Ghosts

"Ghosts" (2013) collects Sophie Calle's profiles of artworks that disappeared from public view, told through the memories of the people who knew them.

The book gathers two earlier French volumes, "Fantômes" and "Disparitions" (2000), translated into English by Calle and Charles Penwarden. The first section addresses works pulled temporarily from view at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The second, "Last Seen," follows works lost to theft or accident in the 1980s and 90s: paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990, a Picasso taken from Chicago's Richard Gray Gallery in 1994, and works lost from the Earl of Bath's residence in England. For each piece, Calle interviewed museum staff and others who remembered it, standing their words in for the missing object.

Calle, a French conceptual artist born in 1953, regularly builds her books this way, using testimony and documentation to stand in for something no longer there.