I

In the summer of 1929 when Agnes Mongan and Lincoln Kirstein had inadvertently attended Diaghilev’s funeral, they had made great efforts to meet the sixty-four-year-old Bernard Berenson. Mongan had written Berenson’s secretary, Nicky Mariano, to set up an appointment to see the renowned connoisseur at I Tatti, his villa near Florence. Set among olive trees and cypresses on Settignano hill in the village of Fiesole, this large building had masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art and an incomparable art history library packed within its thick plaster walls. It was a mecca for scholars and connoisseurs. Because of Berenson’s travel schedule and some renovation work at the villa, the rendezvous had to be at an alternate location on a date after Kirstein’s departure. Mongan ended up going with her sister Elizabeth, a print specialist whose scholarship in her field rivaled Agnes’s in drawings, and on that first encounter they met Berenson in his summer residence, a former hunting lodge near Vallombrosa, high in the hills above Florence. But there would be many future get-togethers at I Tatti itself.

The suggestion to make that initial visit to Berenson had come from Paul Sachs. Mongan had no idea that Sachs had an ulterior motive, although Eddie Warburg might have told her. Eddie had been present when Sachs informed Felix Warburg that Agnes Mongan was the person he was grooming to be the chatelaine of I Tatti after Berenson’s death, when the villa was slated to become Harvard’s property and, as such, an outpost for scholars.

Berenson had attended Harvard, and had remained loyal to the university ever since. A few years prior to Mongan’s visit, Bella da Costa Greene, the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Morgan Library in New York—and a mistress of Berenson’s, who was twenty-seven years her senior—had recommended that Berenson leave his collection to the Fogg, and had raised the issue with Sachs as well. It was an idea that appealed to both sides.

Berenson and his wife Mary had not always looked kindly, however, on the German-Jewish banking community with which Sachs was associated in New York. James Loeb, the brother of Eddie Warburg’s aunt Nina Loeb Warburg, had been a college classmate of Berenson’s, and although Loeb was an esteemed classics scholar and founder of the Loeb Classical Library, Mary Berenson had characterized him as “a handsome, fat, prosperous philistine Jew: … in with all the rich Jews in New York” who were unfortunately Bernard’s clients on whom he depended for income by doing attributions for paintings in their art collections.¹ Not much respect extended in the opposite direction, either. Aby Warburg, who in 1891 had written his doctoral dissertation on Botticelli, had lived in Florence from 1897 to 1902 and was active in the German Art Historical Institute there. Just as Berenson deplored Aby’s sort of iconographic scholarship, Aby put down Berenson as part of a group of “enthusiastic art historians,” specifically his type six of the category: “the connoisseurs and ‘attributionists’ … desirous of protecting the peculiar characteristics of their hero.” Aby labeled Berenson and others like him as “the whole noisy tribe … hero-worshippers … only inspired by the temperament of a gourmand. The neutrally cool form of estimation happens to be the original form of enthusiasm peculiar to the propertied classes, the collector and his circle.”²

Aby’s brother Felix, however, did better with Berenson. In 1926 Felix and Frieda had visited I Tatti, at which point the two men talked of their wish to build up the Fogg. Felix gladly functioned as an ambassador of Harvard, writing Berenson after the visit to thank him for his interest in the university, and referring to himself as “a fellow workman in the same field from an entirely different angle.”³ Felix sent Berenson photographs of the works in his collection and wrote to him about Eddie’s study of art history; he also naively suggested that Berenson ought to meet Aby in Hamburg at some point. Fizzie made characteristic light of B.B.’s propensity to give questionable attributions. In 1928, with Paul Sachs at his side in his New York office, Fizzie handwrote Berenson a letter just to say that he had heard a story that “a celebrated Italian painter was received by St. Peter in heaven.” When St. Peter asked his name, the painter answered, “ ‘How should I know? Ask Berenson.’ ”⁴

In many ways, Paul Sachs could have picked no better ambassador than Agnes Mongan to link Berenson’s world with his and with Harvard. Berenson had at one point converted from Judaism to Catholicism, and although he had ceased practicing by the mid-1920s, he was still very sympathetic to its adherents. The achievement of which Berenson was proudest was the large two-volume, folio-size The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, a work that unlike his other writings to date had no connection with his art dealing. Berenson was more comfortable with his scholarly side than his commercial bent, and in Agnes Mongan he met someone closely attuned to just the sort of work he had done on these draftsmen, and detached from the moneymaking aspect of art. From that first encounter until Berenson’s death in 1959, he and Mongan had a close friendship and mutual dependence.

Mongan was enchanted from the start. In Berenson she found someone who had successfully made her own passion his life’s work. Connoisseurship, issues of authorship, and the lusty appreciation of Renaissance art were the basis of Berenson’s life. Agnes and Elizabeth were so keyed up after their call at Vallombrosa that in the next several days they raced to San Gimignano, Siena, Arezzo, Perugia, and Assisi to visit museums and churches. Then, from Florence, Mongan wrote Berenson a letter that evinced both her characteristic tact and her intense engagement with the master’s way of thinking—to which she had first been exposed less directly in the courses of Georgiana Goddard King:

It was more than generous of you to let us descend—or rather ascend—as we did. I only hope we did not weary you by staying too long. I was so interested in what you were saying that I quite forgot about time.⁵

From then on they corresponded regularly; Berenson counted on Mongan to supply him with photographs and reprints from America, and she posed questions to him as she worked on the Fogg drawings catalog.

