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Lost art: the stories of missing masterpieces.

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Imagine a Museum of Lost Art. If this imaginary museum contained just the artwork we knew was lost—whether from theft, purposeful destruction, vandalism, war, or the forces of nature—it would still contain more masterpieces than those in all the world’s current museums combined. In Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces , art historian Noah Charney guides you through just such an imaginary museum. In 12 fascinating lectures accompanied by stunning graphics, you will learn the stories behind the theft and/or destruction of some of the world’s most famous pieces of art.

Just as we should not forget history since it has passed, or loved ones who have passed away, so too we must keep lost art and monuments in our thoughts as we study history.

Noah Charney is a writer and art historian who specializes in the study of art crime and forgeries. He has taught at Yale University, Brown University, the American University of Rome, and the University of Ljubljana. He is the best-selling author of more than 20 books, and his works have been translated into 14 languages. He founded the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and is a teacher in its Postgraduate Certificate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection.

By This Expert

01: Welcome to the Museum of Lost Art

Discover some of the most important works that would be located in an imaginary “Museum of Lost Art.” Learn about The Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck, one of the most famous pieces of art in Europe when completed in 1432. But in the subsequent 600 years, it has been the victim of 13 different crimes, and, thus, constantly in and out of that imaginary museum.

02: Hall of Heists: Thieves and the Art They Steal

Annually, in Italy alone, 20,000–30,000 works of art are reported stolen. The US Department of Justice ranks art crime as the third highest-grossing criminal trade. Who steals art, and what do they really want from it? Learn about some of the most famous art heists in history, from Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

03: The Mob Wing: Organized Crime in Stolen Art

Most art theft involves organized crime at some step along the route—stolen art being much more difficult to trace than bank accounts and electronic transfers. Discover the mob connections to the still unsolved mystery of 1969 of the stolen Nativity by Caravaggio, and the 13 works stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990.

04: Gallery of Fakes: Forgeries and Attribution

Learn about the relationship between connoisseurship, provenance, and forensics. Can forensics alone—even using the latest technology—accurately identify authentic paintings from those that are forged by a great student of the master? Or does the answer still come down to opinion, as it did with A City on a Rock by “Goya”?

05: The War Wing: Art Plundered through Conflict

Explore the long and troubled relationship between war and art destruction—from the 212 BCE Roman army’s defeat and looting of the Greek city of Siracusa to the 2022 Russian destruction of the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol, Ukraine. Learn about Hitler’s Altaussee art cache and the complicated issue of art repatriation from WWII.

06: The Hall of Vandals: Wreckers and Iconoclasts

Learn about the difference between iconoclasm and vandalism regarding the destruction of art. Can acts of iconoclasm be justified if the perpetrator doesn’t consider the piece to be “art”? What about modern-day destruction of a statue of a despised dictator? Explore many acts of religious iconoclasm, including the 2001 destruction of the 16th-century Buddha Statues at Bamiyan by the Taliban.

07: Gallery of Misfortune: Art Lost by Accident

Much of art is fragile and can be destroyed in an instant by various types of accidents—from a museum visitor tripping over his shoelaces at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2006 and falling into a Ming dynasty vase to fires or shipwrecks. Learn about the great fire of 1698 at Whitehall Palace in London that destroyed works by Michelangelo, Holbein, and Bernini.

08: Disaster Wing: Art against the Forces of Nature

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, an estimated 1.5 million tons of lava and ash were spewed over the nearby landscape every second. In addition to people and animals, the eruption smothered uncounted paintings, frescoes, and other artworks, lost for 18 centuries—lost and preserved. Learn about art damage from earthquakes, lightning, and floods, and how some art has been salvaged.

09: No Bequest: Art Destroyed by Artists and Owners

Michelangelo destroyed scores of his own in-progress drawings to make sure no one knew how hard he had to work on a piece. Botticelli sacrificed his own works to Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities in a fit of piety. And other artists destroy their own “imperfect” pieces in sheer frustration. Explore this unusual phenomenon that keeps us from enjoying countless numbers of artistic works we otherwise would have had today.

10: The Basement: Strange and Unsolved Cases

Explore the stories of many lost artworks for which we have no acceptable explanation. And learn about strange “one-off” situations such as The Rescue by American sculptor Horatio Greenough, who said it “depicted the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes.” Previously located at the US Capitol, a joint resolution to the House recommended the statue “be ground into dust and scattered to the four winds.”

11: Not in the Vault: Fabled Art That Never Was

What happened to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Leonardo’s Medusa Shield, and the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan? Or is it they simply never existed at all? Explore the many theories about these items, as well as the possibly fabled cities of El Dorado and Atlantis, and other items of modern times. Were they purely imaginary or were they partly real? And will we ever know with certainty?

12: Lost and Found: Preserving and Restoring Art

The good news is that lost art does not have to stay lost forever. Art can now be digitally reproduced with no ill effects to the original piece, which now allows us to enjoy detailed replicas of items such as 36,000-year-old paintings. Learn about the amazing, full-sized, precise replica of the French Chauvet Cave painting. Museums worldwide have digitized artwork to make tens of thousands of pieces available to all of us.

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Special 2 Course Set Course No. 70055

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Course 1 of 2 Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian High Renaissance

Professor George R. Bent Washington and Lee University

Explore the life and times of the man whose name is synonymous with inventiveness, curiosity, and creative genius. In Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian High Renaissance, taught by art historian and Professor George R. Bent, you’ll take a powerful and engrossing look at this grand master, the intriguing world he inhabited and shaped, and the legacies he left behind for us. These visually rich 36 lectures will give you fresh insights into Leonardo’s iconic paintings, his important anatomical studies, and his astonishingly prescient visions for machines we now take for granted. But more than that, you’ll experience what it was like to live in Leonardo’s world during the High Renaissance in Italy.

36 Lectures

Course 2 of 2 Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces

Professor Noah Charney

Imagine a Museum of Lost Art. If this imaginary museum contained just the artwork we knew was lost—whether from theft, purposeful destruction, vandalism, war, or the forces of nature—it would still contain more masterpieces than those in all the world’s current museums combined. In Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces , art historian Noah Charney guides you through just such an imaginary museum. In 12 fascinating lectures accompanied by stunning graphics, you will learn the stories behind the theft and/or destruction of some of the world’s most famous pieces of art.

12 Lectures

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Virtual Travel

A Smithsonian magazine special report

Virtual Museum of Lost Art Asks Visitors to Help Track Down Missing Masterpieces

A new online exhibition revisits the fate of stolen or vanished paintings by the likes of van Gogh, Monet and Cézanne

Nora McGreevy

Correspondent

In March, as much of the world went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, thieves broke into the Netherlands’ shuttered Singer Laren museum and made off with a costly Vincent van Gogh landscape: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884). The audacious smash-and-grab raid shocked officials, and though ransom photos of the work later surfaced, the painting itself—a muted landscape dominated by grays and browns—has not yet been recovered.

