In this first in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes involved in a race to recover the Secretum, a "shameful, secret panel" stolen from the artist's studio the night after his death in February of 1918. Her travels, at the behest of New York's Moderne Galerie Museum, owner of the famed 1907 "golden" Klimt portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, take her from the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Switzerland's Ascona, as well as to New York, Vienna, Helsinki, Paris, Montreal, and Girdwood, Alaska....
In this first in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Viennese artist Gustav Klimt, becomes i...
Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight years-dying quite suddenly of influenza in 1918 just as World War I came to an end-he left a stunning pictorial oeuvre. Schiele's obsession with sexuality, his own and that of others, made him at once a voyeur and a participant in that sexual imperative which Freud was simultaneously plumbing with such unsettling results. The disturbing revelations of Schiele's unmasking portraiture and of the new science of psychology disclosed a collective...
Egon Schiele was a meteor that flashed across the galaxy of Viennese art at the beginning of the last century. Although he lived only twenty-eight ...
Retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, is called to Vienna to help solve the brutal murder of a museum night watchman whose naked cadaver was propped up in the same pose as the nude self-portrait by Schiele above him. A series of attacks relating to Schiele occur, ranging from "censoring" of his nude figures' private parts with spray paint to desecration of his burial site. Amid restitution lawsuits and murderous competing gallery owners, Megan's investigations are endangered by the fanatical Grand Master of a secret sect dedicated to...
Retired art history professor Megan Crespi, an expert on the Expressionist artist Egon Schiele, is called to Vienna to help solve the brutal murder of...
In this third book in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, a major double portrait by the Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka showing himself with his lover Alma Mahler has been stolen from the Basel Museum in Switzerland. Left in its place is an exact duplicate, except that Alma has been replaced by an unknown woman. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, an expert on Viennese art, is called in to help with the investigation. Then, a second theft of fourteen crates of unknown Kokoschka artworks from a Viennese storage vault takes Megan to Vienna. There she meets by accident the...
In this third book in the Megan Crespi Mystery Series, a major double portrait by the Viennese Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka showing himself wi...
The art world is stunned. In the space of a little over a week three Edvard Munch paintings, including the iconic "Scream," have been stolen from museums in Oslo and Stockholm. Retired professor of art history Megan Crespi, on vacation in Scandinavia with her little Maltese dog Button and her old friend Lili Holm, is asked to help. In her capacity as Munch specialist, she visits three possible suspects, all major collectors of Munch, and soon finds her life is endangered. Being kidnapped had not been in her plans. Who is responsible? The fanatical "Norseliga" clan, with its emphasis on...
The art world is stunned. In the space of a little over a week three Edvard Munch paintings, including the iconic "Scream," have been stolen from muse...
Overflowing with passion for her work as a scholar and teacher, Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, Alessandra Comini reminisces through six decades as an unconventional art historian in this illustrated memoir. The author of award-winning books on Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and Ludwig van Beethoven, Comini draws on her sixty years of daily journals, sharing research-related anecdotes as she reflects on the formation and flowering of her distinguished career. Beginning with her colorful background as a refugee from Franco's Spain,...
Overflowing with passion for her work as a scholar and teacher, Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University in Dal...
In April of 1912, twenty-one-year old Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), known for his frank depictions of erotica as well as his Expressionist portraits, was arrested and imprisoned in a basement cell in the rural town of Neulengbach, some twenty miles from Vienna. There he made agonized diary entries and created twelve drawings of his dank surroundings. Half a century later, in August of 1963, as an enterprising PhD student from Texas in search of all sites and persons having to do with Schiele, the author of this book did what no previous scholar had yet done. She located and...
In April of 1912, twenty-one-year old Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918), known for his frank depictions of erotica as well as his Expression...
Austria's most influential and revered artist at the beginning of the last century was Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Master of three genres--allegory, portraiture, and landscape--his alluring imagery, decorative colors, and sinuous line seduce the eye and stir the mind. His landscapes are studded with opulent symbols of regeneration and fecundity, while his philosophical allegories enact and question the eternal recurrence of life and death. During an age of lingering societal repression, Klimt's riveting, sumptuous portraits of society women delivered an unmistakable and urgent message of...
Austria's most influential and revered artist at the beginning of the last century was Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). Master of three genres--allegory, ...