Paul Sachs was happy to see the relationship take hold, in part because of the role for which he intended Mongan, but also because of his fantasy that he could turn her into his personal Nicky Mariano—the quintessential assistant. In the spring of 1933 Sachs wrote Mongan from I Tatti,

What a place to live & work! And I am interested to see how Miss Mariano works for & with him. I begin to realize that poor Agnes is not the only one who does 9/10’s of the labor & when she—Miss M—has done all the terrific, endless work & gathering of material that you also do she presents it on a “silver plate” as you do and he “decides.”⁶

But the person whom Mongan emulated at I Tatti was not Nicky Mariano; it was Berenson himself. She wrote to Berenson that she wished to visit him again “to see what I can learn of concentration & system.”⁷ In fact she was already acquiring Berenson’s sort of organizational skills, as well as his eye. Throughout the 1930s, Mongan and Paul Sachs were preparing their catalog of the Fogg’s drawings collection, and most of the research was hers to do. To develop a feeling for attribution, she looked at as many drawings as she could put her hands on. She studied originals, photographs, and reproductions in books. When she traveled abroad, not only did she take along Sachs’s famous letters of introduction, but she also took photographs of the drawings at the Fogg, so that she could make comparisons in the hope of establishing authorship. Beyond the ability to recognize authenticity, she acquired a sharp discernment for what was first rate and what was not.

Mongan quickly mastered special areas of expertise. One had to do with left-handed artists. She herself was left-handed; it was another of her traits that made her feel slightly outside the norm. She recognized that in paintings if the light comes from an open space at the left, the artist was generally left-handed. In drawings, the hallmarks are that the strokes progress from upper left to lower right, and that shading comes from the left. Moreover, the most facile mirror writing is generally done by lefties; their hand does not get in their own way, as it does for people using their right hand. Hans Holbein and Leonardo da Vinci were among the best-known left-handed draftsmen. Her awareness of what this meant to their work gave Mongan further means of confirming or disputing attributions to these and other left-handed artists.

Not long after she had talked her way into Paul Sachs’s employ, Mongan’s eye for the authorship of drawings began to make her a clearinghouse for all sorts of information concerning questions of authenticity. She was a stickler for accuracy. When an error-laden survey of Italian art was published in France in 1930, it was Mongan who pointed out the carelessness in the Saturday Review of Literature.⁸ That a painting should be attributed to Filippo rather than Filippino Lippi and the Fra Angelicos of San Marco listed as being at the Uffizi represented a level of sloppiness she found intolerable. In 1930, K. T. Parker of the British Museum, aware of her scholarly meticulousness, had asked her to help with his catalog of Watteau drawings by documenting all of them in the United States. Parker knew her account would be flawless and thorough. Information of the sort he was seeking had not been published anywhere else, but Mongan had what it took to accomplish his task. In a relatively small art world, she knew lots of people and had total recall of whatever she had seen and heard. She also exercised care and know-how. Typical of the sort of letter of which she might send ten a day from the Fogg was one she wrote about Watteau to Parker on December 17, 1930:

I seem to remember Richard Owen saying he sold one in San Francisco so I have written to the director of their Museum—a friend of mine who was here last year—asking him to send you a photograph of it and news of any other Watteau drawings on the West Coast, if there are any.

Besides Mongan’s extensive circle of acquaintances, what made her so valuable at her task were her uncompromising standards. Consider a letter she wrote two years later to Robert Homans, a State Street lawyer. The issue was still Watteau—not only one of her specialties, but also a passion. With the same sort of tact that enabled her to get along with Paul Sachs when others could not, she addressed the issue of a positive attribution given to Mr. Homans’s Watteau by Walter Gay. Gay was a consummate authority on the subject and owned a related piece. But he had seen Homans’s drawing only in a photograph; Mongan had seen the actual object. “I regret that this time I cannot agree with the opinion of the keen and gifted connoisseur about your drawing,” she wrote. She gave substantial reasons as to why she thought it was a copy by another eighteenth-century artist, not a second version by Watteau of the same subject—which is what Gay had called it. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to know that there was a drawing by Watteau in this vicinity, but my own doubts are too strong to let me believe that you have a work by the master himself.”⁹

This sort of diplomatic practice of her expertise would be part of Mongan’s daily routine for years to come. She became an information center in her field, not unlike Berenson in his, except that Mongan’s reputation was never tinged by commercial motivations or any concern other than pure scholarship. From Mongan one could learn what was where. In 1932 she wrote a long essay for the Fogg Bulletin on Degas’s portrait studies in American collections. It was no wonder that she could locate the objects under discussion; most of them belonged to Paul Sachs, John Nicholas Brown, or the Lewisohns. With her chosen artists Mongan not only knew every work that had been published or was in public collections, but she also personally knew most of the collectors.