Now, an online exhibition is encouraging anyone with a hunch regarding the whereabouts of van Gogh’s work to put forth their own hunches. In “ Missing Masterpieces ,” on view through February 10, 2021, audiences can explore high-resolution images of 12 well-known artworks that were stolen or have simply vanished over the years. Internet sleuths are encouraged to scour Reddit threads, news clippings and other corners of the internet for clues and send their theories to [email protected] . Per a statement , users can also post their ideas on social media using the hashtag #MissingMasterpieces.

Sponsored by electronics conglomerate Samsung, the exhibition is part of a marketing campaign for the company’s high-definition televisions, reports Kabir Jhala for the Art Newspaper . Art historian Noah Charney , founder of the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA), curated the selection of works. He tells artnet News ’ Naomi Rea that the so-called “impossible exhibition” is loosely based on his 2018 book, The Museum of Lost Art .

“Very few of these lost works are definitively lost, and the idea is that people can be more interactive and send in some tips or ideas about where the works might be,” Charney says. “Enough of these lost works resurface, often in very unexpected and surprising ways, that there is hope that some of these might be found again.”

Crowdsourcing has proven to be a valuable tool for art crime sleuths in the past.

“From contradictory media reports to speculation in Reddit feeds—the clues are out there,” Charney adds in the statement. “But the volume of information can be overwhelming. … It is not unheard of for an innocuous tip posted online to be the key that unlocks a case.”

Works in the exhibition include Paul Cézanne’s View of Auvers-sur-Oise (1879-80), which was stolen in true Hollywood fashion on New Year’s Eve 1999. That night, a professional burglar took advantage of celebratory fireworks to cut a hole into the roof of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and descend by rope, using their own smoke canister and a handheld fan to waft smoke and obscure security cameras’ view. All told, the thief made off with the $3.9-million Cézanne landscape in less than ten minutes, as John Ezard reported for the Guardian at the time.

Also featured in the exhibition is Chloe & Emma , a 2013 photorealistic oil painting by Barbora Kysilkova that was stolen from an Oslo gallery in April 2015 . The thieves also stole the artist’s 2014 work Swan Song . Though the paintings were never recovered, Kysilkova went on to track down one of the culprits and paint his portrait—an experience recounted in a new documentary titled The Painter and the Thief.

One work in the exhibition was looted during wartime: Jacob Jordaens’ A Mythological Scene With a Young Bacchus, which was stolen from Poland during World War II. Other featured paintings were lost in the shuffle of time. William Blake’s monumental Last Judgment , for instance, was slated to star in a 1810 exhibition but disappeared after the show was canceled.

Famous artworks can be tricky to sell on the black market. Rather than offloading artworks directly, thieves often use stolen paintings to barter for other illegal goods, Charney tells Euronews ’ Luke Hurst. In the case of van Gogh’s Parsonage, authorities believe that the work is being used as collateral in the criminal underworld, artnet News reports.

Andreas Blühm, director of Groninger Museum , which loaned the painting to the Singer Laren in March, says that continued attention to the painting’s plight can only help.

As he tells artnet News , “I don’t really know yet, but I hope that any kind of publicity will help keep the memory of the painting and thus the painting itself alive.”

“ Missing Masterpieces ” is on view virtually through February 10, 2021.

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Nora McGreevy | | READ MORE

Nora McGreevy is a former daily correspondent for Smithsonian . She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in Wired , Washingtonian , the Boston Globe , South Bend Tribune , the New York Times and more.

Articles and Features

The Gallery of Lost Art. The Erased Archive of Art You Will Never See

By Shira Wolfe

“The Gallery of Lost Art was an immersive, online exhibition that told the stories of artworks that had disappeared. Destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, ephemeral – some of the most significant artworks of the last 100 years have been lost and can no longer be seen.” Tate

Either destroyed, stolen, discarded, rejected, erased, or ephemeral by nature, some of the most significant artworks of the past 100 years have been lost forever, and can no longer be experienced in the flesh. For this reason, in 2012 the Tate initiated a project called The Gallery of Lost Art – an immersive, online exhibition that told the stories of disappeared artworks. The virtual yearlong exhibition explored the circumstances and stories behind the loss of some major works of art by over 40 artists including Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Willem de Kooning, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin. Viewers could wander through a virtual warehouse space and explore the stories of lost artworks through films, sound clips, digital images, documents and links to other resources. After a year, fittingly, the website itself was ‘lost’ and taken down. A full-length book by Jennifer Mundy titled Lost Art remains, compiling expanded narratives about the different case studies. What follows are a few of the most compelling ‘lost art’ stories.

Francis Bacon’s Study for Man with Microphones

In 1946, Francis Bacon completed Study for Man with Microphones , a painting depicting a public orator who appears to be caught mid-sentence. He exhibited the work twice that year, then reworked the painting at some point over the course of the next 15 years. In 1962, the painting was exhibited in its revised form as Gorilla with Microphones . The microphones from the original painting remained, but the man seated under an umbrella had been replaced with the truncated torso of a nude with its back to the viewer, head and face distorted. However, Bacon was still not satisfied. Two years later, the painting was listed as ‘abandoned’ in a catalogue raisonné of his work and the only known image that remains of the original Study for Man with Microphones is a black and white photograph reproduced in one of the 1946 exhibition catalogues.

Bacon was notorious for having trouble knowing when to stop working on his canvases. Often, they became so filled up with pigment he would have to discard them. He also destroyed works that he wasn’t satisfied with. After Bacon’s death in 1992, almost 100 slashed or destroyed canvases were discovered in his studio. Among these works was Gorilla with Microphones , with two large sections cut from the centre of the canvas. Despite these slashes, the painting reveals Bacon’s approach to art very well. He once even commented that his destroyed works were among his best, admitting that he often regretted losing them.    

John Baldessari’s Cremation Project

On 24 July 1970, John Baldessari burned all his paintings made between May 1953 and March 1966. These dates marked the moments he had started and stopped painting in a more traditional sense. From 1966, Baldessari started moving more and more towards the conceptual realm, incorporating photography and text in his canvases. He started to wonder about the vast number of paintings in his studio and wished to explore art beyond painting.

In his writings from that period, Baldessari notes: “The world has too much art – I have made too many objects – what to do? Burn all my paintings, etc., done in the past few years. Have them cremated in a mortuary. Pay all fees, receive all documents. Have event recorded at County Recorder’s. Send out announcements? Or should it be a private affair? Keep ashes in urn.”

