THE GRANDS MESSIEURS
Rich Americans of the early twentieth century did not lay out great sums of money for art and culture without certain accompanying feelings of guilt. They might speak, reverentially, of being merely temporary “custodians” of their treasures for a one-day grateful public, but they privately admitted their own greedy longings for some sort of personal immortality. They might chauvinistically proclaim that it was American capitalism’s manifest destiny to claim the finest art from a decaying European aristocracy, and yet, at the same time, they were troubled by the suspicion that collecting art was, au fond, frivolous.
Henry Frick, for example, after paying about $400,000 for Velásquez’ Philip IV of Spain, tried to rationalize the expense by explaining that Philip IV himself had paid Velásquez the equivalent of $600 for the portrait in 1645. Elaborately computing the interest at 6 percent between the year of the commission and 1910, the year he acquired it—as though the painting were like shares of General Motors stock—Frick could prove that the price he had paid amounted to pennies. Henry Huntington used the averaging system. To justify his paying Duveen $620,000 for Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, Huntington would point out that for some of the paintings in his and Arabella’s collection they had paid only $5,000, and for others as little as $500. “When you average ’em all up, the price for each isn’t bad,” he said.
Still, the new American millionaires were constantly under critical attack on both sides of the Atlantic. They and their wives were the subject of caustic cartoons and pious editorials in which they were accused of plundering and raping the great art collections of Europe just to decorate their own pompous mansions. (Even though the Europeans were welcoming the rapists with eagerly open arms, and begging them into their drawing rooms to admire the portraits of their ancestors.) Americans, without a fixed aristocracy, were accused of trying to invent one; deprived of noble or distinguished ancestors, they were trying to borrow them. Stung by the criticism, they responded defensively. What else but guilt, for example, could have goaded Mrs. Maria Hotchkiss—the widow of a munitions manufacturer whose fortune was based on an invention which had wonderfully refined the machine gun, which had wonderfully helped dispatch the lives of thousands of young men in several wars—into endowing a splendid school for boys in Lakeville, Connecticut?
And all the time, helping to assuage the collective guilt of rich Americans, there was Joseph Duveen, who eventually became Lord Duveen of Millbank and whose considerable fortune was based on the discovery that Americans had a lot of money and Europeans didn’t. Behind every grande dame, it may already have been noted, there was usually a grand monsieur, and between 1886, when he embarked on his astonishing career at age seventeen, and 1939, the year of his death, that gentleman was apt to be Duveen.
The way Duveen gained his reputation for impeccable taste and expertise is interesting. In addition to his you-deserve-beautiful-things approach, he also used the opposite technique. He would tell a prospective client that he or she was “not ready” for great art, and that “you must work your way up to it.” Not surprisingly, when a millionaire was told that he was not good enough to own an Old Master, he was frustrated, tantalized. Duveen would offer to start off the neophyte collector with something from what he literally or figuratively referred to as “my basement,” and that was usually a painting from the Barbizon School, for which Duveen had little use. Then, when the customer had become sufficiently educated by the Barbizon piece, Duveen would offer to buy it back and replace it with a Rembrandt or a Rubens. His Barbizon paintings circulated back and forth while he prepared his customers for bigger, better, and more expensive things.
For years he refused to consider Detroit a fit city to house an art collection, until finally the newly rich automobile manufacturers Henry Ford and Horace Dodge had almost literally to come to him on bended knees, begging him to let them be his customers. He felt the same way about Pittsburgh, and Henry Frick had to move from there to his palace on Fifth Avenue in New York City before Duveen would consent to do business with him. Duveen’s methods of whetting appetites until they had reached insatiability were outrageous, and one of his more useful sales tools was his wife. Having acquired a particularly important painting, he would approach a prospective buyer and shake his head sadly, saying, “No, no, I am afraid that is not for sale. I know it is probably the finest Tintoretto in the world, but I have promised it to Elsie. I cannot disappoint her.” Up, up, up would go the offer, until finally Duveen agreed that he would have to break the terrible news to Elsie. (Actually, Lady Duveen had grown accustomed to entering a room and discovering that a painting she had grown quite fond of was gone.)
