It was so bulbous that even the most sycophantic of his admirers could do no better than to ignore it altogether; like leavened dough it seemed to expand further and further, a luminous symbol of its owner’s capacity of sniffing out important pieces; by the time he reached old age J. Pierpont Morgan’s nose had mushroomed to almost grotesque proportions.
Caricaturists had a field day with this organ, reducing its owner to little more than a porous snout with chequebook attached, prowling the world for treasure, or simply attracting the most precious pieces of the Old World with a gigantic, dollar-shaped magnet.
J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) had spent his youth in material comfort and emotional uncertainty. The son of a successful American banker, he changed school nine times and saw little of his father. As a small child, he had suffered from convulsions and ill health stayed with him for much of his life. The boy’s diaries show a mind intent on control. While the individual entries (‘Mother Ill’, ‘Dancing school. Ladies to tea’, ‘Father did not come home’1) give no more than a hint at what exercised him, the paraphernalia on the page bring it to life vividly: in addition to the dated entries are lists of days past and days remaining of the year, of places in which he had lived, together with the relevant page numbers of diary entries, the initials of the girls he fancied, and a list of all letters sent and received, including the cost of postage. Pierpont, it was clear, liked keeping track and asserting his control over the small corner of the world in which his will counted for something. His father’s busy life, his mother’s emotional instability and his own itinerant schooling with the accompanying lack of friends and certainties may have been beyond his power; the cost of postage and the days of the year, however, could not elude him as easily.
His upbringing was dour and unforgiving, as befits a businessman in the making, so a tour to Europe in 1853 proved to be a revelation: the art, the history and the sheer wealth of beauty he saw there fascinated him, and he was happy to find himself back in London three years later, when his father moved there in the latest step on the long path of his career. Pierpont was sent to Switzerland, where he was to attend an exclusive boarding school, the latest and last of the many he had been enrolled in. The boy was not impressed with what seemed to him a trap for paying foreigners, but did enjoy the travelling his new base enabled him to do, duly noting down entrance fees to museums and money spent on alms for beggars, flowers, cologne, confectionary and the like. He made out his accounts in the correct currencies. Doctors’ fees made regular appearances.
Morgan had not yet finished the education his father thought necessary for his son. He had learned French in Switzerland and was now sent to Göttingen University. Here Pierpont hired a servant and found the good life, declaring the biggest of his problems to be his inability to flirt in German, though he quickly came to understand that his helplessness endeared him to local girls. The university itself was not unduly burdened with the presence of the young American, who clearly was fully occupied already.
Having finished his education, Pierpont joined the family bank and spent the next few years travelling between Europe and the States. He married, but his wife died of consumption when he was only twenty-four. While his private life was overshadowed by tragedy and his health continued to trouble him, business was booming, and an almost psychic sense for the right investment in a time of tremendous expansion made Morgan a very rich man indeed. As such he lived in great style and with all the trappings of a nineteenth-century tycoon. He married again, and seemed happy in his roles as financier and père de familie. It was not until the change of the century, though, when he was in his sixties, that he hit his stride as a collector of European art and books. Once the passion had taken hold there was no going back. His ravenous appetite for all things great and exquisite meant that he himself often had little idea what precisely was in his possession. A note to his librarian inquiring about a sculpture of the infant Hercules, which was attributed to Michelangelo and which Morgan gathered from his account books he had purchased for $10,000, was answered, in green ink, ‘This bronze Bust is in your Library and faces you when sitting in your chair. It has been there for about a year.’2
Morgan continued buying as if there were no tomorrow. Money was no object, and objects were everything. The collector himself noted sardonically that the three most expensive words in any language were unique au monde. His European education had resulted in a very tactile passion for the past and for beauty. When he had his New York residence, now the Pierpont Morgan Library, remodelled in 1906, he furnished it with Istrian marble mantelpieces, sixteenth-century Paduan andirons, original wooden ceilings and other details scavenged from Europe, as well as a tapestry which he bought from Joseph Duveen and which had once belonged to Cardinal Mazarin, that other voracious collector of works of art. Morgan’s taste was ‘American eclectic’ and derived from a lifetime of travel, the highlights of which he now sought to combine in one house, so much so that even his agent, Charles Follent McKim, saw himself called upon to advise restraint: ‘While fully recognizing great merit of Chateau D’Arnay chimney piece we should strongly recommend a consistent Italian marble example in the building of Italian Renaissance design.’3
While the New York residence was appointed in European splendour most of the collection intended to fill it was still in exile, in London, where it was kept for tax reasons. A visitor to Morgan’s house in Princes Gate, the Bishop of Massachusetts, recalled seeing in the upstairs drawing room paintings by Gainsborough, Rembrandt, Hals, Velázquez and Van Dyck, as well as Louis XV furniture, Sèvres porcelain, antiquities, miniatures by Holbein, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver and a profusion of jewelled boxes.