And so Baldessari decided to make an artwork out of his desire for a fresh start in art. He found a crematorium owner in San Diego who agreed to incinerate his artworks in a furnace usually used for human cremations. David Wing documented the process for Baldessari as part of the Cremation Project . The project, involving the destruction of 13 years of work in one go, proved to be highly emotional and conceptual, posing the question of whether it mattered if artworks no longer exist materially. Baldessari was interested in exploring questions such as: “Where does art reside? Is it physically there in that painting? Is it in my head? Could it be a trace memory? Could it be a photo? What is necessary for it? Can you just talk about it?” The process of the Cremation Project was made to feel like a human cremation every step of the way. The ashes of the paintings were placed in several boxes normally used for human remains, while Baldessari also kept a portion of the ashes in an urn that looked like a leather-bound book. Baldessari announced the demise of his paintings in the local newspaper, in order to stop himself from returning to painting as a comfortable and safe technique. The Cremation Project marked a real turn in Baldessari’s career, and its literal creation of the death of painting made this work of art a landmark in the history of conceptual art.

“For me the Berlin Wall was probably one of the most successful media events I ever did. The whole reason almost for doing the wall was more for the idea of doing it and almost as a gesture more than it was to actually paint a wall.” Keith Haring

Keith Haring’s Berlin Wall Mural

In 1961, the East German government erected a barbed wire fence, and then a concrete wall with watchtowers and anti-vehicle trenches in order to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West by physically separating the areas. As a result, families and friends were separated, and the Berlin Wall became a powerful symbol of the iron curtain which separated East and West Europe. Between 1961 and 1989, around 100 to 200 people were killed trying to escape over the wall. The destruction of the Berlin Wall began on 9 November 1989 but some parts of it – left as a commemoration of those trying times – are still visible and have become an open-air museum. Countless artists and everyday citizens, in fact, left their mark on the wall at one point or another. Among these people is the famous street artist Keith Haring.

In 1986, the Director of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum invited Haring to paint a mural on a section of the wall. Haring enthusiastically accepted the invitation and completed his mural of nearly 100 metres long in a day. He used the colours of the East and West German flags in order to symbolise the bringing together of the two peoples. Haring worked without any sketches and without assistants, creating interlinked figures stretching across the 100 metres of the wall. He later recalled of the experience:

“When I started to paint, the East Germans were peering over the wall all the time. At first they were curious because they saw all the people, sort of milling around on the western side and the press and things, so they didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. But eventually after they came out a few times and realised that what I was painting was not really derogatory or insulting them in any way, they just decided to let me alone and stayed behind the wall the rest of the time.”

The mural was publicized and promoted by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and Haring himself. Knowing from the start that the mural would not be permanent, he valued more the gesture itself than the actual painting on the wall. That same night the mural was completed, someone painted large sections of Haring’s mural grey. Soon after, other artists and graffitists followed suit and started painting on Haring’s section of the wall. After three months, very little was left of Haring’s mural, and after the fall of the Berlin wall, all that remained of it was in people’s memories and photographs. But this did not bother Haring, who said of his art:

“It is temporary and its permanency is unimportant. Its existence is already established. It can be made permanent by the camera.”

Otto Dix’s The Trench

As a young man in 1914, German artist Otto Dix voluntarily joined the German army and fought for four years in the trenches during the First World War. During these war years, Dix made many sketches of life in the trenches. Expressionist in style, the works attempt to capture the violent energy of war through anonymous characters. Several years after the war had ended, Dix decided to tackle the intense subject of the war experience, which he feared was already fading within the consciousness of post-war society. This time, he decided to depict the experience of recognisable individuals in gruesome detail. In order to refresh his wartime memories of dismembered and maimed bodies, Dix visited mortuaries and dissecting rooms, and then set to work on his painting The Trench (1920-23), which became a monumental piece: over two metres wide canvas filled with mangled corpses, smashed skulls, worms and maggots. It took him three years to complete the painting.

The painting evoked intense reactions from the public and critics. Some people felt it provoked an anti-war sentiment that might weaken people’s inner war-readiness, or were simply so disturbed and sickened, arguing people didn’t need or want reminders of the war. Though no one could argue with the brilliant realism of how Dix depicted the trenches, many found the detail and the immediacy unacceptable in the context of an oil painting, highly elevated in cultural status. The director of the Cologne museum who had purchased and shown the work was forced to resign, and the painting was returned to Dix in 1924.

The painting had by then become an important symbol of the anti-war movement and was included in the Nie wieder Krieg! (No More War!) touring exhibition in 1924. In 1928, the Dresden art museum purchased The Trench , and it disappeared into storage. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Dix was fired from his position as Professor at the Dresden Art Academy and was temporarily banned from showing any work. The Nazis included The Trench in their Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. The works in the exhibition were presented as expressions by those who were mentally ill, perverse or unpatriotic. After this exhibition, the painting was long thought to have been burned in 1939 along with hundreds of other artworks the Nazis burned. However, it appears that the painting was in fact sold by the Nazis to an art dealer in 1940. What happened to the painting after that is not clear. Most likely, it was at some point destroyed.

Today, The Trench is known only through a number of black and white photographs, which despite the bad quality show the work’s powerful and monumental nature.

Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing

In the autumn of 1953, Robert Rauschenberg, 28 years old at the time, embarked on a new passion project: he wanted to explore an idea he’d had involving the erasure of an already existing artwork by one of the most highly regarded abstract expressionist artists at the time. He stated at the time: “I had been working for some time at erasing, with the idea that I wanted to create a work of art by that method… Not just by deleting certain lines, you understand, but by erasing the whole thing. If it was my own work being erased, then the erasing would only be half the process, and I wanted it to be the whole. Anyway, I realised that it had to be something by someone who everybody agreed was great, and the most logical person for that was de Kooning.”

De Kooning’s star was on the rise at the time, and Rauschenberg had known him and idolized him for several years. He visited de Kooning’s studio with a bottle of whisky and set out to explain his idea. At first, de Kooning kept bringing the notion of destruction up, and Rauschenberg in turn kept trying to explain that the work would not be destroyed. At first, de Kooning was not too pleased with the idea, but after some time he began to understand what Rauschenberg was after, and agreed but decided to make it difficult for Rauschenberg by giving him an artwork that he would actually miss.

Rauschenberg had been actively testing the boundaries and definition of art. With his White Paintings , a series of plain, all-white canvases, he had paired painting down to an absolute minimum. Next came the Erased de Kooning Drawing , as a kind of extension of the White Paintings . With the project, Rauschenberg posed the question whether a work of art could still mean something when completely effaced by a third party.