When customers, as they occasionally did, complained about Duveen’s prices, his favorite riposte was, “My dear woman, when you are buying something that is priceless, no price is too high.” Another favorite saying was, “To fill a collection with paintings worth fifty thousand dollars each is easy. But to build a collection of paintings worth a quarter of a million each—that’s hard work!”
To a special customer, such as Arabella Huntington, Duveen’s approach was a mixture of fawning servility and imperious command. When she traveled, Duveen took care of all her steamship and hotel reservations. He advised her on clothes, and often shopped for her. He helped select her jewels, and who knew what under-the-counter arrangements had been made with the jewelers into whose emporiums he directed her? If he didn’t care for the way she was wearing her hair, he would tell her so, and she would change it. Once, when she had bought a roomful of antique furniture from a rival dealer, she called in Duveen to pass judgment on it. He pronounced it inferior, and Arabella promptly telephoned the dealer and told him she was returning it. “It’s in the back yard,” she explained.
In only one arena was Duveen not able to be much help to Arabella, and that was New York society. For one thing, her personal background was too shadowy and uncertain. For another, her husband Collis—whom Oscar Lewis has described as “scrupulously dishonest”—had made so many enemies that New York society did not want him in their houses. Arabella might live next door to the Vanderbilts, but she was never invited to their parties: Vanderbilt and Huntington were old and bitter railroad rivals. Down the street, Mrs. Astor also failed to give the nod—even, for many years, to the upstart Vanderbilts.
Later, when Arabella became Mrs. Henry E. Huntington, she had made herself notorious—a curiosity, a side-show freak. After all, for an aunt to marry her nephew was more than merely uncommon; it was a social gaffe worse than belching at the dinner table. (Awareness that this might be society’s reaction may have been why Arabella put Henry off for as long as she did.)
But in the ancient country homes and drafty castles of England, and in the damp palaces of Rome, Venice, and Paris, Duveen was able to serve Arabella well. He saw to it that she was entertained in splendid fashion by the aristocracy and landed gentry in Britain and on the Continent, where doors were flung open to her everywhere. One wonders, of course, whether Arabella ever suspected that her enthusiastic hosts and hostesses were really inviting her into their homes in hopes that she would spot something she might want to buy.
There was, meanwhile, always a serious question as to how much Joseph Duveen actually knew about art. As a salesman, of course, he was a nonpareil, and he was a master of bluff and bluster. Once, at a gathering at the home of one of his important New York clients, to whom he had just sold a Dürer for several hundred thousand dollars, Duveen was confronted with a young French art scholar, who had been taken in hand by the host’s daughter and proudly shown the Dürer. After studying the painting for several minutes, the young Frenchman whispered, “I don’t think this Dürer is the real thing.” To his horror, the young woman immediately turned to her father and told him that the Frenchman had declared the Dürer a fake. The shaken father then turned to Duveen. Duveen laughed his big, hearty laugh, and cried, “Oh, that is amusing. That really is terribly amusing. Do you realize, young man, that at least twenty other art experts, here and in Europe, have made the same mistake as you have, and have declared this painting not to be genuine? Oh, how amusing that you have been taken in too!” He had instantly made everyone in the room feel like artistic imbeciles, and presently the Frenchman was apologizing for his “mistake.” The rest of the evening, however, cannot have been very festive.
On another occasion, during one of the many lawsuits which peppered his long career, Duveen was asked whether he was familiar with Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. “Of course I’ve heard of the picture,” he said, “but I’ve never actually seen it.” When it was pointed out to him that Ruskin was a writer—and an art critic, at that—not a painter, and that The Stones of Venice was a book, Duveen merely laughed again, and said that he had always thought that Ruskin was a painter, and not a very good one at that.
