Word: duveens
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...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...
...practically impossible to serve the muse without dealing with Mammon. That is what Bernard Berenson learned and accepted early in his long and lucrative association with Joseph Duveen, the enterprising head of an international gallery whose customers included most of the world's leading collectors. Berenson, born in 1865 in the Lithuanian ghetto-village of Butrimonys, emigrated to Boston, attended Harvard and eventually became the expert on Italian Renaissance painting. For three generations, until his death in 1959, he reigned as a kind of aesthetic Pope. From his "Vatican," a Tuscan villa known as I Tatti, he issued monographs, criticism...
Berenson conducted himself with what he called an "invincible passion for independence." This is not to say he achieved it. Colin Simpson's Artful Partners concedes that B.B.'s spirit may have been willing but that his flesh was weak. The evidence is incriminating: a secret 1912 contract with Duveen that reads like a textbook on conflict of interest, and a clandestine "X ledger," which details the artful partners' profits, losses and restoration expenses. There are also numerous examples that suggest Berenson relaxed his standards or changed his mind to accommodate Duveen and his brothers, who, as Simpson writes, were...
...more complex picture. Berenson's scholarship is treated with greater respect than in Simpson's jolly romp through the mud. Samuels ascribes the controversial changes of attributions to advancements in knowledge and techniques, and points out that Berenson usually covered himself by stressing the tentative nature of his craft. Duveen is brushed in as a necessary evil that his aging colleague came to regret. "I cannot tell you," Berenson wrote to his wife Mary, "what loathing all that part of my past and present inspires me with . . . how much of life is scarred and fouled by that connection...
...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...