The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick Page B

was back, reincarnated this time as the Man from the Getty.
    Charley Hill’s first task in preparing for this new role was to learn about Edvard Munch. Studying up on artists was one of his favorite parts of the job. Hill’s love of art ran deep, though he was a buff rather than a scholar. In his spare time, in whatever city he found himself, he visited museums and looked in on old friends in the collection. In Prague, it was a Dürer self-portrait; at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac (“the angel arresting Abraham’s hand is extraordinary, even though it doesn’t quite work”); at the National Gallery in London a long list, perhaps headed by Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks .
    In Washington, D.C., Hill always made time for a particular favorite, Gilbert Stuart’s Skater (Portrait of William Grant) . The striking work, an action painting in what was typically a stiff and earnest genre, thrust Stuart to fame. It depicts a tall figure in an elegant black coat and hat, carving a graceful turn on the ice on the Serpentine, in London’s Hyde Park. (The story has it that Grant told Stuart that “the day was better suited for skating than sitting for one’s portrait.”) For Hill, the skating Scot embodies an idealized self-image, “the way I would have liked to have seen myself in that time.”
    For The Scream case in particular, where Hill’s role was not that of an art-loving (though crooked) amateur but of a bigwig at a world-class art museum, his research would have to be particularly thorough. There were no shortcuts. Learning about Munch was a matter of assembling a giant stack of art books and diving in. The only catch was money. Though he was preparing to play a free-spending honcho at a money-is-no-object institution—and though he supposedly intended to ransom a $72 million painting—Hill could not afford to buy the books he needed to study. Instead, he haunted the library and a bookstore near his home, where a patient manager made allowances for the tall man in the art section who read and read but never seemed to buy.
    At the start, Hill knew no more about Munch than most people do. Temperamentally too conservative to care much for the modern world, he preferred paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though he made exceptions for a few works as close to the present day as the nineteenth century. The Goya portrait he had looked at in a car trunk, painted in 1805, reduced him to sputtering admiration. “Anyone with even half an eye or half a wit,” he says, “standing there, holding it, you can’t be anything but awestruck.”
    He had never seen The Scream in the flesh, so to speak, and, if he failed to get it back, he might never have the chance.
    Two men more different than Charley Hill and Edvard Munch would be difficult to find. Still, the gruff ex-paratrooper found himself sympathizing with the melancholy, high-strung artist. As haunted and unstable as his near-contemporary van Gogh, Edvard Munch had endured an upbringing that would have blighted the sunniest nature. When Munch was five, his mother died of tuberculosis, with her young son at her bedside. Nine years later, his older sister died of the same disease. His brother, too, fell ill with tuberculosis, but survived.
    Insanity was another family curse. Munch’s sister Laura went mad and was eventually institutionalized. Munch’s grandfather had died, mad, in an asylum, and Munch himself suffered a devastating breakdown in 1908, at age 45, that left him hospitalized for eight months. His treatment included electroshock, but he emerged more or less recovered and returned to his work.
    Even at his healthiest, Munch was far from robust. Sickly throughout his childhood, he had survived tuberculosis and suffered through long bouts of bronchitis. Throughout his life he suffered from panic attacks. At the time he was working on The Scream , it took all his nerve to force himself to cross a street or