Duveen loved lawsuits. He loved to sue other people, and he equally enjoyed being sued. For most of his life he was involved in at least one piece of litigation, if not several, at any time. His habit of publicly denouncing his competitors as charlatans and crooks, and of marching through their galleries shouting, “Fake! Trash! Garbage!” assured him of a steady stream of libel and defamation actions, which he seemed to relish as a kind of tonic in the day-to-day routine of selling. He also enjoyed suing, and being sued by, members of his own large and contentious family, most of whom seemed also to be in the art business, and each of whom periodically claimed that he was being tricked and cheated by the others. When Joseph Duveen’s art dealer father, Sir Joel Joseph Duveen, died in 1908 and left a $7,000,000 fortune to twelve children and a brother, Joseph quickly arranged to “borrow” his brothers’ and sisters’ inheritances in return for “shares” in the family business. From time to time Joseph would dole out a few thousand dollars to his siblings, but there were long periods when the others received no income at all from their investments. When they grumbled and complained, Joseph would laugh and say, “So sue me!” For the most part, since they knew he wanted to be sued, they didn’t sue.
Obviously, the thing Duveen wanted most to avoid in his profession was to be accused of peddling a painting that was a fake or forgery. Not only did that sort of thing tarnish his reputation. When it happened, and was discovered, it meant having to refund the purchaser his money, a much more painful operation. Fortunately, in 1906, when Duveen was thirty-seven, when Arabella Huntington’s art-buying spree was at its zenith, and when Duveen had cemented himself as securely as a barnacle to such other collectors as Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick, J. P. Morgan, Eva Stotesbury, and Mary Emery, he encountered and “discovered” the brilliant young art scholar whom Isabella Gardner had actually discovered some years earlier, Bernard Berenson.
Berenson, of course, had heard of Duveen, and had never been entirely sure that he approved of him. The two first encountered each other in Duveen’s London gallery, where Berenson had gone to inspect a picture he was thinking of buying for Belle Gardner. On this occasion they did not formally meet, and when Berenson mentioned a price for the painting Duveen merely uttered his familiar laugh, said something to the effect that “This young man knows too much,” and turned away.
What had struck Duveen was the fact that Berenson’s figure for the painting was exactly what it was worth; later, he would be able to sell it to one of his rich American clients for twice as much. This gave Duveen a clever idea. He decided to seek out Berenson, and this time they met. Berenson had limited his field of expertise to Italian painting from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and Duveen had a proposal to make to him. If Berenson would authenticate Italian paintings for him, Duveen would pay him an annual retainer fee, plus a commission on sales. Berenson accepted, on the condition that he have nothing to do with sales, which was fine with Duveen. Selling, after all, was his forte. Thus began a relationship that would last for thirty years, and that would elevate Bernard Berenson to a position of influence—and affluence—unprecedented in the history of art scholarship.
From that point on Duveen would refuse to let any of his clients buy an Italian Renaissance painting until B.B., as he was called, working with his flashlight, studying brush strokes through a magnifying glass and opera glasses, had first attributed it and established its authenticity. It was a relationship that was often stormy, though they had become in effect business partners. As a salesman, Duveen used hyperbole and superlatives. Each painting he offered was “the finest of its kind in the world,” “the most perfect example of the artist’s work ever to come to light,” and so on. Berenson’s enthusiasms for certain works were sometimes more restrained. There were times, too, when Duveen, with a lively client waiting eagerly in the wings, would have much preferred to have had Berenson declare a painting authentic. But Berenson, sticking to the guns of his integrity and growing reputation, would refuse to give the work his stamp of approval.
There were also differences of taste. “Berenson may know what’s authentic, but only I know what will sell,” Duveen would say. And “If I were to follow Berenson, I would have a basementful of masterpieces that no one would buy.” Berenson, who used to say that his tastes and sensibilities had been shaped “by two ancient aristocracies,” Judaism and Harvard, tended to prefer paintings done in dark, shadowy, mournful tones. But rich Americans, Duveen had discovered, preferred bright, cheery colors. Like a successful tailor, Duveen liked to cut the cloth to suit the customer. (When Arabella Huntington first took delivery of The Blue Boy, she complained that Gainsborough’s blue wasn’t as sharp a blue as she had remembered it from reproductions she had seen; it was more of a bilious green. Duveen, suspecting correctly that the dull color was the result of soil accumulated over generations of hanging in a musty and underheated castle, had the painting cleaned and restored to its original pretty bright-blueness. Arabella was overjoyed.)
