PORTRAIT IN RED

A haunting painting holds a journalist in its thrall.

On an afternoon in Paris in the summer of 2015, food journalist and illustrator Harris spied a painting of a young girl, unfinished and unsigned, leaning against a residential wall. He found the apparently discarded portrait compelling and rescued it. So began a seven-year quest to discover its provenance. “I feel oddly drawn to the girl who stares out at me with a story she does not tell,” he writes. Harris, curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, was a significant contributor to California’s food revolution of the 1970s and ’80s as both author and publisher. His latest book is at once a detective story, a Parisian culinary travel memoir, and a chain of ruminations—often romanticized—on serendipity and the nature and power of art, especially anonymous art. Ever the urban ambler, Harris chronicles his investigations at great length, pausing here and there for interludes of navel-gazing. Though many of his observations and the introduction of less-well-known art figures can be arresting, other discourses in criticism and psychology seem self-consciously “arty” and overintellectualized. There is much borrowed wisdom in the form of quotations that range from illuminating to fanciful. He also transforms simple coincidences into the karmic and ethereal. This, plus overlength, tends to weaken the presumed focus of the book—the origins of The Girl in Red. Who was she, and why was she abandoned? But the chief problem with this sometimes entertaining, sometimes exasperating book is that, failing to find “closure” in his sleuthing, Harris doesn’t know where to end this “embellished tale of acquisition.”

Making more of a good painting than may actually be there.