Mongan wrote and published important magazine articles throughout the 1930s. Like Kirstein, Warburg, Soby, and Austin, she was on an independent bandwagon. Mongan was not just interested in naming the artist or researching the provenance. She, too, believed in something new, in an attitude that others had not had before, and her voice in its support could not have been clearer.

Her cause was the power of drawings. She championed the idea of collecting them, a practice for which there was little tradition. She first sermonized on behalf of this viewpoint in 1932 in an article in the widely read American Magazine of Art, for which she was one of the few female writers. The piece was technically an exhibition review—of the traveling show of the collection of Dan Fellows Platt of Englewood, New Jersey—but she used it to proselytize. Like many people with a new point of view, she was as quick to call attention to its general lack of favor as to its merits:

We have no tradition of collecting drawings and no inherited treasure upon which to found our knowledge and develop our discernment. Hardly ten connoisseurs have ventured into the field, and where private collectors have been hesitant, museums have been scarcely more bold.¹⁰

To break new ground and to support a bold and surprising view was a big part of the adventure. Mongan was indeed Warburg’s and Kirstein’s soulmate; she too wanted to wake people up.

Like Warburg in his class oration or Soby in his Dali film show, she admired independence and courage. Mr. Platt “has found himself directing rather than following the trend of taste.… Mr. Platt has elected to explore not the great and directing currents of the stream of art history, but those eddying backwaters from which new currents sometimes stem.”¹¹ For the majority of art viewers, drawings had traditionally been treated more as historical documents than as objects to be savored. The exceptions to that trend were deemed to be amateurs. But Agnes Mongan worshiped such amateurs; she considered them a class of rare distinction. The roster included the sixteenth-century Italian artist and biographer Vasari; the seventeenth-century Cardinal Leopold de Medici; Pierre Crozat, who had been treasurer of France at the start of the eighteenth century; and Duke Albert Casimar of Saxony, for whom the Albertina Collection in Vienna had been named. Mongan considered them an elite whose discipleship should grow.

In her discussion of Dan Platt’s drawing collection, Mongan evinced the eloquence and the power to observe and enjoy that would lead to decades of success as an advocate for drawings and as a curator, teacher, and author. Her language was clear and vivid, her ability to communicate pleasures vast; she was a stylist in the Berenson tradition, although with a voice distinctly her own. Of a drawing by the eighteenth-century Venetian Piazzetta, she wrote, “Black crayon touches the soft gray-brown paper so lightly that the misty light of Venice seems to hang about those gracious heads.”¹² She described a Tiepolo drawing: “Brush and wash he handles with incredible surety and economy. In a few strokes his daringly fore-shortened figures are projected into dazzling whiteness.”¹³ Commenting on the British pieces in the show, she remarked, “Gainsborough hangs a valley with English mist, but the very blue of his paper recalls Claude and clear air over the campagna.”¹⁴ Having refined the tone of her early El Greco paper, the young Bryn Mawr graduate already had a rare gift to relate artistic technique to its effect upon the viewer. And Mongan made drawings done centuries ago as immediately present, and brave, as experimental sketches created last week.

In the Platt essay, Mongan further demonstrated her uncanny ability to put people and places together. She could come up with sources for a pose or composition even if the source itself had long been destroyed and was known only through engravings. She identified two of Mr. Platt’s drawings by the sixteenth-century artist Federigo Baroccio as studies for his Crucifixion in the Genoa Cathedral. This gave her occasion to analyze the effect of that startling crucifixion on Rubens when he visited Genoa in 1607 and on Van Dyck when he went there a decade later.

There is a provocative point to this information. Mongan’s brief analysis of what Rubens and Van Dyck did with Baroccio’s style was that “To Baroccio’s suave and graceful manner of modeling, which has an almost feminine elegance, they added vigorous strength and, paradoxically, great subtlety.”¹⁵ These comments on gender came from a woman in a man’s world. Her assumption seemed to be that vigorous strength is masculine, and inconsistent with great subtlety. That she made a feminine/masculine distinction of these traits is puzzling. What is certain is that, like her friends from the Harvard Society, Mongan herself combined elegance, vigor, and subtlety in happy congruity.

Mongan ended the Platt essay with a general plea for the patronage of drawings. Motivation was secondary—it hardly mattered whether people were “stirred to interest or to rivalry”¹⁶—so long as they followed Mr. Platt’s lead. Earlier she had advised collectors to consider drawings in an article about the Platt collection in the Boston Evening Transcript, where she pointed out that prices were still low and one might still “happen upon hidden treasure.”¹⁷ Today art collecting is almost as common as golf among the rich; then it was still something people needed to be told to do. It was the needling of people like Mongan, Austin, and Soby—and their evocation of the luster art objects could give to one’s life—that helped inspire thousands of prosperous Americans to accord art its current stature.