The vagaries of the American caste system also had to be considered. When Arabella was contemplating buying Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, she wanted to know just who this Mrs. Siddons was anyway. Duveen explained that Sarah Siddons had been an actress, a member of the celebrated Kemble theatrical family in England. With this news, Arabella reconsidered. After all, in America, an actress still bore an invisible scarlet letter “A” on her bosom; it was a profession a little too close for comfort to what had been Arabella’s own. It took Duveen to convince her that what she was buying was an artist, not a woman, before Arabella would write out the check. Even so, when Arabella brought the painting home to San Marino the new acquisition was considered very daring. Americans preferred ancestors to actresses.
Whenever Berenson had the slightest reservation about a painting’s authenticity, he said so. Naturally there were times when Duveen wished heartily that Berenson’s standards were not so exacting—that when his doubts were irritatingly niggling, B.B. would bend his rules, just slightly, in favor of a sale. But Berenson always stood firm.
There were times, too, when Berenson eventually changed his mind about a painting. When this happened he admitted it, again exasperating Duveen. Once, in one of Duveen’s lawsuits, the uncompromising Berenson felt compelled to testify against his partner. A painting, which he had earlier attributed for Duveen, was now, in his final opinion, not authentic. The opposing lawyers jumped on this apparent contradiction. How could he verify a painting one day and deny it the next? “I never stick to a mistake,” Berenson said calmly.
One of the factors complicating Berenson’s work for Duveen was B.B.’s knowledge that many of the Italian painters, deluged by Medici commissions, personally executed only those parts of a painting which they found interesting—the face and the hands in a portrait, for instance. The more boring parts—the costume, the furniture, the background landscape—they turned over to apprentices. Thus, was a painting that had only been half-painted by Botticelli really a Botticelli? It was a complicated academic point. To deal with it, Berenson developed nit-picking, hairsplitting categories: “School of Botticelli,” “friend of,” “pupil of,” “After,” “student of,” “attributed to,” and so on, all of which were euphemisms for “possible fake.” To Duveen, whose eye was on the bottom line, all this seemed like an elaborate waste of time. Still, Berenson’s painstaking researches are considered invaluable to art historians to this day.
As Berenson’s reputation grew, so did Duveen’s. Though never really comfortable in their partnership, each man needed the other. The two remained locked together by the exigencies of honesty and the marketplace. Occasionally Duveen would ask Berenson to step outside his chosen specialty, the Italian Renaissance, and authenticate, say, a Rembrandt. Invariably Berenson stood firm. “I will not baptize outside my parish,” he said.
Berenson could be stubborn. One of Duveen’s pet clients was Andrew Mellon, and one of the Italians whom Mellon longed to have represented in his collection was Giorgione. The work of Giorgione, furthermore, is very difficult to differentiate from that of Titian. Aesthetics aside, the difference in the art marketplace between the two painters is entirely monetary. Titian lived to be ninety-nine, and during his lifetime his output was prodigious. Giorgione, who was Titian’s tutor and friend, died young and left little of his work behind. Andrew Mellon had plenty of Titians, and so, when a painting which Duveen was convinced was a Giorgione fell into his hands, he went immediately to Mellon. “What does B.B. say?” Mr. Mellon wanted to know. “Never mind Berenson,” said Duveen. “I tell you that this is unquestionably a Giorgione.” Then he lied a little. “Berenson has verified it,” he said.
Mr. Mellon, a cautious man, then cabled Berenson in Italy to ask whether this was true. Berenson wired back indignantly to say that he had by no means certified the picture, but would be happy to look at it. The painting was shipped to him, and he studied it for several days. Then he returned his verdict: it was an early Titian. The sale was lost, and Duveen was furious.
