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(More customer reviews)"Landscape with Smokestacks" is a beautiful "monotype" created by Edgar Degas around 1890 and currently on view at the Art Institute of Chicago. Degas smeared oil colors on a metal plate in large diagonal strokes with a rag, then placed a paper on the plate and used a press to transfer the image to the paper. As Degas described it, "The result is a picture on paper more luminous than if the artist had worked directly on the paper." He used fingerprints for texture at the horizon of the scene, and then dabbed on pastel colors in little dots of yellow or pink. Green striations of monotype ink were matched with green pastel. Prussian blue pastel was smeared into the sky to suggest smoke coming from the nearly eradicated monotype chimney.
The family that owned the work of art perished in the holocaust. They had sent the art to a dealer in Paris, either for safekeeping or on consignment to be sold. If it was sent for safekeeping, it may have been stolen by the Nazis (especially Goering) who were looting art throughout the occupied countries of Europe during the Second World War. If it was sold on consignment, however, then the heirs of the family (who brought suit in the United States to recover the painting) would be out of luck. Their only recourse would be to find the Parisian art dealer and sue him for the proceeds. But maybe the painting was stolen, in which case the heirs might have a claim to get it back. After the painting left the art dealer in Paris, it wound up in Switzerland, and went through the hands of various purchasers, finally winding up in a private art collection in Chicago. The owner donated it to the Art Institute, and the real legal battle began -- between the heirs who claimed the painting had been stolen, and the Art Institute, which of course wanted to keep it (though the Institute would have returned it to the heirs if the Institute had been convinced that the painting indeed had been stolen).
Although the author, Howard Trienens, represented the defendant art collector in Chicago, I found his book exceptionally fair in its meticulous treatment of the provenance (sales history) of the Degas painting and in describing the negotiations that ensued between the heirs and the Art Institute. Like the Degas painting itself, the book is a little gem.
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