The Art of Confidence
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“I suppose I did it because I wanted something to show for the thirty years—longer than I had lived in my homeland—that I had been here in America. Something that was properly appreciated, even if someone else got all the credit.”
Liu Qingwu doesn’t set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a painting—something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to tourists outside New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew Cantrell’s modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for millions.
The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it—Liu, a Chinese immigrant still reeling from his wife’s recent departure; Caroline, a gallery owner intent on saving her aunt’s legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and Harold, a Taiwanese businessman with an ethical dilemma on his hands. Weaving together their stories with that of Cantrell and the inspiration for his masterpiece, Wendy Lee’s intricate, multilayered novel explores the unique fascination of great art and the lengths to which some are driven to create it—and to possess it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her third novel, Lee (Across a Green Ocean) delves into what propels people to do the right or wrong thing and centers the book's unique perspective on the creation of a forged painting. Lee focuses on four vastly different story lines, each revolving around the painting. Artist Liu, living hand to mouth in New York City for 30 years, longing for the wife who left him, and now selling his Impressionist reproductions on the street, grapples with the morality of creating a copy of Elegy, a 1969 painting by Andrew Cantrell, for gallery owner Caroline Lowry. Lowry, who inherited the failing gallery years before from her glamorous aunt Hazel a doyenne of the art world in her day who had an affair with Cantrell needs a quick fix to save her business and selling a forged painting seems to be the answer. Her assistant, Molly Schaeffer, daughter of Caroline's best friend, intrigued by the sudden appearance of the Cantrell painting in the gallery, is dealing with her own troubled past. And businessman Harold Yu hopes the purchase of the painting might add joy to his lackluster family life. As the story unfolds from different viewpoints, the author moves back and forth in time, bringing depth and understanding to what motivates people in both their personal and professional lives.
