Love and Redemption

...Houghteling based her on stalwart curator Rose Valland from whose 1961 autobiography she wisely drew key material, such as Rose's run-in with the "tremendously fat" Luftwaffe commanderHermann Wilhelm Goring, mastermind of Hitler's art operation: "I once had the eerie experience of seeing him decide whether or not to take a painting of Cronus eating his children...

...Heirs’ legal battles, resulting in paintings being withdrawn from auctions and yanked from the walls of museums, have made frequent headlines...

...Berenzon père is an imposing, dapper, charismatic figure, “a lean, angular man, as if he had stepped out of a canvas by Modigliani and, dusting the paint from his dinner jacket, taken his place against the gallery’s doorjamb...

...He is aided in his quest when he reconnects withRose, for whom he still rather desperately lusts...

...Max’s sole ambition is to follow in his father’s footsteps...

...Daniel, by contrast, is ambivalent...

...his father moves 250 paintings to a bank vault...

...Reviewed by Sarah Douglas Staff writer, “Art+Auction” Magazine IN THE YEARS since the release of Lynn H. Nicholas’ groundbreaking 1995 study The Rape of Europa, it has become widely known that the Nazis looted thousands of artworks from Jewish collectors and art dealers during World War II...

...Whentwo American GIs show him a pair of Cézanne s he once owned and try to extract an exorbitant price, Daniel sends them packing, shouting curses on their families...

...But Max’s attempts to win over his father and Rose end in disappointment...

...Max recovers some artworks and loses others, including, sadly, his father's beloved "Almonds...

...Rose pre-empts, and essentially rejects, his marriage proposal...

...Rose helps Max get in his father’s good graces by alerting him to a set of fraudulent Matisses being hawked by a rival gallery, and letting him break the news...

...His private setbacks, however, are quickly overshadowed by the War: Rose assists in emptying the Louvre of its artworks...

...She is “a woman as Ingres would have painted her: luminous skin, impossibly long limbs,” and no sooner does she move into chez Berenzon than Max begins courting her...

...Spurred on by his father's deep despair, Max is intent on recovering the lost paintings...

...Max counsels Rose not to talk money with clients after she offends an elderly princess by calling a Gauguin “a good deal...

...He forms a friendship with an irrepressibly optimistic Auschwitz survivor who takes him in when he is homeless...

...While giving us insight into the havoc the Nazis wreaked on the art economy—they "stole paintings and unaware of theirvalue, sold them to third-rate shams, who also were dumb to their value, so that now you can buy [them] for next to nothing, still knowing it is four times as much as the picturevendor paid"—she deftly portrays a man who has reached the limits of his desire to recoup his worldly losses...

...Houghteling’s knowledge of the inner workings of the early to mid-century art market—clearly the product of prodigious research—serves her well in telling the tale of Max Berenzon, her somewhat bumbling protagonist and narrator...

...As Max recalls of a Matisse on the book's final page, "I thought of the dimensions of the painting, of its flat and hovering planes, and that somewhere, inbetweenthe two, lingered those whom I had lost...

...After the Germans have been routed from Paris, Max seeks to redeem himself...

...Those quibbles notwithstanding, Pictures at an Exhibition is an engaging tale of familial love and redemption told through a search for artworks that ultimately are surrogates: The thousands of missing paintings stand in for the millions of people who perished in the camps...

...his father is the redoubtable art dealer Daniel Berenzon, whom Houghteling has modeled loosely on real-life Picasso dealer Paul Rosenberg...

...An Epilogue concerning his later years in America feels rushed and tacked on...

...a single still life reminds a father of a personal tragedy...

...and learns the tragic family secret that lies behind his father's reticence and emotional detachment...

...When Daniel entrusts him to bid at an auction, he splurges on a still life of a ham by Manet that is declared a fake...

...Sara Houghteling’s first novel uses one family’s saga as the framework for a coming-of-age story that centers around the relationship between a father and son...

...After strong-arming Max into medical school, Daniel hires the precocious and alluring Rose Clément, an art history whiz barely subsisting on the skimpy wages she receives in the Louvre’s curatorial department...

...This makes a man sick.'" The narrative heats up considerably once Max sets off on his own, making the rounds of the shady Parisian art dealers who are profiting by the Nazis' looting...

...They lead to longing and to speculation...

...At times Houghteling's characters seem thinly drawn, and her art-driven metaphors can be somewhat caricaturish...

...When the book opens Max is 17 years old and living in 1930s Paris with his parents...

...If not lovers, the two become fast friends...

...Your morose face would depress the clients, make them feel all the sadness they’ve come here to escape...

...discovers that he has a better eye than he thought he did—that Manet may not be fake after all...

...You see, Max'—Father's fist came down on the bedside table and the lamplight quivered—'this is why we do poorly when we affix ourselves to objects...

...She stayed on when the Nazis took over the Jeu de Paume and made it a storeroom for stolen art, keeping meticulous lists so the collections could one day be returned to their owners...

...And when Max himself returns to their hotel room with a Manet drawing he bought for a song from an unsuspecting print shop clerk peddling pornographic photographs, his father surmises that it is War loot and orders Max to drop it off at the Louvre...

...As a child he threw tantrums whenever a beloved painting was sold...

...You lack the hunger, the desire to hunt and chase,” he tells him...

...I was a work on paper: weightless, sketchy, all impulse," is the middling reflection that goes through Max's mind after he is mugged...

...The cold-blooded businessman takes a harsh view of his son’s talents...

...But unlike Daniel Berenzon, who owes his success to a cultivated detachment where artworks are concerned—he sold the paintings he inherited from his own father in the early 1920s, with one exception, Manet’s still life of almonds—Max is a sentimentalist...

...His mother is a Polish virtuoso pianist given increasingly to histrionics over the threat of a German invasion of her home country...

...He and his father return to the city from south-central France, where the family hid out withafarmerto whomthey had paid "a single enormous sum," only to find that Daniel's paintings have disappeared...

...Houghteling's finely drawn observations of the changing roles of son and father—now determined youth and defeated patriarch—are the major strength of her book...