PICTURES OF MY DESIRE

A New York art consultant sells an Impressionist painting to a sultan and meets someone with concerns about its provenance in Goldberg Igra’s novel.

Emily Wolf aspires to be an art history professor at a New England college, but for now she’s in Manhattan, working at Sterling’s Art Advisory. She’s more bookish than many in the Soho art scene, but she has the requisite expertise to work in New York before heading to the comfy confines of academia. At Sterling’s, she has just bought a $23 million Pissarro for a sultan. Emily meets a man named Nate who has been researching the painting and tells her after the sale that the Pissarro was given to the Nazis by a Jewish family in Paris in exchange for their safety during the war. Nate and Emily start dating, but this revelation complicates things. For Nate, the issue is personal, as a personal tragedy in his family mirrors those of the past. (His mother tells him, “None of this, what you’re trying to do, is going to rid our family of its ghosts.”) The professional becomes personal for Emily, too, and when a flashy Soho gallery owner named Julia comes into the picture, Emily is entranced but also wonders if she’s been targeted. Goldberg Igra’s novel has an irresistible premise, and the narrative’s treatments of the New York art scene and the WWII-era looting of great artworks are beautifully realized, as are the principal characters. The novel is very much steeped in the richness of the art world, but it is also an emotional story propelled by clear lines that are drawn from the present to the past (Nate is one whose personal loss is inseparable from the horrors of history). The author has a wonderful gift for tapping into Emily’s deep feelings of concern, which deftly support the story’s important themes.

An expressive, penetrating novel that highlights the personal stories behind the glitz of the art world.