Two years after reviewing Mr. Platt’s collection, Mongan had a chance to work directly on an exhibition of master drawings. Another former Sachs student, Gordon Washburn, had just become director of the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo. He decided to make his first exhibition there a drawings show, and asked Mongan to help. An exhibition of this sort was a radical idea, and he knew he could count on her to bring it off. In her catalog introduction—which was quoted in its entirety in The Art News—Mongan articulated the qualities the medium held for her. The appeal of drawings, even from five centuries ago, was oddly similar to that of Calder’s wire pieces and Picasso’s brushwork. These disparate works share a relentless honesty. They reveal the artist’s hand so palpably that the viewer feels as if the creator has been there only a moment ago. They are spontaneous. They show the stage before ideas of formal presentation have taken over. They precede fine-tuning and finishing touches. They reveal the artist’s inner workings: personal fire more than outer display. She wrote that

It is in drawing that the real intention and essential character of a man or movement are most clearly revealed.… The world’s greatest drawings have not been done either for display or as works of art. They have been by-products in the process of artistic creation drawn by artists to help in the clarification or formalization of their own problems.… They have the virtues of freshness, immediacy and utter honesty. In them banality, empty cleverness or mere trickery, can have no place. Like architects’ plans they are usually the basis for erections in a more substantial material but they have a freedom and a vibrancy which ruled lines lack. Paradoxically drawing is both the very bones and foundation upon which great composition depends and the most subtle medium in which to capture the fleeting and the ephemeral.¹⁸

Collectors and curators should wake up. It would take decades before Agnes Mongan’s views—and the sort of show mounted at the Albright—became a national trend, but within a few years their echoes would be felt in galleries and museums around the nation. Today they are everywhere.

The people who depended on Mongan as a living catalog and a voice of authority included some of the major figures of the American art world. She corresponded frequently with Erwin Panofsky, the great Northern Renaissance art authority who had fled Nazi Germany and relocated at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. A consummate scholar of iconography, Panofsky had high regard for Mongan’s ability to cite the various appearances of certain images and determine their significance. In 1936 he proposed that they combine forces for “a sweet little monograph” on “the piebald horse in art history.” Between the two of them, they had come up with examples of this type of horse in thirteenth-century Persian faience, paintings by Brueghel, and other art objects; Panofsky thought it worth taking further. Mongan turned him down, but they remained in touch on various subjects.

Mongan periodically assisted Georgiana King and many other of her colleagues in their research. She also kept up communication with John Walker, who after his Harvard graduation spent several years as a beloved assistant to Berenson at I Tatti, and a bit later became director of the National Gallery in Washington. Mongan and Walker corresponded constantly. A typical letter was one in which she commented on Robetta’s Youth Captive and Free, for which Walker was then researching the sources. She pointed out that the Pan figure was clearly based on a Pollaiuolo drawing that had been lost but was known because the artist copied it in his Venetian sketchbook. One of Robetta’s angels resembled a figure in the Benozzo Adoring Group in the Riccardi Palace. Cain and Abel looked a lot like the central figures in the Pollaiuolo School engraving of Battling Nudes. In suggesting these sources, Mongan was contradicting Walker’s own conclusions, but that was precisely the sort of challenge she enjoyed; as she wrote to Berenson, “It is most pleasant having John Walker nearby. We enjoy our arguments over attribution much more than the vehemence of our remarks would lead an outsider to believe.”¹⁹

Pollaiuolo also figured in Mongan’s voluminous correspondence with Alfred Barr. Barr’s main concern was the art of his own time, but he also had a strong interest in earlier work, and remained in ways a traditional scholar. Sometimes his research was prompted by a personal penchant—as with Pollaiuolo, where Mongan could, off the top of her head, provide him with insights on the mythological themes, discussing, for example, the Manlius Torquatus legend of Roman warriors and Gaul as a source for the artist’s Fighting Nudes. At other times Barr was helping friends of the Museum of Modern Art, trustees or key donors, research an old master drawing in their private collection. He counted on Mongan to help authenticate and date pieces by Ricci, Claude Lorrain, Tiepolo, and others. It was a luxury for him to be able to turn to someone so firmly rooted in traditional academia who was also sympathetic to his modernism.

For Mongan, Barr and his wife, Marga, were among the people who offered a bit of the sparkle and glamour she craved when the life of libraries and the Fogg seemed too confined. She mostly led the existence of a scholar, but there were times when she liked to don her fancy clothes and join her pals for one of their glittering evenings in Hartford or White Plains or Manhattan. In the midst of her quest for correct attributions and the precise provenance of each work in her Fogg catalog, it gave her a lift to get notes like the one from Marga Barr that said,

Blessings, blessings my dear and get well and for Pete’s sake die [sic] your hair. I will whisper to you that I had what is called a henna rinse and will continue to do so. If you like you can have your hair done in New York and I will hold your hand. I know the right place.²⁰

Marga was forever writing to urge Mongan to spend more time with her—in New York or Vermont—and to arrange rendezvous in Europe.

