A rogue dealer and old masters

Duveen

The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time

S.N. Behrman, with an introduction by Glenn Lowry

The Little Bookroom: 236 pp., $12.95 paper

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Duveen

A Life in Art

Meryle Secrest

Alfred A. Knopf: 518 pp., $35

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Without Joseph Duveen, many great American public art collections would be shadows of themselves. The head of a vast network operating from London, Paris and New York, Duveen had a virtual monopoly on the trade in old-master paintings among rich American clients early in the 20th century. He made himself an arbiter of taste, treating moguls such as J. Pierpont Morgan, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon more as trainees than customers. Born into an Anglo-Dutch family of antique dealers in 1869, he had an eye for values, an aggressive charm and an instinct for the particular insecurities that often come with stupendous wealth.

Throughout his career, Duveen inspired stories of dealerish braggadocio that he did little to discourage. Triumph and disaster were as one for him, so long as both were visibly expensive. He set the highest prices and charged clients a further premium for the privilege of paying those prices. He was seldom out of court; his lawyers grew almost rich enough to afford his paintings. Not that greed was his prime motive. Art, money and social cachet merged for Duveen in a colorful blur, making him an irresistible subject for the kind of teasing but ultimately respectful portrait in which the New Yorker magazine once specialized. S.N. Behrman’s “Duveen: The Story of the Most Spectacular Art Dealer of All Time,” written originally as a series of New Yorker articles in 1951 and ‘52, is an evergreen sample.

Witty kiss-offs come at a pace that would have left Cary Grant or William Powell gasping. To a proud collector displaying a Renaissance work bought from a rival, Duveen sighed disapprovingly, “I sniff fresh paint.” Asked why his restorers varnished paintings so thickly, he explained that clients liked seeing themselves in their old masters. His wholesale restorations were equally controversial. Challenged on a virtually repainted portrait of a young woman he was offering as 16th century, he told a wealthy widow, “If you were as old as she was, you would need restoring.”

Diverting as they are, such tales risk reducing Duveen to a wisecracking buffoon. An opposite danger, which Behrman does not wholly avoid either, is to make Duveen an all-knowing Jeeves to rich but innocent Bertie Woosters. In truth, the moguls mostly read his game. The California rail magnate Henry Huntington mimicked Duveen’s rapturous sales pitches; like his peers, he was simply happy to play. One exception was Henry Ford. Duveen, disobeying his own rule never to cooperate with other dealers, led a five-member team to Ford’s home in Dearborn, Mich., to break down the car tycoon’s notorious indifference to collecting art. They presented a beautifully illustrated catalog of wares, bound in red leather. “Mother, did you hear that?” Ford turned to his wife. “These gentlemen are going to give me these beautiful books as a present.” When they pressed him about buying, however, his eyes hardened and he asked in mock innocence why he would need paintings now that he had such a magnificent picture book.

Besides recounting such amusing, half-believable stories, Behrman also describes Duveen’s business. He acquired at least eight large European collections for an estimated $25 million to $30 million, which he sold off from the basement of his Fifth Avenue gallery over decades. As he bought for cash and was usually paid later in stock, friendly bankers were vital. Unused to second-best, he turned to Morgan and Mellon, who took the amicable view that since Duveen’s goods were invaluable, his overdraft should be unlimited. Duveen not only siphoned old masters from Europe to the United States, he helped shift art from private to public hands. In 1916, the top rate of American inheritance tax was 15%. By the end of the 1930s it was 77%, though charitable gifts could be offset. Duveen accordingly encouraged clients to treat eventual public donation as a silver-lined necessity, thus helping enrich collections at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery in Washington.

To authenticate his wares and guide him in the half-light of the Italian old masters market, Duveen in 1912 turned to an eminent art historian, Bernard Berenson. (Their turbulent relationship, which ended in a quarrel just before Duveen’s death in 1939, has never ceased to intrigue; Simon Gray’s play about the two men, “The Old Masters,” opened in London this past summer.) Berenson had made his reputation with a path-breaking survey of 15th and 16th century Italian art, then foggily known at best. In attributing authorship to works of art, he relied, as was common, on eye and “feel” rather than on a study of contemporary documents and on technical analysis, which was in its infancy. His technique, known as connoisseurship, has long since fallen into disrepute. It relied heavily on specialist authority and even in its day had its doubters. But his reputation has dropped for other reasons. When Behrman wrote, Berenson was still alive. Behrman’s flattering and libel-proof portrait murmurs only that he was “never very far from the arena of art dealing.”

Meryle Secrest, in her detailed and fascinating biography, “Duveen: A Life in Art,” is more candid. For 27 years Berenson had a secret contract with Duveen giving him a profit-sharing percentage on the Italian works he authenticated. Secrest, who has also written a life of Berenson, is sensibly nonjudgmental. Though typical of the day, the arrangement was undeniably corrupt, even if the extent to which money distorted Berenson’s judgment is disputable. Proof either way is elusive, as arrangements of this kind inevitably rely on what is left unsaid.

Secrest has gone deeper than Behrman into how Duveen operated. His personality rather dazzles her, as it did Behrman, but hers is not a one-man show. Though Duveen remains the star, Secrest surrounds him with a large supporting cast of brothers, partners, agents, underlings, restorers, informers and freelance spies. A far-flung intelligence service alerted him to early signs of mortal illness at the grand houses of Europe or the arrival there of the first notice of unpayable bills, either of which might shake loose collections for sale. To his American clients he made himself indispensable. No favor was too menial: He found them staff, organized tours, procured tickets, advised on decor and, if Secrest is to be believed, even attended to the design of the Parisian corsets ordered by a rich collector’s widow.

Los Angeles businessman Norton Simon bought the Duveen firm and its remaining stock in 1964, ending an era. Though the art market itself is hardly more transparent now than it was then, Duveen’s solo buccaneering would not be possible today. Knowledge of Renaissance art is more firmly based and widely shared. He operated in a pre-technical world where art history barely existed as an academic subject and where some old masters that were neither wrecks nor duds remained at large in Europe, awaiting capture.

Duveen feels remote in other ways. He discouraged collectors from buying modern art, partly in the mistaken belief that there was too much of it ever to command high prices and partly because he subscribed unreflectingly to what you might call the Twin Peaks theory of Western culture -- the view that art reached heights in 5th century Athens and Renaissance Italy that no other age could touch. Admitted to this restrictive canon of serene and cultivated leisure, though at somewhat lower altitude, was 18th century art from France and England, on which Duveen also made millions.

Duveen was in many ways a brilliant rogue, an establishment pirate who knew too much about the wrong things. But, as Secrest convincingly argues, his love of art was genuine. He worked to have it put where all of us can see it, in museums, and for that we can be grateful. *