The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  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 severa
l 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.

  PART SEVEN

  “Walk Erect, Young Woman!”

  22

  INGENUE

  To be invited to one of Mrs. Astor’s rather stultifying evenings, it was nearly always necessary to be rich. But Caroline Astor let it be known that she also had other standards, and three of New York’s richest families were never given her stamp of approval. These were the Goulds, the Harrimans, and the Belmonts.

  In the cases of the Goulds and Harrimans, it was not difficult to see why. Both Jay Gould and “Ned” Harriman were, from all accounts, thoroughly unpleasant men, whose habit of snatching away railroad companies from unsuspecting stockholders—and from each other—had made them hated and feared in the financial community. It was darkly rumored that both Gould and Harriman were Jewish, though neither was. (An earlier American Gould, however, had spelled his surname Gold.) The situation with the Belmonts was a little more complex. Nearly everybody liked the Belmonts. On their own they gave parties and fancy-dress balls that were every bit as lavish as Caroline Astor’s, and were usually much more fun. And yet there was something mysterious and alien about the Belmonts—a secret, like Arabella Huntington’s past, which they preferred to keep hidden, and a topic which, in the rules of polite conversation, could not be discussed. Because the Belmonts were Jewish. Or at least a little bit Jewish. Who were the Belmonts, exactly? In The Saga of American Society, published in 1937, Dixon Wecter tried to sum up their anomalous position in New York:

  Since the first August Belmont set foot in America, no member of that family has ever married a Jewess, but invariably a Gentile of social standing. In this way, plus an exchange of the synagogue for Episcopal communion, a constant association with non-Jews, and the adaptability of Nature which has given Belmonts scarcely any Semitic cast of feature except in their patriarchal age, a complete break with their Old World background has been successfully effected. In social acceptance no later Jewish Family can compare with them.

  A hundred years before that passage was written, the situation was somewhat different. In 1837, the first August Belmont, a youth of twenty, arrived in New York from Cuba. He was small, dark, baby-faced, almost handsome, but on the plump side. He was, he announced, the new American “agent” for the European House of Rothschild, and he certainly seemed to have brought with him a Rothschildian spending capacity. The year of his arrival, meanwhile, was no accident. The panic of 1837 was under way, and in a depressed stock market young Belmont began buying shares of American companies at bargain-basement prices. Presently a shingle appeared on his office door in the financial district announcing him to be August Belmont & Company. Still, the financial community wondered, who was he?

  He had been born December 8, 1816, in the little town of Alzey, in the Rhineland Palatinate. Alzey was in Rothschild country, a little more than twenty miles from the family’s banking headquarters in Frankfurt. And at age thirteen August Belmont had gone to work for the Rothschilds as an unpaid office boy, an even lowlier position than Ned Stotesbury’s first job at Drexel. From then on, however, his rise was astonishingly rapid. Soon the teen-ager was dispatched to Naples and placed in charge of Rothschild operations there. Next he was sent to Havana, and now here he was in New York, the youngest banker in town and a man of considerable power. The balance of trade had not yet shifted, and American corporations still turned to the bourses of London, Frankfurt, and Paris for financing, and that meant deali
ng with August Belmont.

  Belmont never denied being Jewish. To do so would have been professionally unwise, for the Rothschilds were not only rich and proud but also very pious Jews. On the other hand, Belmont did nothing to identify or ally himself with the established Jewish community of New York. It was Horace Greeley, who disliked Jews and Democrats—which Belmont had become—who first published the news, in his New York Herald, that Belmont had been geboren Schönberg, and had “Frenchified” the name on the ship to America, in an effort to conceal his Jewishness. (Belmont and Schönberg, Greeley pointed out, both translated as “beautiful mountain,” though a more exact French rendering would have been Beaumont, not Belmont.) Belmont denied all this, asserting that he had “documents” proving that he was the son of Simon and Fredericka Elsaas Belmont, that his parents were “large estate owners” in Germany, and that in Alzey, which was not far from the French border, families often had French-sounding names.