With the Barrs, Mongan could also compare notes about Kirstein and Warburg. She opted for a more scholarly life than they, but they still offered her an essential amusement and friendship. Her role was as the stable, sensible one—intrigued but above the fray at the same time. So at the start of 1933 she wrote to Alfred Barr to describe a visit with Kirstein in New York when he had taken her to Jean Char-lot’s studio:

to see his latest portrait—as Adam in what seemed to me a very horrible Adam and Eve. Perhaps you are such a Chariot enthusiast you would not mind his conception of Eve, but to me she was pretty repulsive. The latest Creative Art reports that Lincoln is about to depart for Tibet to study Buddhism. Haven’t I heard that before?²¹

Barr’s reply took a similar tone: “Lincoln seems more erratic than ever, but my devotion to him continues.”²²

Mongan kept up the dialogue:

Lincoln has written me that nothing is further from his thoughts at the moment than Tibet or Buddhism. He is, he claims, deep in a life of Nijinsky, with little time for other thought.

Eddie I have not yet seen. He is again holding forth at Bryn Mawr on Modern Art. I have only heard one comment but that was favorable: that he seems to have grown up considerably and that the effects of his tour have been all to the good.²³

Mongan was deep in a sea of books and photographs, and hard at the meticulous work of artistic documentation, but she needed these dips into the old world of her Harvard Society for Contemporary Art chums. And she relished banter as much as scholarship. More than anyone else, it was the founders of the Harvard Society who offered her such pleasures. They had moved to distant points when she remained in Cambridge, but they stayed in close touch. If by chance they began to falter, she knew how to keep them in the fold. At the beginning of 1933, she wrote to John Walker,

I had a perfectly mad but entirely characteristic note from Lincoln this morning. And, for Christmas, a cable from Eddie from Bethlehem. Of that ancient and strange triumvirate, you alone remain to be heard from. You are not going to default, are you?

Warburg’s cable from Bethlehem somehow amazed her; she reported on it in letters to the Barrs and to Kirstein as well. No one seemed to offer her more pleasure, and laughs, and friendship, than the fellow the newspapers had labeled as “the bad boy of Harvard Yard.” Throughout the thirties, Mongan and Warburg visited one another frequently in Cambridge or New York or at his parents’ house, and they corresponded regularly. Sometimes the tone was earnest and purposeful, such as a letter from July of 1934 that Warburg wrote from his office at the Museum of Modern Art to Mongan in hers at the Fogg in an attempt to give further assistance to Josef Albers. Warburg referred admiringly to the abstract woodcuts Albers had recently completed as his first American work. Having decided to circulate an exhibition of these pieces, Warburg wondered whether Mongan would like them for the Fogg. It was precisely the sort of thing he was doing all day long for struggling artists. At other moments, he wrote to his old Harvard friend with far more intimacy. Consider the letter addressed to “Ag Darling” in which he describes his first meeting with the woman he would eventually marry:

I met her at a cocktail party—decided she had class with a capital “K”—took her out to lunch the next day, … et, voila—l’amour. !!

And that kiddies is the way I met your Grandma.

The majority of letters were a mixture of banter and serious discourse, and of their shared penchant for “gossip”—one of Mongan’s favorite words at the time. Warburg was occasionally spending time with President Roosevelt, whose son James was a friend, and Mongan liked hearing about this sort of thing. FDR talked with Warburg about the latest archaeological discoveries. When the young art patron asked the president how he had time to read about such things, FDR asked him if he had ever read The Congressional Record; to Warburg’s reply that he had only read a few pages once, the president explained that since he had to read it he depended on archaeological journals for kicks. It was precisely the sort of gossip that she enjoyed passing on to her friends. With Warburg, Mongan could jest about issues like Henry Russell Hitchcock’s fears about going to New York; Hitchcock was terrified of further mention in Lucius Beebe’s column, a distinction the Wesleyan administration frowned upon. Warburg could be counted on for a funny reply. The two would also discuss politics at the Fogg, the carryings-on of the Sachs museum course students, the problems of the ballet. Their tone was what Eddie’s cousin Bettina, who had known Mongan ever since Bryn Mawr, called “so forthright as to be fifthright.” Mongan signed her letters “Ag the Hag.” Discussing a question of attribution of a Tiepolo drawing Warburg was considering for purchase, she signed off, “Draw your own conclusions. You will anyway.”²⁴ When they were disputing the latest activities of Sachs’s students out in the world—Warburg had found some museum course members out of line in their haphazard requests for loans from his father’s collection for a show at the Fogg—Mongan summed up the way her attitude differed from his with “You have been prejudiced ever since the beginning of our acquaintance and so have I.” But there was nothing they would not do for one another; the more flip the tone, the closer the link. At the beginning of 1936 Warburg wrote to Agnes to describe a jam he had gotten into because he had been mouthing off at a party at Vincent Astor’s about the unique strength of American collections of the art of myriad cultures. He insisted that European scholars needed to visit America if they were to do thorough research in most areas of art history, and that American scholars would probably do better to stay at home than travel abroad. The result of this tirade was that he had been asked to do a piece on the subject, and document his viewpoint, for TODAY magazine. He wrote Agnes about what a burden this task was, and asked if she would give him some help in presenting the strong points of American collections. “At any rate, dear, loosen up the accumulated store of irrelevant facts that you have acquired through years of training at the Fogg,”²⁵ he implored.