The remodelling of the New York mansion, meanwhile, was progressing apace, and Morgan showed not only exacting taste, but also a sense of irony when he decorated his sumptuous East Room with a sixteenth-century Brussels tapestry, The Triumph of Avarice. Today, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the collector’s legacy, stands almost pathetically squat among the towering rockscapes of Manhattan. Described by the art historian Bernard Berenson as ‘a pawnbroker’s shop for Croesus’, some of its interior rooms have been faithfully preserved. The neo-Renaissance library is a treasury second to none for modern and medieval autographs; it contains some of the greatest treasures on paper of the West, with examples of seemingly every literary and musical figure of any renown, as well as a profusion of incunabula: two Gutenberg bibles, the celebrated Farnese Hours, manuscript scores by Mahler, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, letters and notebooks by Shelley, Johnson, Dickens and Burns, original drawings by Blake, Shakespeare folios, the works of Sir Thomas Browne in early printings, the only surviving manuscript fragment of Milton’s Paradise Lost – the list seems endless, and endlessly rich.
In Morgan’s study, across a vaulted rotunda with historicizing frescos, one impression above all is conveyed: despite the fine quality of the works displayed around the room, on the mantelpiece, on the ledge running round the walls, on the walls themselves and on the desk, despite the fact that there are masterworks by great artists in plenty, fine medieval paintings, stained-glass windows, Italian Renaissance reliefs attributed to Perugino, Botticelli, Cima da Conegliano and Raphael (though later shown to be by a different hand), the famous double portrait of Luther and his wife, Katharina von Bora, exceptional Renaissance bronzes, etc., the overall sense is one of clutter, of stuff, of a room crammed with things, the apotheosis of a Victorian study in which each of the multitude of knick-knacks happens to be worth millions.
Morgan was one of a breed of American collectors that came to dominate the beginning of the twentieth century, men who underwrote the purchases of their agents in Europe with blank cheques and who were positively distrustful if they paid less than a six-figure sum for any major work of art they wanted. This was the age of the moguls, during which Morgan, together with (and competing against) William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Altman, Samuel H. Kress and a handful of others, seemed set on denuding Europe of its treasures, amassing more of them than anyone had done since Rudolf II and Napoleon, and sometimes more quickly than either of them. In their young country, the great collectors displayed a ravenous appetite for what was old, in the Land of the Free they craved the paraphernalia of the lives of those whose wealth had been earned by serfs and slaves.
One man more than any other shaped these collections and the taste that informed them, and, by extension, many of the holdings of great American museums and the aesthetic of America in the twentieth century: Joseph Duveen, later Sir Joseph and then Lord Duveen of Millbank.
As a young man, Duveen had founded his career as an art dealer on the spectacular purchase of an entire German collection, assembled by Oskar Hainauer and catalogued by no less an authority than Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Berlin museums, for the dizzying sum of $2.5 million (some $50 million in today’s money) in 1906. It proved an excellent investment. Duveen would continue to sell works from the Hainauer Collection for his entire working life, to H. E. Huntington, Frick and Morgan, among others.
The central premise underlying his meteoric rise to the grandest of art dealers and adviser to some of the most acquisitive collectors the world had seen was simple: there was plenty of money in the United States and plenty of old, valuable art in Europe. All he had to do was to establish a connection between the two. Which meant first turning the taste of American collectors away from lugubrious French and Victorian landscape painting towards the Italian Renaissance, a far more profitable and exciting field.
Duveen’s most successful selling ploy was his apparent reluctance to sell anything at all. Whenever wealthy clients came to the shop to browse for statuettes or vases, there would be one painting prominently displayed that would not be for sale, either because it was already promised for someone else, or because Duveen doubted that it would be right for the client, or the client for it, or because the dealer himself could not bring himself to part with it. The onus of proving his worthiness was upon the client, be it Hearst, Rockefeller or even some less bona fide person, and time and again Duveen would find his good heart finally won over in the face of a collector’s eloquence. ‘Duveen didn’t want to sell his stuff, but they always badgered the poor feller till he gave in,’ a sympathetic Mrs Hearst was once overheard to say.4 A collecting novice, a Californian industrialist, found this out to his cost when he came to visit Duveen’s gallery. He was kept waiting for half an hour and then admitted with the greatest courtesy. Immediately his appetites were whetted by a Rembrandt portrait prominently displayed on an easel. The price was a $100,000, which in itself did not pose the slightest problem. The problem was Duveen’s concern about the appropriateness of the transaction. On hearing that the prospective client did not own any other pictures, he flatly refused to sell. ‘I can’t possibly sell a Rembrandt to a man who owns no other pictures, the Rembrandt would be lonely,’5 he opined and would not be swayed. The downcast supplicant had to leave without the Rembrandt. Business life, however, had taught him a few tricks of his own. Over the following years he acquired a series of less celebrated Duveens, building up a collection of sufficient quality to force the dealer to release the portrait that had originally caught his eye.