The act of erasure itself proved difficult. It required several weeks of work, and many types of erasers, to remove all of the original drawing. “In the end it really worked,” he later said. “I liked the result. I felt it was a legitimate work of art, created by the technique of erasing.” The work was first exhibited in 1963 and was passionately discussed all over the art world. Rauschenberg was satisfied: he felt a new work had successfully been created by this act of erasing the original work.

Relevant  sources to learn more

Discover other stories of lost artworks on the Gallery of Lost Art website Watch videos about various lost artworks on the Gallery of Lost Art on Vimeo You may also like: Lost Architecture. Iconic Buildings That No Longer Exist Portraits of America: Keith Haring’s Crack is Wack Mural Frida Kahlo’s “The Two Fridas”

Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces

• By: Noah Charney , The Great Courses
• Narrated by: Noah Charney
• Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
• 4.6 out of 5 stars 4.6 (10 ratings)

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I'm a writer and this course is to blame.

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bad recording audio. too many breaks and crackles,

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Publisher's summary

Imagine a Museum of Lost Art. If this imaginary museum contained just the artwork we knew was lost— whether from theft, purposeful destruction, vandalism, war, or the forces of nature—it would still contain more masterpieces than those in all the world’s current museums combined. Imagine that!

In Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces, art historian Noah Charney guides you through just such an imaginary museum. In 12 fascinating lectures accompanied by stunning graphics, you will hear the stories behind the theft and/or destruction of some of the world’s most famous pieces of art. From the 21st-century Taliban’s iconoclastic destruction of the 500-year-old Buddha Statues at Bamiyan to the earthquake that felled the Colossus of Rhodes in 226 BCE, no one knows how many great works of art have been destroyed or lost throughout history. Only very few have ever resurfaced.

In this course you will learn about dozens of pieces of art whose whereabout are completely unknown at this time, including:

• Paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The biggest art heist in modern history occurred in Boston on March 18, 1990, when 13 paintings were stolen from the Gardner Museum. The FBI values the works by Vermeer and Manet, among others, at $500 million. Some believe the mafia was involved. The museum is still asking the public for leads.

• Nativity by Caravaggio. One of the most notorious and long-running unsolved thefts in 1969, this Caravaggio painting was stolen from the Oratory of Saint Lawrence in Palermo, Sicily, and it has continued to appear on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Art list since. Current thinking is that the Sicilian mafia was behind the theft and still has possession of it.

• Hanging Gardens of Babylon. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were noted for their architecture, engineering, and the beauty of the plants themselves. The only problem is that no one can find them, not even a reliable trace. Were they simply a matter of fantasy?

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

• Categories: Arts & Entertainment

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• Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 26
• Performance 4 out of 5 stars 21
• Story 4 out of 5 stars 21

Creation stories, found within many ancient cultures, are traditional accounts of the origins of the universe, the earth, and humanity. Often embodied as epic poetry, and told through the acts of divine beings, creation stories illuminate the values, beliefs, and creeds of the earliest civilizations. As such, these stories show us how early cultures made sense of the human condition, in theological, philosophical, and political terms. These 12 dynamic and thought-provoking lectures offer you a penetrating look at the origin stories of the great civilizations of the Mediterranean.

Flawless in Every Way

• By Justin Sproles on 11-18-23

By: Joseph Lam , and others

• The Many Lives of the World's Most Famous Museum

By: James Gardner

• Narrated by: Graham Halstead
• Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
• Overall 4.5 out of 5 stars 33
• Performance 4.5 out of 5 stars 30
• Story 4.5 out of 5 stars 30

The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world's greatest art museum.

Enlightening

• By Jean on 10-29-20

What listeners say about Lost Art: The Stories of Missing Masterpieces

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 4 out of 5 stars

Fascinating series, but flawed last lecture?

The series is absolutely incredible, thoughtfully organized and compellingly told. But the final lecture has two instances of word-for-word repetition of sections, first about Salvator Mundi and later about the Next Rembrandt Project. A little bizarre, and a departure from the exquisite quality of the rest of the series and Great Courses lectures generally.

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• Overall 3 out of 5 stars
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Great Content -- Awkward Narration

Huge respect for this Yale professor's knowledge and experience. Sadly, his reading and enunciation skills are lacking, and repeatedly distracting from the content. This would have been 5 Stars across the board if a professional narrator had been hired. Great content. Difficult listening.

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Lost art: works with a death warrant

Should we mourn the loss of art that was only made to be destroyed.

John Baldessari, The Cremation Project (1970) © John Baldessari

In our examination of lost art, we tend to assume that art that is destroyed is, by definition, tragic, upsetting to art lovers, collectors and the artists themselves. But there is a vein of art that was made only to be destroyed. Art “born” with its death warrant signed. In such cases, art lovers might sigh for not having been able to see the work prior to its obliteration or bemoan the fact that the work was deemed disposable by the artist. We praise Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend, whom Kafka charged with burning all his manuscripts after Kafka’s death. Brod decided that it was for the collective good to go against his friend’s wishes, and instead Kafka’s texts were published—and are considered among the greatest works of literature ever written. And in 1970, when the late contemporary artist John Baldessari turned to conceptual art, he famously burned all of his earlier figurative and abstract work in a symbolic “death” of his artistic body. The resulting installation created from the ashes and called Cremation Project , remains in the artist’s estate.

The practice of artists destroying their own work is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the modern era, however. Prior to the 18th-century rise of galleries and the art market, and especially before the industrialisation of paint production, when pigments could finally be purchased for reasonable sums of money in tubes or canisters, raw materials for paintings and sculptures were so expensive that it would have been foolish to destroy them. Works were also almost exclusively made on commission; they did not sit in an artist’s studio until a buyer or exhibitor could be found. So aside from irregular incidents, such as Botticelli offering his own paintings to Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities in a fever of piety, artists before the modern period could not afford to ruin what they had made.

Artists in fact very often preserved materials by reusing them. During the Renaissance, vellum and paper for drawing were not inexpensive; they were not nearly as costly as painstakingly planed and joined wooden panels, but they were nevertheless a commodity not to be disposed of profligately. As a result, artists frequently filled paper and vellum with sketches, front and back, on any blank space. Canvases might also be reused, and modern technology permits us to look beneath the top layers of paint, to view what lies beneath.

Studying paintings with x-rays, ultra-violet and infrared lights can reveal pictures, buried but still lively, beneath the surface layers of paint. If light causes these upper layers to fade, the underlying pictures can ghost to the surface, gradually appearing as hazy outlines called pentimenti, as can be seen in the painting of a child suckling at the breast of his naked mother, beside an ox and lamb (perhaps a sort of Nativity scene), found beneath Pablo Picasso’s famous Blue Period Old Guitarist (1903-04). In such cases, technology is the key to summoning up these revenants.