She answered by return mail.

Whee! What a terrible order! Just a little something to occupy my idle moments and to keep me out of mischief, is that it? You describe it as a terrible thing that has happened to you. It seems to me that you are passing on the burden. Very easy, of course, and very wise, but your day will come if it hasn’t already.…

Dear! Dear! I never thought I would see the day when you would manifest such scholarly interest.

What followed in installments was perfectly in character: page upon page of annotated listings of American collections, private and public, with everything from Japanese stoneware to New Mexican baskets to Renaissance drawings. It was as if Mongan even knew which books each of a hundred thousand Americans had on his library shelves. Both as a friend and as a bottomless source of information she would gladly share, Mongan was without equal.

Agnes Mongan could lunch with Bernard Berenson and attend ballet galas, but she could not go down the front steps of Widener Library after 6 p.m. She had a study inside, and generally did her best to abide by the rule that, although the library was open at night, women were not permitted there after six. On one occasion when she was so absorbed in her work that she stayed until six-thirty, she was ushered into the basement and through tunnels so that she could exit unseen by a side door—and avoid a scandal.

Nor could she join the Harvard Faculty Club, although women were permitted as guests provided they entered by the side door. Mongan’s pragmatic solution was to have her father join, which as a graduate of Harvard Medical School he was entitled to do. From 1930 on, she was able to sign on Dr. Mongan’s account; at least she could eat there, even if she could not enter by the same route as her male colleagues. But when colleagues at the Fogg asked her to do typing for them, her father’s name was little help. Other than the secretaries, Mongan was the only woman on the Fogg staff. Depression funding cuts had meant that she, as a woman, had been the first to lose her secretary, and so was compelled to perform clerical work. Those who saw her doing it assumed that she would type for them, for which she had a solution as pragmatic as for the club issue. She never learned how to do it; when professors asked her to type up their notes, she generally replied that she would be happy to but did not know how.²⁶ This deficiency served her well; in later life Mongan came to feel that if she had allowed herself to be stuck behind a typewriter, she would not have had a career.

II

On June 14, 1935, Agnes Mongan wrote to Lincoln Kirstein that she had been awarded a grant for the summer by the Institute of International Education to look things up at the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Cabinet des Dessins at the Louvre.²⁷ She would be sailing on the Normandie within a week and would be gone, she speculated, until the end of September. She was not telling her friend the whole story.

Earlier that spring, Paul Sachs had had a conference at Shady Hill with Gustav Mayer, a partner in Colnaghi and Company, one of the leading art galleries in London. Following their meeting, Sachs told Mongan that she should plan to go abroad that summer. Something was going to develop, but he was not free to say what it was. She must invent some pretext for the trip to tell her parents and others. Sachs had bought drawings from Mayer often enough in the past, and Mongan speculated that some important artworks might be coming on the market. She asked no questions. She went to Europe as instructed, and in August, when Sachs notified her that she should go to the village of Murren in the Swiss Alps, she headed there accordingly. At the appointed hotel, she soon received word that she was to get on the Orient Express in Zurich at 6 p.m. on September 6.

Mongan took the seat on the train specified by the ticket that had been sent to her. There she found Paul and Meta Sachs, along with Henry Rossiter, curator of prints at the Boston museum; W. G. Russell Allen, a collector and chairman of the museum’s Print Department Visiting Committee; and Gus Mayer. She learned that they would all get off in Vienna.

The Austro-Hungarian Archduke Albrecht, allegedly owner of the Albertina collection of drawings—considered the finest holding of graphic art in the world—wished to sell the collection clandestinely. The Boston Museum and the Fogg would jointly be the purchasers. Gus Mayer had made the initial arrangements. As a woman, Mongan was told nothing about the business arrangements, but she was expected to help catalog and authenticate the collection, and prepare it for travel. High officials in the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department were aware of the secret plan, but under no circumstances were the Albertina’s curators or others in Vienna to find out.

The Albertina collection was precisely the sort of thing about which Agnes Mongan already knew a great deal. It was one of the leading cultural attractions of Vienna. It had been formed in the eighteenth century by the Saxon Prince Albert, after he married the Archduchess Marie-Christine, daughter of Emperor Franz and Empress Maria Theresa. It had been housed since that time in a palace in the center of Vienna. It had remained in that location even after 1919, when the National Assembly had voted that the Republic of Austria now possessed the fortune of the House of Hapsburg—apparently including the Albertina—and the current leader of the family, Archduke Friedrich Hapsburg-Lorraine, had emigrated to Hungary. The International Treaty of St. Germain had designated Austria’s artistic legacy as collateral for certain reparation payments that it imposed at the end of World War I, but France had prevailed over America in regard to the Albertina, and had maintained that this was an essential part of Austria’s cultural heritage that could not be touched.