Duveen remains a legendary presence among art dealers and collectors. Everyone has their favourite anecdote of this man who almost realized his ambition of cornering the American market of old master paintings for himself and who thought nothing of approaching a work one of his clients had rashly purchased from a different dealer and saying, en passant, ‘I smell fresh paint.’ The work, of course, would be sent back and the chastened collector returned to Duveen’s fold. This was a strategy he knew to employ to great effect: a remark uttered almost inaudibly could devastate his competitors.
Seemingly cavalier in his modus operandi, Duveen was in fact acutely aware of his clients’ ambitions and would often work for months before dangling just the right picture in front of a collector in his famously nonchalant way. When an art historian saw fit to chide him for having put too much brilliant varnish on a restored canvas, Duveen remarked that his clients mainly wanted to see themselves reflected when looking at their pictures. There was more at stake in these transactions than simply the possession of a great work of art: canonization, admittance into the great chain of previous owners, into the mystique of provenance, supplied helpfully by the dealer in the form of a scholarly brochure accompanying every painting sold by him. Duveen did not sell pictures: he sold immortality.
In order to keep himself the one and only dealer in the market, he had to make sacrifices: he bought pictures from his clients that he considered too poor for their walls, too appallingly saccharine to hang next to a Raphael, too bland for the dramatic setting. These would go (usually in exchange for something from his gallery) into his own vaults, which in time became a veritable menagerie of the hated, the bad or the dangerous: asked why he had bought a near-contemporary work from a collector, he answered: ‘I didn’t want that fellow to get used to buying modern pictures, there are too damn many of them.’6 This was one of the more obvious ways in which Duveen tried, successfully for a while, to dominate American collecting habits. Less immediately apparent was his preference for certain genres over others, which, he believed, would not sell in the States: not too much nudity, attractive women (if not overly suggestive) but no nude men, nothing lascivious or even faintly immoral (the sale of a Gainsborough once almost collapsed because the sitter, Mrs Elliot, had run off with her gardener), no too overtly religious scenes, no martyrs wallowing in suffering and, most importantly, no small fry. He could sell the Sistine Chapel several times over, he believed, but works that were too cheap or painted by artists who were too little known were just not worth the trouble. Considering the fact that Duveen was constantly in debt, he should have sold the contents of his copious cellars, and was repeatedly advised to do so. This, however, he could not do; it would swamp the market and allow men of less impeccable taste to lapse back into mediocrity from which his ministrations had rescued them.
Duveen’s greatest secret weapon and part of his astounding success was an American in exile, the art historian Bernard Berenson, who had built himself up to be (arguably together with von Bode in Berlin) the greatest and most indisputable authority on Italian art. Berenson’s expertise, his merest word, could establish or destroy the authenticity of any work he chose to pronounce upon – and he chose to pronounce regularly, aided by a generous retainer from Duveen, to whom he, in turn, would lend the scholarly respectability and the Italian radiance that the dealer himself, who had never been to university and whose father had been little more than a wealthy draper, could not quite muster. Berenson was everything Duveen was not: he came from Boston and had been to Harvard, was an aesthete, a scholar and a bookman, a former protégé of Isabelle Stewart Gardner. Surrounded by some of the finest works of the Renaissance he lived in Italy in an exquisite villa, the intimate of counts and princesses. His authority had mythical proportions.
Theirs was the most formidable partnership in the art world, though even Berenson’s scholarship was not infallible. In one of the most interesting asides in art history, he created a painter, Amico di Sandro, simply to satisfy his need for firm attributions. This Renaissance master was the creator of an increasingly large canon of fine works until his own maker decided that it would be prudent to do away with him after all and reattributed his entire output to other masters, thereby depriving the Italian Renaissance of one of its most enigmatic and short-lived geniuses.
