Showing posts with label art theft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art theft. Show all posts
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Theft of the Mona Lisa
On this day in 1911 curators at the Louvre discovered that the Mona Lisa had been stolen. Among the suspects were the 32 year-old poet Guillaume Apollinaire and a 29 year-old semi-famous painter named Pablo Picasso. The tale appears on page 109 in A Book of Ages. Picasso appears ten times in the book, Apollinaire once. The painting appears twice, being stolen and being painted by da Vinci when he was 51.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Mona Lisa, Gatsby, Theroux
The story about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa is detailed in the new Vanity Fair, but the most interesting anecdote, involving the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and a young painter named Pablo Picasso, appears on page 109 of A Book of Ages.
Today is author Paul Theroux's birthday; he's 68. He was thirty when he quit teaching to be a writer full time. He also was making enough, finally, to own his own telephone. Page 107, A Book of Ages.
The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald wrote much of it the year before while living in France. While there he also took the time to recommend a young writer to his editor at Scribners, a writer he hadn't even met yet named Ernest Hemingway, who was also living in Paris. Fitzgerald is already drinking heavily but not disastrously, as his prose demonstrates, but the novel doesn't sell very well, nor will the next or the one following it, all of which leads Fitz to observe that there are no second acts in American life. F. Scott Fitzgerald appears on pages 69, 89, 103, 148, 153, 161 and 171 in A Book of Ages. There are second acts, by the way, you just have to survive to see them.
Today is author Paul Theroux's birthday; he's 68. He was thirty when he quit teaching to be a writer full time. He also was making enough, finally, to own his own telephone. Page 107, A Book of Ages.
The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1925. Fitzgerald wrote much of it the year before while living in France. While there he also took the time to recommend a young writer to his editor at Scribners, a writer he hadn't even met yet named Ernest Hemingway, who was also living in Paris. Fitzgerald is already drinking heavily but not disastrously, as his prose demonstrates, but the novel doesn't sell very well, nor will the next or the one following it, all of which leads Fitz to observe that there are no second acts in American life. F. Scott Fitzgerald appears on pages 69, 89, 103, 148, 153, 161 and 171 in A Book of Ages. There are second acts, by the way, you just have to survive to see them.
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