The collection consisted of over twenty-two thousand items. Those of the German School included a group of major Albrecht Dürer drawings, among them his Praying Hands, and important works by sixteenth-century masters like Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, and Wolf Huber. The Netherlandish pieces included several major drawings each by Pieter Brueghel, Rembrandt Van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck. Of the Italians there were drawings by Lorenzo di Credi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphaello Santi, Paolo Veronese, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Francesco Guardi. Among the French masters represented were Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In chalk, sepia, pen, pencil, and wash, these were among the finest works on paper by each of these artists. In addition, there was a vast holding of prints; Henry Rossiter put the number at about a quarter of a million.

A few years earlier, a rumor had surfaced that the collection had changed hands. In 1922, there had been reports that Archduke Friedrich had sold the Albertina collection to an American consortium headed by Herbert Hoover, an expert on Austrian affairs, soon to become president of the United States. The quoted price was six million dollars. However, this story was quickly refuted. Austrian government officials made a public statement that the Albertina was no longer Friedrich’s property; he had no right to dispose of its content, for it belonged to the Austrian nation. In response to the incident, Professor Hans Tietze, a prominent Dürer scholar who was senior civil servant to the secretary of education, declared that the collection was one of the major cultural properties of the German-speaking world, and should always be regarded as an inviolable national treasure. The Austrian government concurred.

Gustav Mayer’s proposition made it clear, however, that in 1935 there were still those willing to consider the Albertina as marketable art. When Archduke Albrecht, Friedrich’s son, approached Mayer to sell the collection for him, he claimed that the Austrian government had decreed that the Hapsburgs were entitled to all the imperial property it had previously confiscated. Hence the cache of drawings and prints were his private possession.

Albrecht needed money more than he needed portfolios of art. He hoped some day to become emperor of Hungary, and perhaps of Austria as well. In Budapest he ran a household that was like the Imperial Court. It required a constant influx of cash. So did the upkeep of his mistresses, of whom he had many in various lands; he maintained digs for girlfriends as far away as Brazil. Albrecht was a high-level, 1930s-style playboy. With his impressive physique and handsome face, he cut a fine figure at the gambling tables in Monte Carlo. He was always superbly turned out in English style for golf and hunting. As for things like art: this he would be happy to sell, in order to support his way of life.

So, acting on Albrecht’s behalf, Mayer had headed to America, which in 1935 was the best place to find a buyer for an expensive art collection. He went to New York to approach officials at the Metropolitan Museum. But shortly after he arrived, Mayer ran into Henry Rossiter as they were crossing Fifty-seventh Street. Rossiter was surprised that Mayer had not let him know that he would be in America; having shared a trench during World War I, they had long been close friends. Mayer quickly explained the reason for the low profile on this particular journey. He was at that very moment on his way uptown to the Met.

Rossiter persuaded Mayer that he should give the Boston Museum the opportunity instead. They went to Boston together, where Rossiter immediately approached Harold Edgell, the museum director, as well as the members of the committee that governed his department. Everyone was interested, and they all understood the need for secrecy.

Paul Sachs was on that committee of the Boston Museum. He and the other members all voted to make the purchase for an undisclosed amount. The sum was sizable for the middle of the Depression, but—in view of what was at stake—it seemed worth the struggle and sacrifices to raise it. Sachs had spoken with the collector Robert Woods Bliss, who agreed to put up a considerable percentage of the money. The understanding was that the collection would go jointly to the Boston Museum and to the Fogg; the various division heads at both museums consented to give up all other acquisitions that year in order to make the purchase. It was shortly after these decisions were made that Sachs and Rossiter and Mayer agreed to go to Vienna to consummate the deal, and that Sachs told Agnes Mongan to plan her trip.

Once they arrived in Vienna, Mongan, the Sachses, Rossiter, Mayer, W. G. Russell Allen, and W. A. Roseborough—the Americans’ legal adviser for the deal—all took up residency at the Bristol Hotel. Agnes Mongan began her work in the study room at the Albertina. But neither in Vienna nor back in America did most people know her task. The director of the Albertina, Dr. Anton Reichel, assumed that she was simply doing academic research. There were a few people in Vienna, however, who knew precisely what she was up to. The Austrian vice chancellor Starhemberg, and the minister for financial affairs, both close friends of Archduke Albrecht, were doing everything they could to help the sale along. For a number of his countrymen, Starhemberg was a national hero. An aviator, he personified the spirit of the new young, modern Austria. He was also fiercely nationalistic and monarchistic. Starhemberg knew that legally Albrecht had no right to the Albertina, that the collection belonged to the republic, but he favored reinstatement of the Hapsburgs, and would do anything to help that cause. Starhemberg and the archduke were very much people of the same class; they enjoyed drinking together, and Starhemberg liked to accompany Albrecht hunting in Hungary. So he rallied his forces to overcome obstacles to the sale. Agnes Mongan had been warned that her telephone calls would be recorded, her mail opened, and that she would be followed; all of this was done by Starhemberg’s minions, who wanted to make sure that she was not disclosing her work to the wrong people.

