In the fateful month of March 2000, shortly after opening a hugely successful
show in New York that unveiled the more nefarious financial connections of
Presidential candidate George W. Bush, the hugely ambitious Conceptual artist
Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio, an apparent suicide. With museums
lining up to buy his work, and the fame he had sought relentlessly at last
within his reach, speculation about whether his death was suicide or murder has
titillated the art world ever since. Lombardi was an enigma who was at once a
compulsive truth-teller and a cunning player of the art game, a political
operative and a stubborn