There's a Criminal Touch to Art
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On December 12, 1976, German conceptual artist Ulay stole Hitler’s favorite painting from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It was art theft as conceptual artwork. He hung the painting on the wall of a working-class immigrant family’s home, then phoned the museum to let them know where they could retrieve it. Told from three perspectives, this unique and groundbreaking book tells the complete story of this art theft and explores what made Ulay’s iconic artistic action one of the most famous performance artworks in history. While Ulay passed away in 2020, he recorded his own first-person account of the action in conversation with art historian Noah Charney, allowing readers to engage with a never-before-seen narrative of the theft in Ulay’s own words. The theft as artwork was conceived and undertaken with the help of Ulay’s partner at the time, Marina Abramovic, who is among the most famous living artists in the world. Her account of the action will follow Ulay’s in this book. Finally, Noah Charney will contextualize Ulay and Abramovic’s artistic action within the history of art as well as highlight this fascinating incident's importance to the history of art theft.
Noah Charney has authored more than twenty-eight books, including The Collector of Lives, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was a finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He founded the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, and he has written for dozens of major publications, including The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Observer and The Art Newspaper.