It was attribution that made the partnership between Berenson and Duveen so valuable, and it was attribution that would end it. When Duveen wanted to sell an Adoration of the Shepherds, a painting he believed to be by Giorgione, to Andrew Mellon, one of his best customers, he found to his dismay that Berenson insisted it was by Titian, a master who in the seventy years of his career produced so many fine pictures that their value relative to that of a Giorgione was small. Moreover, Mellon already possessed several Titians but no Giorgione. The question of attribution was therefore of greatest importance. Berenson, however, was not to be convinced, not to be reasoned with, not to be out-argued and certainly not to be bullied. He studied the picture and again rejected his collaborator’s attribution. Uncertain and dissatisfied without a Berenson authentification, Mellon returned the picture and Duveen considered his friendship with the great scholar to be at an end.
As purveyor of fine paintings to the new aristocracy, Duveen had to accommodate their whims. Huntington once sent back Gainsborough’s Blue Boy because he did not consider it blue enough. Such artistic criteria presumably inspired Harold Macmillan to call the Americans Romans to Britain’s Greeks. If the parallel between the American moguls and the rapacious Romans seems obvious now, they saw themselves rather as Medicis and Gonzagas, princes of the Renaissance, a period whose artistic grandeur and brutal efficiency contributed, together with Duveen’s good offices, to making it their favourite. On Saturday afternoons Frick would sit in his palazzo on Park Avenue on a Renaissance throne reading the Saturday Evening Post to the majestic chords of his house organ played by a musician employed for this act of worship. The catalogue Morgan commissioned of his collection, a work of several years of scholarship by one George Williamson, resembled an illuminated manuscript, its colourful illustration and gold and silver leaf laid on so thick that the designs of his watch collection could be engraved on to the pages just as they were on the originals. When he died, in 1913, it was lying by his bed.
Those who dealt with this new nobility were well advised to play along, and even the otherwise aloof Berenson was not above encouraging his patroness, Isabella Stewart Gardner, to buy a portrait because it depicted ‘the greatest and most fascinating lady of the Renaissance – your worthy precursor and patron saint – Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua’.7 The American, who liked to believe that she was descended from Robert the Bruce and took her second name from Mary Stuart, obviously considered this line of thought entirely appropriate and purchased the work.
The prince of all these princes was William Randolph Hearst, who must have felt it positively frivolous to waste his time on little gestures like name changes. A newspaper tycoon who had made a fortune out of making the gutter press and who had had a hand in starting the American–Spanish War in 1898, through deliberate misinformation to increase the circulation of his Journal, he was the archetype of the autocratic and ruthless entrepreneur whose self-aggrandizement had become his raison d’être. It comes as little surprise, then, that he was the inspiration for Orson Welles’s 1941 film, Citizen Kane, which the Hearst press understandably attempted to scupper. Welles had looked closely and invented little: from the charisma and the curious sentimentality of a man running an unparalleled media empire to his Quixotic attempts at making his mistress, the actress Marion Davies, into a great star despite her obvious lack of talent; from his need for total control of the people around him to his inability to control himself; and his almost pathological urge to amass and accumulate riches and treasures to demonstrate his power, an urge that could never be satisfied.
There was no ‘Rosebud’ in Hearst’s life that could succinctly and poignantly explain his maniacal gallop through existence to an audience of adoring film students, and yet his career serves as an illustration of the nature and force of an obsession lived out to the full. This came to be expressed most acutely in his San Simeon mansion, a building in what was later called the Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance-Bull-Market-Damn-the-Expense Style and an extravaganza previously unseen even in the United States. It was, writes his biographer, ‘not built from scratch to suit certain living needs, but was a mosaic of Hearst’s memories, inspirations and possessions. In his card-index memory he had recollections of decorative schemes and arrangements he had seen in European castles and cathedrals, and which he wished to incorporate in his own palace’.8 He had already amassed hundreds of crates filled with entire gothic rooms, carved ceilings, choir stalls, panelling, staircases, stained glass, sarcophagi, tapestries and countless other items that would come in handy for a palace that was yet to be erected, a building to supplement the two castles already in his possession, one of which, St Donat’s Castle in Glamorganshire, North Wales, he hardly ever visited.
In his San Simeon palace, Hearst himself slept in a bed that had once belonged to Cardinal Richelieu. In the Clarendon building in New York, the elevator leading to his three-floor apartment, crammed full of armour, canvases, tapestries and sculptures, was a converted confession box that had once been witness to whispered sins and intrigues at the Vatican. The bathtub was of Parian marble and had once accommodated President Wilson at the White House. Everything had to be on the most lavish scale. Hearst, the newspaper man, owned an airfield, 10,000 head of cattle, a dairy, a thoroughbred stud farm, a poultry farm, scores of cars, a small army of gardeners and a private zoo in which lions and tigers, polar bears and other creatures were shown off to admiring guests, who became themselves, at least temporarily, part of his enormous collection. Not since Versailles had the world seen a palace so phenomenal and a master so lavishly, so prodigiously wasteful.