Victory lunch, Bristol Hotel, Vienna, Autumn 1935. From the left: Henry Rossiter, Agnes Mongan, Gustav Mayer, Paul Sachs, W. G. Russell Allen, and W. A. Roseborough. (Photo Credit 5.1)

The secret mission clearly had other proponents as well. Mongan, Sachs, and the rest spent a number of months in Vienna, during which they moved from the Bristol to the Imperial to the Sacher, three of Vienna’s finest hotels. Someone was footing the bill. There are those who believe that in all likelihood it was covered by a special account bankrolled by the United States government.

Then, on December 30, Anton Reichel received an astonishing telegram. It was from Joseph Duveen, the New York art dealer. Duveen said he was representing people interested in purchasing the Albertina; they were prepared to pay at least 10 percent more than the amount currently being considered. No one knows for certain how Lord Duveen got wind of the intended sale, but this is how the Albertina’s director found out about it.

Reichel immediately got in touch with the Austrian cultural minister, and together they brought up the matter to the chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, who became adamant that the sale not take place. For one thing, if it did, it would put the Austrian government in bad grace with the Nazis; Schuschnigg and his cabinet had great fear of the Third Reich, and did not want to do anything that would make them susceptible to criticism from that side. But Albrecht and his cohorts still maintained that the archduke was in a position to sell the drawings, and the negotiations continued. The diminutive young woman from Somerville proceeded, at Sachs’s behest, as if it were possible to take one of the jewels of European culture from a seemingly impenetrable bastion of Hapsburg imperialism to two museums in Massachusetts. After all, her friends Kirstein and Warburg had been able to import the heir to the Ballets Russes.

Mongan continued to walk every day between her elegant hotel rooms and the Albertina study room to proceed with her work, even if this meant being tailed by a character who looked out of a Hollywood movie in his shiny blue suit and bowler hat. She would glimpse him behind her as she ate linzer torte in the cafés, viewed the opera, and wandered through Baroque churches. In February the Frankfurter Zeitung published a report that the Albertina had been sold, and Hans Tietze again made a public protest. The revelation of the secret clearly threatened the success of the entire operation. But the would-be seller and purchasers persevered.

In April, Albrecht wrote to Gustav Mayer from Budapest to express his annoyance at the publicity about the sale. He blamed it on the indiscretion of the people at the Boston Museum and the Fogg, where the journalist from the Frankfurter Zeitung had apparently done some of his research. Albrecht neglected to mention that it was Duveen who had first spilled the beans, well before the newspapers had picked up the story, and that this was probably because Albrecht had approached the renowned dealer in hopes of getting the largest possible sum for the collection. Albrecht simply told Mayer that thanks to the press coverage he was now receiving other offers for the collection; the archduke acknowledged that he owed Mayer first refusal, but insisted that he had to consider the financial needs of his family.

Above all, Albrecht wanted to speed things up. Therefore he was forming an English company to negotiate with the Austrian government. What he hoped was that, if necessary, the final contract could be subject to international rather than Austrian jurisdiction. If it were challenged, it would be brought before The Hague Tribunal, where one of his personal lawyers was the Hungarian representative and had considerable power.

Mayer continued to believe that he could pull it all off. In May of 1936 he cabled Colnaghi’s to send a conservator to remove the prints and drawings from their mats in order to take them to London en route to Boston; sixteen thousand works were ready to go. He scheduled “a Victory lunch” at the Bristol. A photograph of that event shows Agnes Mongan, the only woman—and a generation younger than everyone else there—sitting in Viennese splendor between Mayer and Rossiter, with Sachs, Allen, and Roseborough also at the table. She must have been excited, but wears a dubious expression. Perhaps she more than anyone else recognized the magnitude of the treasure that they hoped to secure; she also must have had more conscience about the appropriateness of its journey to America.

In any event, the victory was not real. In June, Gustav Mayer finally conceded defeat. The British ambassador and Austrian government officials had resolved that no one had the right to sell or buy the Albertina; Mayer informed the other interested parties accordingly.

Agnes Mongan, however, would enjoy one last lark out of the whole affair. Paul Sachs told her to pack up right away and take the next train to Paris, but she insisted that she must see the Danube one last time, and would leave the following day. Heading off that Sunday for this final bit of sight-seeing, she noticed that her usual shadow in his blue suit had been replaced. While the original tail was dark and large, his substitute was “a thin oily blond.”²⁸ Mongan decided to give him some real work. First she journeyed to the outskirts of the city to cross its great river. Then, back in the center, she attended High Mass in a packed St. Stephen’s Cathedral, where she stood through the entire service. Then she rushed to see the Lipizzaner stallions at the Winter Riding School, after which she doubled back to the Kunsthistorisches Museum for one final glimpse of the Brueghels. By the time she returned to the Bristol, she was running, and so was he. The last time she saw him—at the train station—the man was out of breath.