Art Auction Mystery - Hardcover

Nilsen, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 075345842X ISBN 13: 9780753458426

Publisher: Kingfisher, 2005

Synopsis

Sixteen famous paintings from collections around the world have been stolen and replaced with clever forgeries. Now these fake paintings, along with sixteen others, are going up for auction. After an anonymous tip, the reader has to come to the rescue! By comparing the paintings to the originals, the reader has all the clues to figure out which paintings are real and which are fakes. Including work by the world's most famous artists, this book is part mystery, part puzzle, part art reference book, and all-over fun!

About this title

About the Author:

Anna Nilsen is a former art history teacher and a prizewinning artist. She devised Kingfisher's highly successful Art Fraud Detective, The Great Art Scandal, I Can Spell, and I Can Count titles.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 4-8–Following up on Art Fraud Detective (Kingfisher, 2000), Nilsen offers another opportunity for detail-oriented students to pore over fine works of art and solve a mystery. The night before an auction, Henry, the auctioneer, is sent an anonymous e-mail suggesting that 16 of the 34 paintings are fakes. He enlists readers' help by providing information on four gangs of forgers, including their level of expertise and how much they get paid for their copies. Readers are then asked to identify the fakes and figure out how much money the crafty collector paid for them. Henry suggests creating a spreadsheet to fill in all the relevant data. This is a complex task made more interesting by the addition of the mathematics component. The meticulous solution is provided at the end. The high-quality glossy paper allows for excellent reproductions of paintings by Whistler, Warhol, Fra Angelico, Cézanne, and Renoir, among others. The auction catalog itself shows the paintings above short biographies of the artists and includes a description of their style. There is also a smaller image of the actual work of art that readers can use to determine the authenticity of the piece. This is a nice browsing title even if students don't solve the mystery. If your library has budding sleuths who are ready for a more complex challenge and who like art, this is the book for them.–Linda M. Kenton, San Rafael Public Library, CA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kingfisher
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 075345842X
• ISBN 13: 9780753458426
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48