Underlying all this was an unquenchable need for possession and control. His newspapers allowed him to control minds and the course of politics (he was instrumental in the election of two presidents), his money gave him control over the world. Even his attempts at making his mistress the greatest diva Hollywood had seen were dominated by his possessive instinct: ‘She had beauty and talent. He would supply the instructors, the writers and directors to bring it out, and the publicity to exploit it … He was possessive about everything he owned. Miss Davies was his most prized possession, whom he would train, groom, push and publicise until she reached the heights.’9 It was not to be, and the actress, whom he had plucked from the chorus of a Ziegfeld extravaganza, became the grande dame of his castle instead of enthralling the world on celluloid. This instinct to have and control made him an easy prey for art dealers. He simply could not resist anything that came his way. At auction he would habitually outbid everybody else (as a result his mere presence would boost prices) and he once bought a $40,000 carpet simply because the window display marked it the most expensive in the world. It was shipped off to one of his warehouses never to be seen again. He was well aware of this Achilles’ heel. ‘I’m afraid I’m like a dipsomaniac with a bottle,’ he told The New York Times, ‘they keep sending me these art catalogues and I can’t resist them.’10 Duveen worked his favourite trick on him by telling an agitated Hearst (who had just quarrelled with Miss Davies) that a Van Dyck he was admiring was in fact for Mrs Duveen and not for sale. This piece of information resulted, after a discussion as protracted as it was passionate, in a transaction of $345,000, enough to comfort a disappointed Mrs Duveen. Typically, Hearst had overpaid wildly in his determination to possess what was threatening to slip from his hand. The painting was later resold for $89,000.
A staff of thirty men worked at Hearst’s warehouses on 143rd Street and in the Bronx, where millions of dollars’ worth of art and antiques lay crated up, including the entire cloisters of two monasteries, one of them alone stored in 10,700 crates, and tens of thousands of books, many of whom their owner had never seen and would never lay eyes on. Here the possessions were catalogued and photographed and bound for Hearst to ogle in the safety of his home, a record of ownership almost rendering the objects themselves redundant. Two cabinetmakers and an armourer were in full-time employment here.
In the end even Hearst’s fabulous wealth – his income was around $15,000,000 (c. $160,000,000 in today’s money) a year – could not withstand his obsessive urge to possess and he found himself in 1937 to be $126,000,000 (c. $1.6 billion today) in debt, most of this through spending on works of art and on San Simeon. Now the walls of his castles in the air came crashing down, burying underneath them his power and an entire era. Hearst and his mistress had to leave their apartment at the Clarendon, which had by now spread over five floors of art-packed rooms; he had to sell and auction off many of his objects just to save his company and stay afloat; he had to give up his Hollywood dreams for Miss Davies; and restrict the number of his residences to a mere four. He managed to hold on to much of his empire, to his palace and to great parts of his collections, but his power and his position at the cutting edge of journalism were all but broken. He now faced what he had done his utmost to avoid facing all his life: death itself.
Life went on for another fourteen years, but much of it was a drawn-out form of atrophy; humiliated by a constant need of loans, stung by the release of Citizen Kane, weeping, he left his castle for the last time to take refuge from a world he understood less and less in a Beverly Hills villa and a life governed by doctors and nurses. His odd falsetto voice would still be heard over the telephone at his newspaper offices at all hours of the day and night in a feeble attempt to assert control, but the arms of his empire were run by other, younger, men who did little more than show deference when necessary.
Hearst’s fear of death had been the great taboo of his career, scrupulously observed by his employees, who had been under orders to keep away from him any discussion of the matter or any inkling of its constant reality. His staff went to extremes to keep him in the illusion of eternal life. When one of the palms at San Simeon died unexpectedly, the gardeners painted its leaves green until it could be replaced during Hearst’s absence. He hated attending funerals and would send deputies, solicitors and exorbitant flower wreaths rather than attend the last rites even of close associates. He was sentimental about his childhood memories. During his baronial banquets, which were attended by film stars and other celebrities, the table settings would include, among antique silverware and exquisite porcelain, ketchup in the original bottles to remind him of picnics he had had with his parents. Special guests were honoured by being allowed to sleep in bed linen decorated with his mother’s monogram and inherited from her. Now, watched by nurses and kept alive by medicines, the illusion could be upheld no longer and the immortality he had tried to purchase with every item he had ever bought was running through weakening fingers. He died, aged eighty-eight, on 14 August 1951.