|
|
|
|
|
|
In the 1960s and 1970s, an American
professor of Soviet economics forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of
underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have
it illegally shipped to the United States. Norton Dodge visited the apartments of
unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. John McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched. The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other.
|
|
Copyright ©2000
- 2003 Farrar, Straus
& Giroux |
The Ransom of Russian Art 
By 1977, he had a thousand works of art. His ultimate window of
interest involved the years from 1956 to 1986, and through his established contacts he
eventually acquired another eight thousand works--by far the largest collection of its
kind.