The Museum Of Lost Art
Noah Charney
Phaidon £19.95
Shelley’s most famous poem is about a traveller who discovers a shattered statue in the middle of a barren desert. Once upon a time, the statue had been the centre point of a great city, but the city is now in ruins beneath the sand. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
But this broken memorial is all that is left:
‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
The idea of an entire city obliterated may seem bizarre, but in fact there are many examples of such an event. For instance, Pompeii was buried by a volcano, and in 1945 Dresden was largely destroyed by bombs. In the past few decades, traces of 80 lost Mayan cities have been discovered beneath the forests of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

The Eruption Of Vesuvius by Pierre-Jacques Volaire, destroying Pompeii. The idea of an entire city obliterated may seem bizarre, but in fact there are many examples of such an event
On a more local level, just up the road from my home in Suffolk lies the village of Dunwich. Nowadays, its population numbers barely 200, but in the 13th century it was an international port, on a par with London. Over the years, repeated storms swept its buildings into the sea, among them all eight churches.
Nothing lasts for ever. As Stuart Kelly wrote in his much more thoughtful work, The Book Of Lost Books (2005), our entire world is only finite. ‘All matter will eventually be spread as fine, interstellar dust, or concentrated in a black hole’s gorged interior. Loss is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm. It is the rule. It is inescapable.’
Borrowing a leaf from Kelly’s Lost Books, Noah Charney has compiled a book about all the art that has been and gone. ‘Imagine a Museum of Lost Art,’ he begins. ‘It would contain more masterpieces than all the world’s museums combined.’ Oh, yes? At first, this struck me as a monstrous overstatement, but, as one tots up the damage from theft, war, wanton destruction and natural disasters, one begins to realise that he may well have a point.

Students battle to save the books of the Florence Library after the flood of 1966. Up to three million books and manuscripts destroyed, and 14,000 works of art
The Museum Of Lost Art is a rag-bag of bits and pieces about pictures, sculptures and buildings that have disappeared from the face of the Earth. It is full of interesting material, ranging from potted biographies of master burglars to a résumé of the damage inflicted on the city of Florence by the flood of 1966 (up to three million books and manuscripts destroyed, and 14,000 works of art). But it lacks focus or any clear intention: often it seems that Charney has bunged something in simply because it interested him, regardless of whether it had anything to do with the book.
For instance, he devotes four pages to his hazy, modish thoughts (‘the first post-modernist work of art’) on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, for no better reason than that this great masterpiece was ALMOST destroyed by a palace fire in 1734. Elsewhere, he rambles on about Camelot, which never existed. Of course, one of the troubles with an illustrated book about lost art is that most of the content cannot be illustrated, and perhaps his deviations were driven by pictorial requirements. Nevertheless, his choice of subject matter remains too random, his thoughts too unfocused.
Sometimes, he just writes gibberish. Of the destruction of the Twin Towers, he says: ‘The buildings themselves did nothing objectionable – it was what they represented (or, in this case, what people did while inside them).’ He is never tempted to shy away from the blindingly obvious. At one point, he writes: ‘Just because an object had the bad luck to have been lost or destroyed, by man or by nature, does not mean its place in history was insignificant.’ And at another: ‘The desire to own rare objects of beauty and skilled craftsmanship gives artworks a value beyond the sum of their component parts.’ Well, who’d have thought it!
His prose can be cumbersome, to say the least. Sometimes, I found myself having to read a particular passage two or three times, just to work out what he was trying to say. Try this, for instance: ‘We will never know how many works were discarded or recycled by artists over the centuries without a second thought, in search of art that represents the way the artist wishes to be seen now, garnishing the historical record of their work.’ Sadly, he fails to tell the story of Francis Bacon asking an assistant to go back to his studio and destroy the sub-standard canvas on the left wall, and the assistant, muddling left and right, destroying the wrong one.

Van Gogh’s Portrait Of Dr Gachet, which is thought to have been cremated with its Japanese owner
The brief chapters follow an irritating format, beginning with an italicised paragraph written in the present tense – ‘Christmas Eve in the Alcazar, 1734. Most of the occupants are at midnight mass’ – and then whizzing back into the past tense, and normal type. Then the original subject is summarily dropped, to make way for a breathless medley of other examples on the same theme – in this case, the Great Fire of Rome, the not unwelcome destruction of Tracey Emin’s grotty tent in the Momart fire of 2004, and so on – before, some pages later, returning to 1734 and the Alcazar.
There’s plenty here to keep one interested, from King Henry VIII’s blingy Field of the Cloth of Gold, with a pop-up palace 100m long, and the King’s armour decorated with 2,000oz of gold and 1,100 pearls, to Danny Boyle’s ramshackle opening ceremony for the London Olympics. On the other hand, much of this has very little to do with Lost Art. Why include the Olympics opening ceremony, for instance? ‘Performance art appears briefly, only to vanish,’ argues Charney, and the Olympics ceremony is, he says, ‘preserved only in pictures’. In fact, it is also preserved on film, and millions have already watched it on YouTube. In fact, it has not been lost at all.
Some works of art have vanished in the most peculiar ways. In 1990, a Japanese businessman called Ryoei Saito bought Van Gogh’s Portrait Of Dr Gachet for $82.5 million, and then announced that, after his death, he wished it to be cremated alongside him. There followed understandable outrage from the art world, and then Mr Saito’s spokesman said that he hadn’t really meant it to be taken literally. But he died in 1996, and the painting hasn’t been seen since.

Tracey Emin’s tent, which was lost in the Momart warehouse fire.
More famously, Sir Winston Churchill’s widow set fire to Graham Sutherland’s merciless portrait of the great man, though not, as it happens, the version that is illustrated in Charney’s book.
What is one meant to make of it all? Charney doesn’t seem to be sure. His conclusion is headed ‘LOST IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR WAITING TO BE FOUND’, which may be true of a lot of stolen art, but certainly isn’t true of art that has gone up in flames, or been destroyed in floods. Nor does he ever acknowledge that some art may be worth losing: in 1981, the sculptor Richard Serra erected a hideous 120ft-long, 12ft-tall steel wall across a plaza in Manhattan, which meant that residents had to walk round it to get anywhere. After a ruckus, a jury voted to dismantle it. It’s now in storage, with Serra huffily declaring that he’ll never let it be seen again. Fair enough, but pity the poor storage workers, having to walk an extra 120 yards every time they feel like going for a cup of tea.