While most cases of artist-destroyed art can be attributed to a certain level of vanity or perfectionism, there were other motivations. When Ingres (1780–1867) remarried, his new spouse did not take kindly to a spectacular nude of his deceased first wife, which remained in his studio. The painting disappeared, perhaps disposed of, perhaps passed on to another by the artist, in the interest of marital concord. An 1852 daguerreotype photograph of the painting in his studio is all that remains of a masterpiece.

Heather Benning, The Dollhouse (June 2007)

Then there are artists who create a work, then determine to destroy it in the name of creating a new work. In 2007, the Canadian artist Heather Benning (b.1980) built a life-sized dollhouse from an abandoned farmhouse. Over the course of 18 months, she renovated the house, creating an idyllic structure with picture-book rooms and one entire side of the building missing and replaced by glass, so the rooms could be easily seen. The Dollhouse was a beautiful object, surreal in its magnification of a child’s toy, an interesting take on our curiosity about other people’s lives, at a time when reality TV was popular. But the foundations of the house, which dated to around 1968, were unstable by 2013. Recognising the inevitability of an eventual collapse, Benning decided to turn this potential disaster into a new work of art. While beautiful photographs of the house remain, the building itself does not. She set fire to it that year, in a new work entitled Death of the Dollhouse .

The colossal Trump-like wooden sculpture by Tomaž Schlegl installed in the Alpine village of Sela in Slovenia (about an hour away from where First Lady Melania was born) made international headlines when it was first unveiled, on 29 August 2019. But some of the more conservative locals were unimpressed—they were concerned that it would bring ridicule, not recognition, to their idyllic village. It was offered domicile, as Slovenian newspapers joked, by the nearby town of Moravče. It arrived there in early January 2020. A few days later, the statue made international headlines again, when arsonists burned it to the ground in an act of vandalism.

The funny thing is that the artist who designed the statue was completely delighted by its destruction. The artist is a friend who lives just a few miles away from me in the Slovenian Alps. When he first conceived of the statue, he told me and my wife about it while sitting on our porch, eating peanuts and chain-smoking. Schlegl always planned it to be a temporary work. The idea was to burn it, ritually, in a bonfire on Halloween 2019—a sort of Burning Man festival meets the Salem witch trials. But the locals got nervous about burning Trump in effigy (they were already nervous about having a statue that seemed to mock the short tempered US President at all). Schlegl felt that the conceptual work was not complete without its flaming end.

A wooden sculpture resembling US president Donald Trump was lit on fire, in Moravce, Slovenia, on 9 Janurary 2020 Municipality of Moravce

And so, reluctantly for the artist, a new plan was hatched, to move the statue elsewhere and let it remain “alive”. The mayor of Moravče saw this as an opportunity to raise the visibility of his town and draw some tourists. So, the statue was brought from Sela to Moravče, about 13 kilometers away. There was a grand ceremony to install it. Within days, it was ashes.

Schlegl wanted the statue to be burned to symbolise the destruction of populist, neo-fascist-type leaders in general. The actual rationale for the act appears to be far more prosaic. At the unveiling ceremony, several people overheard some local teenagers talking about getting gasoline in order to burn the statue. It was likely an idiotic prank undertaken by bored teens to get some attention. But they inadvertently managed to spark a debate and world headlines. And whatever the impetus of the arsonists, the artist is delighted that his conceptual work is finally done.

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Lost art: The hunt for vanished masterpieces

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The auctioneer’s hammer falls, the art fair closes, the gallery exhibition is over, the excited babble about the latest megaprices subsides: but what happens next? Where does the work go? A few pieces, increasingly few, find their way on to the walls of public museums. Most go off to live with their new owners under conditions of considerable secrecy. And, these days, an increasing number of important pieces go straight into storage.

That may be a reprehensible trend but at least the work will be safe, and there will be some record of where it is. For one of the oddest things about a culture that purports to care so much about art is that the art seems strangely easy to lose. With no register of ownership, important works can apparently just evaporate into thin air.

Art history is full of examples of missing wonders, each one an El Dorado for devotees of the artists. Frida Kahlo’s largest known work, “La Mesa Herida” (1940), went Awol in 1955, the year after the artist’s death. She had apparently made a gift of the work to the USSR some time earlier, and at Diego Rivera’s request it was later exhibited in a show of Mexican painting at Warsaw’s Zacheta National Gallery of Art. After that, it was never seen again.

Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr Gachet” (1890), which was sold to Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito in 1990 for a then-astronomical $82.5m — the price, when adjusted for inflation, held the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction for more than two decades — is also missing in action. As is Renoir’s “Bal du moulin de la Galette” (1876), which he purchased the very next day: apparently used as collateral for business loans, then sold on, it is rumoured to be in a private Swiss collection, but there has been no trace of it since 1990. Saito-san declared that he wanted the Van Gogh painting cremated with him when he died: perhaps he did so, as it has not been seen since his death in 1996.

Owners have a legal right to destroy the work they purchase. But not, in most people’s eyes, a moral right. Clementine Churchill’s destruction of Graham Sutherland’s 1954 portrait of Winston (its subject hated it) still rouses strong feelings; and as we are busy celebrating the Rockefellers as great collectors there is little mention of the fact that they had a magnificent 1934 fresco by Diego Rivera chipped off the walls at Rockefeller Center in New York. Its politics were too radical, they claimed: one can only think that, in commissioning Rivera in the first place, they might have known what they were getting into.

And the destruction by the Taliban and Isis of irreplaceable archaeology and art in the areas under their control evokes almost universal outrage.

Artists sometimes do it too: Botticelli, under the spell of the rampaging fanatic Savonarola in 1497, dragged some of his own works to the pyre in the original Bonfire of the Vanities. “Primavera” and “The Birth of Venus” were, wonderfully, safe elsewhere during this moment of madness, but who knows what was lost?

These cases and more are examined in Noah Charney’s fascinating but often sobering The Museum of Lost Art (Phaidon). Such a museum, as Charney imagines it, would “contain more masterpieces than all the world’s existing museums combined”. This might seem a wild claim until we read such statistics as that lost works by Caravaggio alone number between eight and 115.

Thefts, too, often end in sad stalemate: thieves may be caught or ransoms successfully negotiated, and the works salvaged, but several famous cases remind us that it is not always so. In 1990, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum suffered a mysterious burglary, when thieves made off with treasures including a Rembrandt, a Manet and a Vermeer — the latter a particularly sore loss, since there are so few extant works by the artist. Despite sleuthing, a proffered reward and a flurry of press, the whereabouts of these pictures is still unknown. We just have to hope that the Vermeer is out there somewhere, still intact.

