Word: berensons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...being the Common Property of Mankind. Americans now begin to view the outflow of their own art with bemused alarm -- just as Italians and Englishmen, at the turn of the century, watched the Titians, Sassettas and Turners, pried loose from palazzo and stately home by the teamwork of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, disappearing into American museums. "The Japanese are awash in money," says New York's leading dealer in old-master drawings, David Tunick. "And when something really good goes to Japan, you feel it has vanished into an abyss...
...when John Ruskin lets fly in Modern Painters: "A taint and stain, and jarring discord . . . marked sensuality and impurity." In 1895 Romain Rolland downed him: "He was able to deceive two entire centuries . . . Guido's laborious conscientiousness is void of thought and true feeling." Two years later, Bernard Berenson wrung his neck: "We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable." And it was downhill from there; in 1910 one of his versions of Bacchus and Ariadne sold at Christie's for just under (pounds)10, a fraction of its auction price 60 years before. The nadir...
...since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence...
...this way, of course, but not every one of them commands the interest of strangers. In these letters, Wharton does. And for the rest of the time, she is an incisive guide through the glories and vicissitudes of her own amazing life. She knew everyone, from Henry James, Bernard Berenson and Teddy Roosevelt to Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She usually remained mute about her generosities with money and time, but the helpful annotating of Biographer Lewis and his wife Nancy fills in many gaps. She read extensively and exhaustively in a number of languages; in one letter...
...books seems remote from history. Mellons, Fricks, Altmans and Rockefellers vie for Giorgiones, Titians, Bellinis and Botticellis, while offstage monarchies disintegrate, nation-states aggressively come of age, and men are pulped in the trenches. There is a certain amount of glee in reading about rich innocents abroad who retained Berenson as an art consultant without knowing the extent of his ties to Duveen and other dealers. If the "squillionaires," as Berenson called them, did not always get what they paid for, they at least got royal treatment...