The uneasy partnership between Duveen and Berenson was not helped by the differences in their backgrounds either. The Duveens were Dutch Jews who, for several generations, had been prosperous city burghers in a religiously tolerant country. Berenson was from a Lithuanian ghetto, where his ancestors had been rabbis. Duveen was not above pointing out this difference in class to Berenson when it suited him. After all, Duveen’s father had been made a British baronet. Duveen himself had risen to baronet, then to baron. (Though he had no interest in politics, he occasionally popped into the House of Lords, just to show that he had gained the right to do so.) And to further complicate their relationship, their respective wives liked each other. Mrs. Berenson liked Duveen, too, and, with his effervescent personality and endless capacity for enthusiasm, he was good company. “He’s like champagne!” Mrs. Berenson used to say. “More like gin,” her husband would mutter in reply.
Years later, after Joseph Duveen’s death, Berenson would look back at their long association with rue. He, too, felt guilty, as though he had betrayed his talent, let it be crucified on a cross of gold. To be sure, his association with Duveen had afforded him luxuries—his library, his own exquisite collection of art—that are not often vouchsafed to the art historian. It had afforded him his beautiful villa, I Tatti, outside Florence, which for years was the mecca of art students from all over the world. Still, he seemed never to escape the conviction that he had sold his soul to the devil. Significantly, in his memoir Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Bernard Berenson never mentioned Duveen’s name, nor their long partnership. But of the great art authority that Duveen had helped him to become, he did write:
I soon discovered that I ranked with fortunetellers, chiromancists, astrologers, and not even with the self-deluded of these, but rather with the deliberate charlatans. At first I was supposed to have invented a trick by which one could infallibly tell the authorship of an Italian picture … Finally it degenerated into a widespread belief that if only I could be approached the right way I could order this or that American millionaire to pay thousands upon thousands and hundreds of thousands for any daub that I was bribed by the seller to attribute to a great master … Needless to say that every person I would not receive, every owner whose picture I would not ascribe to Raphael or Michelangelo, or Giorgione, Titian or Tintoretto, etc., etc., turned into an enemy.
Though he had always remained true to his code, he seemed unable to reconcile his art expertise with the fact that he had made money at it:
I took the wrong turn when I swerved from more purely intellectual pursuits to one like the archeological study of art, gaining thereby a troublesome reputation as an “expert.” My only excuse is, if the comparison is not blasphemous, that like Saint Paul with his tent-making and Spinoza with his glass-polishing, I too needed a means of livelihood … Those men of genius were not hampered in their careers by their trades. Mine took up what creative talent there was in me, with the result that this trade made my reputation and the rest of me scarcely counted. The spiritual loss was great and in consequence I have never regarded myself as other than a failure. This sense of failure, a guilty sense, makes me squirm when I hear myself spoken of as a “successful man” and as having made “a success of my life.”
To atone for his guilt, perhaps, Berenson, who died widowed and childless, left everything he owned—his estate, his collection, his money—to Harvard.
For a cheerier appraisal of B.B.’s journey on this planet, it could be pointed out that his Italian Painters of the Renaissance survives not only as a classic but also as something of a bible in the art world, and that a majority of the curators of the world’s great museums today have been either students of, or disciples of, Bernard Berenson.
As for Duveen, it could be pointed out that the majority of the great American private art collections, most of them assembled between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression and nearly all of them reposing today in public museums for the world to enjoy, were put together with Duveen’s assistance.
And while it is true that the rich women of the era were manipulated by Duveen and others like him—Edith McCormick’s mind manipulated by Carl Jung, Anna Dodge’s jewel fetishism by Pierre Cartier—look what Duveen offered in return. For Eva Stotesbury, it was simply that he taught her “how to live.” As for Arabella Huntington, for much of her mature life she may have been one of the most frightened women in the world. Obviously Colonel Mann and Town Topics knew something. Who can imagine what inner torment she suffered in dread of the day when her untidy past—at least two adulterous affairs with married men, an illegitimate child—might suddenly rise up to confront her? Joseph Duveen had helped her drown the secrets of her past in splendor.