Lost or destroyed works by Caravaggio alone number somewhere between eight and 115

Charney divides his web of intriguing anecdotes into sections such as “Theft”, “War”, “Accident”, “Act of God” and more. Some case histories are uplifting: the rediscovery in the 1930s, for instance, of the glittering mosaics of Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia (at least those Islamic conquerors preferred covering them over to wholesale destruction).

Heartening too are the ways in which technology is now harnessed to traditional curatorial expertise to rediscover and reappraise works that have led a hard life: damaged, badly cleaned, overpainted or whatever. A recent famous case was of course Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi” , “lost” for centuries because it had been so thickly overpainted.

Detective work, in the arts, especially in the Old Master field, is a keen sport these days, with professional connoisseurs perpetually on the hunt for “sleepers”, or works whose real identity and quality have been obscured. Questing for lost works can consume lifetimes, or take official form — as when the government of China set out to find the magnificent bronze animal heads from the zodiac water clock of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, stolen during the Opium Wars in 1860. The rat and the rabbit turned up in the collection of Yves St Laurent, and were bought (after some detours) by Christie’s owner François Pinault, and gifted back to China. But if anyone spots a dog, a snake, a dragon or a sheep or a rooster . . . 

The reasons why art is lost are not always nefarious, as Charney makes clear. Lack of care, changes in taste or morality, accident, poor technique, jealous spouses, sheer ignorance . . . the circumstances are many. But as another trove of works leaves the booths of Art Basel, those who advocate a register of ownership for valuable works will be interested in this book.

Follow @FTLifeArts on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

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Lost art : missing artworks of the twentieth century

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Reviving the Lost Arts with E-Learning #229

Lost Arts and Forgotten Skills #229:  Challenge  |  Recap

I’ve been teaching my daughter how to tie knots. Not shoelace knots. Real knots. The kind of safety, household, and technical knots our grandparents knew and used.

Searching for knot-tying resources, I started thinking about other lost arts that seem “old fashioned” by today’s standards.

What Are the Lost Arts?

Lost arts are the basic skills for self-sufficient living that have been forgotten or replaced by modern technology.  

These include skills such as: using slide rules, reading maps, and renting movies at Blockbuster. Here are a few more examples:

• Basic survival skills (making fire, foraging for water, reading animal tracks)
• Reading a map, using a compass, deciphering Morse code
• Cursive, calligraphy, and letter writing
• Sewing, knitting, and crocheting
• Canning and food preservation
• Developing photographs

Lost Arts: Animated Knots

This site is one of the best examples of ways to use animated GIFs for learning . Using a slideshow format with animated GIFs, you can learn how to tie knots of any kind. The player options include speed controls and perspective views.

View Animated Knots

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an interactive example or tutorial that highlights one or more skills that qualify as lost arts.

Your entry can be something simple, like a list of lost arts you wish would come back. For more involved entries, try sharing a tutorial, how-to, or process interaction that teaches a lost art or forgotten skill.

Even if you don’t have time to build a demo this week, let us know about a lost art or skill you think needs reviving.

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you relearn the skills of our forefathers, check out the observation games your fellow challengers shared over the past week:

Spot the Difference E-Learning Games #228: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you a found  week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios . You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

Related Content

Course starters: e-learning templates for leadership training #230, a week in review: april 22, 2019, 24 lost arts and forgotten skills preserved with e-learning #229, 97 comments.

• Gabriella Vinci

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• Jodi M. Sansone

LOL! I do have something you might call a "process"—yesterday we had flash flooding all day so I had a lot of time. Here's what I do--TMI, probably. 1. Read the challenge and make sure I understand it. 2. Look through the links and examples to determine how much time it will take. 3. Scour other challenges looking for inspiration or techniques. 4. Have a cup of coffee. 5. Land on the concept—for this one I was considering how to polish silver, how to iron a dress shirt, or how to set a table Downton Abbey-style. Landed on breaking up like an adult because it was more fun. 6. Have a second cup of coffee. 7. Look through my art library to see if I have something fun to work with. 8. Go to the gym and work out for an hour—my project usually comes together at the gym. 9. Sit at my d... Expand

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About the Lost Art Database

The Lost Art Database is maintained by the German Lost Art Foundation. It documents cultural property that was either demonstrably seized from their owners between 1933 and 1945 as a result of Nazi persecution, or for which such a seizure cannot be ruled out ("Nazi-looted art/cultural property").

In addition, the Lost Art Database lists cultural property seized, relocated or removed as a result of the Second World War (“wartime losses”).

• German Lost Art Foundation

Search Requests and Found-Object Reports

The Search Requests section lists cultural objects that were lost by private individuals and institutions or public institutions as a result of National Socialist dictatorship or in the course of the Second World War. Their locations are usually unknown, but the search list also includes objects whose locations, e.g. in Russia, are known.

The Found-Object Reports section lists artefacts that are known to have been seized or relocated due to Nazi persecution or as a result of the Second World War. Furthermore, reports on cultural property are published here, for which an uncertain or incomplete provenance indicates a possibly unlawful seizure or a war-related relocation.

In the case of Found-Object Reports, it is not always possible to make a clear assignment to a specific context of loss, as experience has shown that today's owners often do not know the details of the provenance of the artefacts in their possession.

Historical contexts of injustice

Between 1933 and 1945, millions of cultural objects were relocated, confiscated and looted: Persecutees of the Nazi tyranny became victims of state-organized cultural property looting in the form of "Aryanizations," expropriations, forced sales, or forced donations.

At the end of the war, the activities of the Soviet trophy commissions, the thefts of individual military personnel of the Allied forces, or territorial shifts led to the fact that cultural property that had been removed from storage were no longer returned to their original location and were looted, transferred, or relocated as "war trophy." In the Soviet Union in particular, they were intended to serve as compensation for war damage and losses suffered.

Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Archiv,  303.3/M3, F 743

BArch, B 323 Bild-0311-010

Legal and ethical foundations

The legal foundations for the restitution of cultural property expropriated as a result of Nazi persecution after the Second World War were the Additional Federal Compensation Act of 1953, the Federal Compensation Act (BEG) of 1956 and the Federal Restitution Act (BRüG) of 1957. However, they did not come close to reversing the property transfers. The deadlines for filing claims have since expired.

In 1998, the Washington Principles on Nazi-confiscated art were adopted at the international level. In 1999, Germany followed this historical and moral commitment and issued the Joint Declaration . Point III of the Joint Declaration calls for a public document listing lost and found objects that have been identified by public institutions as or are suspected to be Nazi-looted cultural property. Against this background, the Lost Art Database was put online in April 2000 and Guidelines were prepared by the German Federal Government, the Länder and the national associations of local authorities in 2001.

