Michele Marieschi, La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore.

• Even now, more than seventy years after the end of World War II, the Nazis have found new ways to ruin things. Art, for example. In July, Sotheby’s will sell Michele Marieschi’s eighteenth-century painting La Punta Della Dogana e San Giorgio Maggiore. You might wish to buy it—it’s a nice painting, on the face of it, containing boats, water, the sky, and other attractive things often found in paintings. But read the fine print. The painting was looted by the Nazis decades ago, and the Jewish family who’d originally owned it has fought for generations to get it back. Now that it’s been recovered, you’d think the family could simply reclaim it. But the art market has other ideas, and the painting’s market value has escalated; rather than return it, Sotheby’s has brokered an uneasy settlement with the family. Nina Siegal has the story in detail: “It was 1937, Vienna, when a Jewish couple named Heinrich and Anna Maria Graf bought a vibrant eighteenth-century oil painting of the Grand Canal in Venice with the Punta Della Dogana in the background. The work held pride of place in their living room, the highlight of their small but treasured art collection. One year later, Germany annexed Austria, and the Grafs and their twin six-year-old daughters, Erika and Eva, had to flee the country. They put their art into storage … By the time they settled in Forest Hills, Queens, it was 1942, and all their possessions had been looted by the Nazis … Looted artworks that have been in private hands for decades are coming to market after settlement agreements with the rightful owners, in a way that tries to address their tainted past. These agreements may not result in the return of the paintings to the heirs, but the compromise does provide at least a form of resolution and some compensation to the heirs, and brings the artworks out of hiding.”

• Philip Gourevitch, a former editor of The Paris Review, remembers reading Denis Johnson’s debut novel, Angels, in an ecstatic single sitting when he was twenty-one. He liked it so much that he decided he had to speak to Johnson—immediately. Gourevitch writes, “Who was this guy? Who wrote this language that carried traces of many writers I’d read before but was its own world entirely? If this was his first book, he must want to hear how good it is. The bio beneath his photo said he lived on Cape Cod. I picked up the phone and called information. I dialed the number the operator gave me, a woman answered, and when I said his name, she asked who was calling, and I said, ‘A reader’ … The only thing that he said that I remember exactly was when I asked him how long it had taken to write the book. He asked me if I was a writer, and I said that that remained to be seen. Then he answered my question: ‘Twelve years,’ he said. Later that night, I told a friend about my strange phone call, and when I got to the bit about twelve years, I said, ‘You see, it’s hopeless.’ But that wasn’t really what I felt, and I knew it. What I had felt when I hung up the phone was that I had got what I wanted. What I felt was: it was worth it.”

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