Alessandra Comini

A moving van filled with eleven Wassily Kandinsky paintings stolen from Munich’s famous Lenbach House Museum during a violent neo-Nazi demonstration is hijacked in Slovakia. Two rival Kandinsky collectors appear to be involved: Igor Rasputin of Odessa, visiting in Munich, and Boris Zima of Moscow, whose agent Raisa Sokolova is keeping tabs on Rasputin. Puzzlingly, the museum adamantly declares there has been no theft, even though its night watchman has been found murdered. Also visiting Munich is retired art history professor Megan Crespi, slated to give a lecture she titles, curiously enough, “Double Kandinsky.” In between visits to “mad” King Ludwig’s fantasy castles, Megan comes into contact with possible suspects, ranging from Rasputin to Iris and Laszlo Togarassy, owners of Munich’s new The Blue Rider gallery featuring Kandinsky’s works, to Katrina Keller, associate director of the Lenbach. Manipulating events connected with the theft are a young, careless gambler who owns a building behind the Lenbach, two men from the Ukrainian island of Amiinyi—one a computer wizard, the other a science photographer—and their Munich engineer friend Alyksandr Miesel, neo-Nazi leader Walter Krankenhauer, and Detective Dieter Löser. Crespi’s lecture, including results of state-of-the-art XRF technology, becomes the revelatory preamble to a thrilling denouement that cracks the Kandinsky conundrum.

A Megan Crespi Mystery Series Novel

The Kandinsky Conundrum

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 Norwegian superiority? The beautiful cosmetics queen, Myrtl Kildahl, who hides her German roots, or the Swedish collector who denies he is the grandson of writer August Strindberg? Pursuit of the truth takes Megan from Copenhagen and Oslo, to Bergen and Trondheim, and finally to Stockholm and the myth-laden island of Runmarö. Megan’s dog adds an element that qualifies him as a detective second only to his mistress. Includes Readers Guide.

A Megan Crespi Mystery Novel

The Munch Murders

During a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio at the Vienna State Opera there is an explosion in the foyer just off the auditorium. Auguste Rodin’s famous 1909 bronze bust of composer and conductor Gustav Mahler has been blown up and a hate-filled note has been left at the scene demanding that there be “no more Jews defiling our culture.” Retired art historian and musicologist Megan Crespi, in Vienna to lecture, is at the performance with her former student, the renowned cellist Egga Streicher, and is asked by her friend, Chief of Police Erich Decker, to help in tracking down the culprit. Soon copy-cat vandalism of Jewish monuments around the city breaks out. Things come to a horrendous climax during a performance of Mahler’s great Second Symphony, the “Resurrection” symphony, but is it the only surprise awaiting Megan Crespi’s dangerous investigation? Includes Readers Guide.

The Mahler Mayhem

Gustav Klimt

The alluring art of the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918) has seduced art lovers for decades.

Egon Schiele

New Edition

The Artist's Vision of Himself

Käthe Kollwitz

Elizabeth Prelinger

Hildegard Bachert

The German printmaker, draughtsman, and sculptor Kathe Kollwitz's images of mothers and children and of protest against social injustice have long been admired by both critics and the public. Kollwitz adhered to a figurative style in the era of abstraction and she depicted socially-engaged subject matter when it was unfashionable. Critics have often focused on those issues and have rarely studied the ways in which the artist manipulated technique and resolved formal problems. This illustrated book redresses this imbalance, portraying Kollwitz as an innovative and virtuosic artist rather than a mere chronicler of particular themes.

National Gallery of Art, Washington ; [catalog of an Exhibition Held May 3 - August 16, 1992]

Providing a rare glimpse into one of the finest private art collections in the world, this book presents the extraordinary collection of the Neue Galerie's co-founder, Ronald S. Lauder. This book accompanies an exhibition of the Lauder collection at the Neue Galerie, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in the fall of 2011. The book focuses on six areas: medieval art, arms and armor, Old Master paintings, nineteenth- and twentiethcentury drawings, fine and decorative art of turn-of-thetwentieth-century Vienna, and modern and contemporary art. It features works by Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Vasily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, among many others. Essays by medieval art specialist William Wixom; Stuart Phyrr, arms and armor curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art; esteemed drawings collector Eugene Thaw; independent scholars Christian Witt-Dörring and Alessandra Comini; and Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, discuss how the Lauder collection was assembled and round out this generously illustrated volume. Encompassing a broad range of masterworks, this book offers an in-depth look at the Lauder collection through numerous illustrations and scholarly essays. This book accompanies an exhibition of the Lauder collection at the Neue Galerie, which celebrates its tenth anniversary in the fall of 2011. Encompassing a broad range of masterworks, this book offers an in-depth look at the Lauder collection through numerous illustrations and scholarly essays.

Selections from the 3rd Century BC to the 20th Century : Germany, Austria, and France

The Ronald S. Lauder Collection

In this unique study of the myth-making process across two centuries, Comini examines the contradictory imagery of Beethoven in contemporary verbal accounts, and in some 200 paintings, prints, sculptures, and monuments.

A Study in Mythmaking

The Changing Image of Beethoven

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 cultural anxiety during the last years of the crumbling Austrian empire. As a seer into the souls of his sitters, Schiele redefined portraiture in the age of Angst. Alessandra Comini is University Distinguished Professor of Art History Emerita at Southern Methodist University, where she taught for thirty-one years after having served on the faculty at Columbia University for ten years. She is the author of eight books, one of which, "Egon Schiele's Portraits," was nominated for the National Book Award. The Republic of Austria extended her its Grand Decoration of Honor in 1990. This is her third book on the artist; she has also published "Schiele in Prison," an extended essay and English translation of the 1912, makeshift diary Schiele kept during his twenty-four days in a provincial prison cell-a forgotten cell which she discovered and photographed in 1963. The cell is now part of a Schiele Museum in the village of Neulengbach. Her 2014 Megan Crespi mystery novel, "Killing for Klimt," is followed by "The Schiele Slaughters."

Egon Schiele's Portraits

Two monumental granite statues by famed German artist Käthe Kollwitz—the Grieving Parents—have been stolen from a World War I soldiers’ cemetery in Belgium. What could the motive have been for such an unlikely theft? On a visit to the director of the Kollwitz Museum in Cologne, retired art history professor and Kollwitz scholar Megan Crespi is asked to aid in tracking down the robber or robbers. As she pursues clues and visits possible suspects more Kollwitz statues are stolen in Cologne and Berlin. Crespi’s itinerary takes her to the Berlin Kollwitz Museum, Weimar, the Baltic Sea island of Rügen, Greifswald, and finally to the Kollwitz House in Moritzburg. On the way she interacts with physicians Abraham Rückgabe and Iliana Frankel, the just-married couple Monika von Putbus and Akram al-Aljamie, and unscrupulous CEO of Rügen’s asbestos-contaminated Dorotek factory, Reinhold Fromm, collector of dominatrix drawings. We meet possible suspects, Iranian prince Yusri Pahlavi, greedy Lukas Zamann of the Galerie Zamann, and the mysterious “Marie Schmidt,” of Moritzburg, Kollwitz’s final home. All seem to be connected to the spate of Kollwitz thefts. Can Crespi solve these thefts and will the precious artworks be found? An unexpected denouement involving seven persons and two cats gives us the answer.

Alessandra Comini

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