How Art Advisor Natalie Lemle Turned Her Love of Antiquities Into a Debut Novel

Art might be what Natalie Lemle is known for—she founded the art advisory firm art_works, based in Boston and Montreal—but her interests run the gamut: Lately, she’s been thinking a lot about organized crime, ancient Rome, and learning Sanskrit. Her debut novel, Artifacts, incorporates all of the above.

Out this week, the book follows Lena, a young lawyer, who’s asked to work on a case involving a precious antiquity stolen from an Italian museum. The case prompts flashbacks of the summer Lena spent working on an archeological dig in Italy, back when she was a college student. Lena still has unanswered questions about that summer, and the deeper she gets into her case, the more she realizes the danger that dig represented.

For Lemle, who founded art_works in 2016, fiction writing served as a balance to her full-time job and motherhood. “I was really busy,” she says. “I had an 18-month-old at home. I felt like I didn’t have any control over my life, but [writing] was one thing I could do for myself.”

Lemle spoke with ELLE about working in the art world, how much we can learn from a single object, and the Italian crime syndicate she can’t stop thinking about.

I got the idea for art_works thinking, originally, that I would be a programming person. We would get requests a lot, that [an insurance company, for example] would love to hear from this curator of American art. I thought I could be that middleman. I thought I could bring art into the workplace, because [companies] are very focused on benefits for their employees. The first meetings that I took, they were like, “Well, could you actually help us buy some art, or could you help us get rid of this huge collection?” Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts hired me to deaccession hundreds of works of art.

I had worked in little galleries, but it wasn’t like I was coming from Gagosian or Pace or one of these huge galleries. I wasn’t wheeling and dealing. I basically just followed where the interest was and then got bigger clients, started working with Google, and then the company became real. I now have a business partner, Mallory Ruymann, who is more the curator between the two of us. We became a real advisory, I would say, probably five years ago. The first five years were kind of scrappy.

A photo from the archeological dig that Lemle participated in as a college student.

I was interested in writing about art and about objects, and about literature, but I think I thought, Oh, this is something that’s a hobby. It’s something that I do for myself. It’s a creative outlet.

Art_works, because art is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have, took off during the pandemic because I think people were like, “Oh, we can’t do these actual important things. Let’s just do the art stuff and we can do it on Zoom and we can look at slides and we can have these fun conversations.” So, I was really busy. I had an 18-month-old at home. I felt like I didn’t have any control over my life, but [writing] was one thing I could do for myself. I was like, “This is making me feel better.” I applied to local and low-residency MFA programs and got a great offer from Emerson College that I was like, “Oh, I might as well do this. I could do it at night.”

Going into that program, I had already written a draft of what would become Artifacts. It was so bad. I never in a million years thought that it would get published, to be honest with you. Maybe the headline is that it’s always been part of me, but it started to play a more important role in my life after I became a mother. I would actually line it up with the way motherhood changed me and made me feel like I needed something that I could control.

In earlier drafts, she was less likable even than she became in the finished version. I really wanted someone who was both innocent and not, and who would be believably moving toward a dangerous situation, but that also needed to change. How did she come to me? Slowly, over time, she evolved. In my earlier conception of her, I wanted her to be so nerdy—almost to not care about relationships as much as she cared about amassing knowledge. And that wasn’t quite right because [in the college scenes] she’s a [young] girl. She’s horny. She’s boy crazy. That felt more correct.

I don’t know if this is visible to others who read the book, but I see a parallel between what we write about an object, what we think about an object, what we say about cultural heritage, what we inherit, and then what we create for ourselves. What do we create for ourselves? I think Lena’s emotional journey and her family journey mirrors her obsession with archeology. She’s very interested in these things that she wants to understand because she doesn’t understand herself. That stimulates me.

I studied classics in school. I thought I wanted to be a professor or an archeologist. I’m also really, really interested in Babylon and the ancient Near East and Greece and even India. I’m interested in the ancient world writ large, I would say. But the only thing I could really point to is that we would go to the Art Institute of Chicago when we were kids and spend time there. I went to a huge high school and we had an AP art history class. I learned Latin in high school.

I’ve always been really interested in the stories that we tell about an object. It’s so subjective, obviously, and it can change. I love reception theory. The way that we receive culture over different periods of time changes, the more we know or the more culture changes. When I’m in the presence of an ancient object, like my character, Lena, I do really feel like this humming or this buzzing.

I am such an eternal student. I really love to get into these nerdy books and copy lines from them. I personally am most interested in early Christianity, late Rome. That’s why I made the central object in the book a dichroic cup that would’ve had to have been from the late third or early fourth century. I’m very interested in that time period because the empire was so fractured and the things we understand now have also been sort of shaped by the politics of the Catholic Church and what they want us to think about the roots of Christianity.

I love the Byzantines, too, so I love porphyry [a type of rock used in ancient art and architecture]. I knew I wanted porphyry to play a role in the book. The senator, the villain, in the story thinks that they’ll find imperial porphyry, which was then used by Mussolini and fascists in the 20th century, at this dig. He’s interested in what that might say about him as this rising politician.

The origin of my obsession with the ‘Ndrangheta, the Italian crime syndicate, goes back to a piece in The New Yorker from 2018, “The Women Who Took on the Mafia” by Alex Perry. That became a book. What’s so interesting about that particular organized crime syndicate is that they’ve been operating with so much stealth and so professionally and integrated with systems that are above the fold that, even now, I think many people haven’t heard of them. It’s not like the Cosa Nostra or Camorra, these other Italian organized crime syndicates that we know much more about.

But I think what I’m particularly interested in with them is the way that they engage with the business world. I get so obsessed with these things that are not discussed, that are so egregious, that continue to happen. When we talk about these heists that have been happening [at the Louvre and at the Magnani-Rocca Foundation in Italy], I personally believe that organized crime is behind them, because they’re executed with so much precision, even if they’re made to look like they’re kind of sloppy.

I’m also interested in systems in general. The art world is a system. I remember thinking as organized crime was starting to play a bigger role in Artifacts, as I was working on revisions of my book, like, Is this a little too melodramatic? Obviously, I take some liberties, but these are all totally plausible things that could be happening even down to drugs being stored in the aqueducts underground. There have been examples of this in Southern Italy: of drugs being discovered in these underground tunnels that are ancient.

The fascinating thing about art is it’s one of the only trillion-dollar asset classes where a thing can retain its value without being able to be sold on the public market. Real estate, if you can’t sell it openly, is not worth anything. But with art, because of these underground networks, it can retain its inherent value. ISIS uses [art] a lot. At the Syrian National Museum in Damascus, the paintings from the ancient city of Dura-Europos don’t appear on the map of the museum. The only people who know how to access them are the museum workers because they could be taken and used underground at any point. These things that are so world-famous, so valuable? They stay valuable.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.