Missing Art

[Rod Drake]

Every day for six months, the little old man in the worn, long-out-of-style black suit and threadbare fedora came to the Chicago Art Museum.  He went to the same room every day, sat on the same marble bench, and looked at one specific Van Gogh painting for hours, the only Van Gogh in the spacious room.  The Van Gogh picture was a broad field of flowers in France, marked by bright, vibrant blues and greens, with sharp orange and red slashes from the low sun and a small muddy brown wheelbarrow was lost in the flowers.  Then, one day in late October, he came into the museum as usual, walked to his regular room and stood stunned—the painting was gone, the wall was empty.  He turned, gesturing at the blank wall in silent bewilderment, to a museum guards who said, “That painting was only on loan; they took it down last night and returned it to the museum who owned it this morning.”  The little old man looked around the room once more, shook his head sadly, then quietly left the museum, went home, loaded the old revolver he kept under his tattered bed and blew his brains out.

[Gita]

I live with an artist who sometimes has giclee prints made of his work. Those are prints on canvas, and unless you walk up and run a fingertip over the surface of a giclee, it is virtually impossible to tell from the real thing. Of course it is not the canvas touched by Van Gogh, but I came back to read this and agreed with Bill Floyd's observation. It feels forced that someone would blow his brains out in a day and age when everyone can own the beautiful paintings once reserved for museums and the ultra rich.

[Bill Floyd]

Very Van Gogh.  At the risk of sounding glib, though, might I suggest a print instead of a bullet?  

[Angela]

We never know how much is too much.

[Toby Tucker Hecht]

Somehow I can believe that this can happen. 

[Diana E. Backhouse]

How terribly sad that the old man thought that the Van Gogh painting was the only thing worth living for.