Jonathan Santlofer Entices Readers into Learning Art History With the Masterful 'The Lost Van Gogh'

Acclaimed artist and author, Jonathan Santlofer, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss his latest suspense thriller, The Last Van Gogh: A Novel. The story follows Alexis and Luke, both art enthusiasts, as they trace the path of a missing Van Gogh painting, believed to be the painter’s last self-portrait. Along the way, they discover that this painting was once hidden from the Nazis, who at the time were going into German-occupied countries and confiscating artwork and other cultural items. Similarly to Santlofer’s previous thriller, The Last Mona Lisa, The Last Van Gogh includes not only Alexis and Luke, but also Interpol agent, John Washington Smith. Santlofer explained, “I just wasn’t finished with those characters. While I was writing [The Last Mona Lisa], they were still talking to me inside my head and so this book sort of came about just as that book was finishing… [There’s] Luke Perrone, who’s a kind of mixed-up, … very troubled young man, who’s an artist in New York and his partner, Alexis, who is… her father is an art criminal, and then there’s John Washington Smith… and how these three people come together, not always very happily, intrigued me.”

Regarding the looted art, Santlofer noted that between 20-30% of all the art artifacts in Europe were stolen by the Nazis during World War II. He explained that Hitler had been planning to open a museum in his hometown stocked with all the stolen art. Additionally, the Nazis were not only seizing the art, they were also destroying and burning some in bonfires. Because of this, important paintings were hidden and people risked their lives trying to protect these valuable artifacts. As Santlofer said in his book, “Every lost artwork, every stolen artwork, was a stolen life, because most of the people’s artwork that was stolen were murdered. The Nazis murdered them to get this work, unless they managed to escape, and they escaped without the work. It’s really astonishing; it’s a crazy thing to think about.” And while much of the art has since been recovered, “…there are at least, at least, 100,000 works of art that are still missing and we don’t know where they are, and these works are still traded on the dark web. That’s what my book is about, really. I did a lot of research and a lot of reading to discover how these things could be traded and sold nowadays. It’s very diabolical, very dark.”