The starting point for the repatriation of cultural property displaced by war is international law, and in particular the Hague Convention of 1907: Among other things, it prohibits looting (Art. 47 HLKO), protects private property, and prohibits the confiscation, destruction, or damage of works of art (Art. 56 HLKO).

In order to document losses of cultural property from the years 1933 to 1945 and to create a basis for their repatriation, ten German Länder founded the "Koordinierungsstelle der Länder für die Rückführung von Kulturgütern [Coordination Office of the German Federal States for the Repatriation of Cultural Property]" in Bremen in 1994. Since 1998, all 16 Länder and, from 2001, the Federal Government, have participated in the Coordination Office, which was given its headquarters in Magdeburg (Koordinierungsstelle Magdeburg) and merged into the German Lost Art Foundation in 2015.

BArch, B 323 Bild-0311-063

Sensitive language

Titles and descriptions of objects in the Lost Art Database may contain discriminatory terms that reflect historical discourses and power relations. They go back to titles given by artists, manufacturers or authors, or have been handed down through historical inventories, inscriptions, catalogs, etc. We are aware that the use of these terms reproduces discriminatory language. However, in order to ensure that works remain traceable under their historical titles, we have decided to retain these terms. Documentation of historical work titles is essential for provenance research.

Coursework: Lost Coursework

Guidance on the process to follow if coursework has been lost. 7 sept 2023 • knowledge, information, if the centre is responsible, if the candidate is responsible, attachments.

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Lost or damaged work

Guidance for schools and colleges on what to do if students' non-exam assessment work has been lost or damaged.

This information covers both internally assessed work (marked by the school or college) and externally assessed work (marked by an AQA examiner).

If the school is responsible

• responsible for the loss
• able to verify that the work was completed or partially completed and that the student was monitored while doing the work.
• The student should reproduce as much of their missing work as possible.
• For internally-assessed work, the 'loss of coursework' special status must be selected on the e-Submissions mark inputting screen alongside your mark. You can't indicate that work is lost using EDI mark submissions.

If the student is responsible

Work that has been lost or damaged as a consequence of student negligence is not eligible for special consideration.

Lost Art Press

Category: Woodworking Classes

Reminder: new classes on sale 10 a.m. eastern.

The following Covington Mechanicals classes go on sale today at 10 a.m. Eastern. They will likely sell out quickly – some in seconds – so be ready to register. (But before you do, please check your calendar to make sure you can attend the class for which you want to register).

If you don’t get into your desired class, do sign up for the waitlist – because I can’t remember a class in which we didn’t have to fill at least one slot.

• Comb-back Chair Class with Chris Williams , June 24-28 • Carving Oak – 17th-century Style with Peter Follansbee , July 8-11 • Make a Magic Mora Knife with Jögge Sundqvist , Aug,. 26-27 • Karvsnitt: Chip Carving Scandinavian Symbols & Patterns in Wood with Jögge Sundqvist , Aug. 30-31 • Make a Dovetailed Shaker Tray with Megan Fitzpatrick , Dec. 7-8

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Classes are now open for registration.

Just a reminder that registration is now open on our ticketing site for classes at the Lost Art Press storefront for the first half of 2024. (We’ll post classes for the second half of 2024 in February).

p.s. If you have questions about the classes, please read our FAQs . If, after reading those, you still have a question, email [email protected] (not the LAP help desk).

Covington Mechanicals Classes, January-June 2024

Next Monday, Sept. 25, 2023, at 10 a.m. Eastern, bench spaces go on sale for January-June 2024 Covington Mechanicals classes at the Lost Art Press storefront. (And we’re excited to announce that both Roy Underhill and Matt Cianci we be once again make the trek to Kentucky to teach!)

We have only eight benches, so classes are – with rare exceptions – limited to six students (which leaves the not-teaching editors here at LAP one bench on which to work). Thanks in part to the small class size, most classes sell out in nanoseconds – for which we are grateful; thank you. But it does mean that it’s best to be ready to hit “register” the split second classes go live on the Covington Mechanicals Ticket Tailor page (and it helps to have a pinch of luck). If a class is sold out, I recommend registering for the waitlist; we end up filling a slot or two from the waitlists for almost every class.

Upcoming classes are: • Build a Comb-back Stick Chair with Christopher Schwarz, Jan. 15-19, 2024 • Make a Dovetailed Shaker Tray with Megan Fitzpatrick, March 9-10, 2024 • Window Joinery with Roy Underhill, March 23-24, 2024 • Build & Engrave a Shepherd’s Coffer with Christopher Schwarz, April 5-7, 2024 • Build a Traditional Sawbench with Megan Fitzpatrick, April 20-21, 2024 • Saw Sharpening 101 with Matt Cianci, May 18-19, 2024 • Build & Engrave a Shepherd’s Coffer with Christopher Schwarz, June 7-9, 2024

Classes for the second half of 2024 will be posted in February.

Click here to go to our registration site . From there, you can click on each class for more details about it. NOTE: There will be a button on each class page that says “Register Now.” You can click that, but you won’t actually be able to register until 10 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 25.

Check out FAQs about classes here . If, after reading the FAQs you still have questions, please post a comment here, or email [email protected] . (These classes are independent of Lost Art Press/Crucible Tool, so please do not email the LAP help desk.)

p.s. There are still 2 spots available in my Shaker Tray class in beautiful Berea, Ky., Oct. 14-15, 2023. Come cut some dovetails with me; I promise to pay more attention to my students than to Woodsy, the new Pine Croft shop cat. (Or I at least promise to try.)

Weekend Woodworking Class Openings

Spend a weekend in October cutting dovetails with me (Megan Fitzpatrick) in gorgeous central Kentucky at the Woodworking School at Pine Croft (with luck, the trees surrounding the school will be a riot of fall color by then!).

It’s a two-day class – Oct. 14 & 15 – in making a classic Shaker silverware tray, with gently arced ends, handholds and, of course, dovetails. And speaking of Shakers – if you’re in the area, why not also plan a day at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill .

In the class, you’ll learn:

• Dovetail layout with dividers
• How to cut the joints, aiming to “fit off the saw”
• How to wield a coping or fret saw
• How to pare and chop to a line with a chisel
• Strategies for transferring the tails to the pin board
• Techniques for fitting the joint
• How to lay out then cut and fair the handles (both the hand holds and the curved top edge)
• How to smooth-plane your surfaces
• How to use cut nails (to secure the bottom board…if you wish – but there’s an argument for leaving it loose)
• And of course, how to put it all together (and why I recommend liquid hide glue).

