly search that will not only expose secrets of the artist's last days but draws them into one of history's darkest eras.
Beneath the paint and canvas, beneath the beauty and the legend, the artwork has become linked with something evil, something that continues to flourish on the dark web and on the shadiest corridors of the underground art world.
Jonathan Santlofer is the award-winning author of The Last Mona Lisa, The Death Artist, The Widower’s Notebook, and more. Jonathan is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy In Rome, the Vermont Studio Center, and serves on the board of Yaddo, one of the oldest arts communities in the U.S. Also a well-known artist, Jonathan’s work has been exhibited in more than 200 exhibitions worldwide and is included in numerous private, corporate and public collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Newark Museum; and Tokyo’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Find him online at jonathansantlofer.com.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities emerita at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
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