Donate to Help Our Scholarship Classes

At the request of readers, we have created a way for you to donate to help fund the two scholarship classes we are holding at Lost Art Press this fall.

In September, we are holding our second Chairmakers Toolbox class with six students. All students are from populations that are underrepresented in woodworking, including women, people of color and those who are gay, bi, trans or otherwise outsiders.

In November, Jerome Bias will lead a class of six African-American woodworkers as they build a blanket chest using hand tools.

I am picking up the tab for the wood and all the lunches during the classes. If you would like to donate to help with the wood or meals, simply click on this link , where you can make a donation with a credit card or with your PayPal account.

You will be able to designate which class the money goes to support, if that’s important to you.

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The Lost Art Of Being Present

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Advanced Ideas, Inc.

• Personal Development

This course will teach you how to rediscover the lost art of being present.

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• £ 20.00 – £ 49.00

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Learning Outcome

• Learn how to prevent stress and mental disorders with this little-known practice that is free of cost
• Know the stress reduction tips to make you happier
• Learn four ways to boost your present-day mindfulness
• Find out how mindfulness can be improved by learning about 'Hygee'
• Discover the world's happiest countries' mindfulness secrets

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Professor Paul J Cline is an award-winning university professor, therapist, corporate trainer, professional speaker, and business consultant. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Advanced Ideas, Inc.

His educational background includes degrees in Business, Education, and Counseling, as well as a Doctorate in Counselor Education & Supervision. As a psychology professor at Argosy University, he has also been asked to give guest lectures at several universities, colleges, and special events. His teaching awards include “Webster University Faculty Member of the Year Award” and Argosy University’s “President’s Award For Excellence In Teaching.”

The state of New Hampshire licensed him as a Mental Health Counselor as well as a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor. In Florida, he holds a CAP (Certified Addictions Professional) designation.

Course Overview

Distraction prevents people from remaining in the present. which eventually reduces productivity. Living in the present can help with so many issues. You will learn how to rediscover the lost art of being present in this course.

You may find it difficult to concentrate, but we’ll teach you how to overcome distractions and force yourself to concentrate in this course. You will learn how to relax easily whenever you become distracted due to stress. A meditation and mindfulness practice will be taught to you by our instructor so that you can become more present in your day-to-day lives. Besides explaining how yoga and exercise can optimise your concentration and reduce distractions, our instructors will also advise you on achieving success by staying focused on the present.

This  “ The Lost Art Of Being Present ” course was designed by an expert instructor to provide you with the best learning experience possible. Our goal is for you to learn and apply the lessons from this course to improve yourself.

No further delay. Enrol Now!

Course Description 

This course is an excellent learning opportunity for those who are passionate about the topic and who are interested in a successful career within the relevant industry. Professionals currently working in this field who wish to brush up on their knowledge and advance their careers may also enrol in this program.   

In the The Lost Art Of Being Present Course, you will find a number of engaging, in-depth modules that will provide you with comprehensive theoretical knowledge that will enable you to succeed in your career. As proof of your completion, you will receive a free e-certificate from Learndrive .

Using computers, tablets, smartphones, and other internet-enabled devices, you can access the course modules at your own pace. Invest in your professional development today and learn skills that will lead to your dream job. Become a career leader by taking this course online.

What Do You Get With The The Lost Art Of Being Present Course?

• Premium Video Materials in bite-sized format for the most accessible learning experience
• Free e-certificate after completing the course
• Flexible study time and pace
• Instructor-led Course

Course Design

Students can access the course using any internet-connected device through our online learning platform. You may study at your own pace since there are no formal deadlines or teaching schedules.

Certification

The learners who pass the course will receive a Learndrive Certificate as a badge of accomplishment. The e-certificate is free of charge. There is a small fee, however, if you want a hard copy of your certificate.

Who Is This Course For?

The course is right for you if you already work in this industry or want to make the transition. This The Lost Art Of Being Present Course is designed to enhance your expertise and improve your CV. 

Requirements

Students from all backgrounds are welcome to participate in the online training. There are no requirements for participation. The only prerequisite for studying this The Lost Art Of Being Present Course is an interest in learning and a good grasp of English, mathematics, and computer skills.

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The Lost Art of Discipleship

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Connect with other parents whose children are starting secondary school on this forum.

Secondary education

Lost gcse art portfolio help.

HPparent · 29/04/2014 07:55

DD2 appears to have lost her art folder containing the majority of her coursework. The end of course exam is soon and her exam prep is also gone. Any idea what if anything happens in this sort of situation - can the teacher estimate the grade - can she redo it next year - she is distraught.

I ask because dd's portfolio is fairly huge and has only been between school and home - where it's obvious. I can't see how it's 'got lost'

No clue but wanted to send sympathy. What have school said? Any idea where? Worth posting a reward? Hope it works out she must be so stressed.

Surely there can't be that many places she could have lost it? ring any cafes, shops, bus companies etc that she used the day she lost it and get a status up on facebook askinf friends to keep an eye out. i'm in Scotland so not really sure what the rules are for GCSE, i am guessing they would allow an estimate based on other work, or an appeal?

Dd says her school lost some of an older girls coursework (I say again HOW?) anyway apparently she was working at A grade but got a C. SO I guess they must estimate but don't expect it to come out very well. She needs to find it.

It was her birthday she was taking photos in the street and put it down leaning on a wall. She only realised this morning when she got ready for school. She left in Tesco once but we got it back. Otherwise as the do it as a one year course she will have to do it again next year.

School just rang - an art teacher found it yesterday and brought it back to school. Phew!!!

I was just going to say have a word with the school, Then I saw that a teacher had found it. Glad it's been found and everythings okay,

my heart missed a beat when I read your OP - SO easy to do. Thank goodness it was found.

Thanks for your comments - yes the teacher definitely deserves a big thank you!

Keep that folder safe! Many years ago my db school lost his art folder, he got his lowest gcse for that. My dm still really cross with the school 15 yrs later.

PHEW I keep telling DD1 to photograph hers, she has a record of some of it. She is dizzy and I can see it vanishing.

DD's school have already lost her course work once. She has had to leave it in school today. I will be nervous now until the exams are over and all work has been assessed. DS left his on the bus and I spent a day trawling bus stations until I found it.

So glad this thread had a happy outcome. DD's school demanded all their sketchbooks except exam one about two week's ago and locked them all up. It's definitely not a good idea to carry entire portfolio about when consequences of losing it are disastrous. Uploading photographs of individual works and entire spreads and worksheets to Pinterest as a backup is also a good idea. If your child does have a crisis, printing out and sticking in a record of the work is much better than having nothing to show at all.

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