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The activities in the United States a half century ago that
made possible the advent of the Duveen Era were on a titanic
scale. The tumultuous exertions and accomplishments to be
found in the great coal and iron mines, in the flourishing
department stores, in the prodigious chains of
five-and-tens, in the great public utilities and networks of
railroads and banking houses, in the breathtaking corporate
pyramiding that reached its climax with the merging of ten
giant steel companies into J. P. Morgan's "billion-dollar
trust," in the apogee of finance capitalism, which was
bringing its masters a material wealth without precedent—all
this was interesting and praiseworthy, as far as it went,
but to the art dealer Joseph Duveen, head of the firm of
Duveen Brothers, who eventually became Lord Duveen of
Millbank, it was merely an overture to the fantastic and
costly opera he was himself prepared to produce. The
emperors of the immense commercial realms of the period were
rich in power but poor in panoply. It had all happened so
quickly. For the most part, the millionaires of this era
could trace the origins of their fortunes to the struggles
of their own youth—on farms, in offices, in machine shops or
butcher shops, behind the counters of country stores.
William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Mellon and John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., and William C. Whitney were among the
exceptions; they were the aristocrats, with a tradition of
substantiality that reached back a generation. Most of the
rest—H. E. Huntington and Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie
and Benjamin Altman, P. A. B. Widener, E. T. Stotesbury, and
Samuel H. Kress—remembered shirtsleeved rather than imperial
pasts. How could they obliterate these memories? How could
they drown them in splendor? Duveen showed them how.
The passion of these newly rich Americans for industrial
merger yielded to an even more insistent passion for a
merger of their newly acquired domains with more ancient
ones; they wanted to veneer their arrivisme with the
traditional. It would be gratifying to feel, as you drove up
to your porte-cochere in Pittsburgh, that you were one with
the jaded Renaissance Venetian who had just returned from a
sitting for Titian; to feel, as you walked by the ranks of
gleaming and authentic suits of armor in your mansion on
Long Island—and passed the time of day with your private
armorer—that it was only an accident of chronology that had
put you in a counting house when you might have been
jousting with other kings in the Tournament of Love; to push
aside the heavy damask tablecloth on a magnificent Louis XIV
dining-room table, making room for a green-shaded office
lamp, beneath which you scanned the report of last month's
profit from the Saginaw branch, and then, looking up, catch
a glimpse of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan and flick the
fantasy that presently you would be ordering your sedan
chair, because the loveliest girl in London was expecting
you for tea.
It was Frick's custom to have an organist in on Saturday
afternoons to fill the gallery of his mansion at Seventieth
Street and Fifth Avenue with the majestic strains of "The
Rosary" and "Silver Threads Among the Gold" while he himself
sat on a Renaissance throne, under a baldachino, and every
now and then looked up from his Saturday Evening Post
to contemplate the works of Van Dyck and Rembrandt, or, when
he was enthroned in their special atelier, the more
frolicsome improvisations of Fragonard and Boucher. Surely
Frick must have felt, as he sat there, that only time
separated him from Lorenzo and the other Medicis. Morgan
commissioned the English art authority Dr. George C.
Williamson to prepare catalogues of his vast collections.
Williamson spent years travelling all over the world to
check on the authenticity and the history of certain items
and to supervise the work on the catalogues. The last one he
completed for his patron was "The Morgan Book of Watches."
For the illustrations, gold and silver leaf was used, laid
on so thick that the engraved designs of the watches could
be reproduced exactly. Morgan was in Rome when he received
this catalogue, on Christmas Day, 1912, and he cabled
Williamson, in New York, "IT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BOOK 1
HAVE EVER SEEN." It was lying by Morgan's bedside when he
died in Rome, early in 1913.
Duveen boasted that he understood the psychology of his
dozen biggest customers much better than his competitors
did. In his peculiar semantics, "to understand psychology"
meant to be able to guess how much the traffic would bear,
and under that interpretation his boast was not an empty
one. He always knew how to shift the interest of his
customers—or, more accurately, his protégés—from their
original fields of accumulation to his own, and to persuade
them, moreover, that his was the more exalted. The truth was
that after having spent a lifetime making money, Duveen's
protégés were rich enough to go anywhere and do anything but
didn't know where to go or what to do or even how to do
nothing gracefully. After the Americans had splurged on
yachts and horses and houses, they were stymied. There were
no noble titles to be earned—or bought—and lived up to, as
there were in Europe, and if they ever made an attempt to do
nothing gracefully, they were hampered by the Puritanic and
democratic tradition that held such a life sinful. Whenever
they let themselves go, they had a feeling of guilt.
Stotesbury, in a gray business suit and a high stiff collar,
with a Panama hat clamped down on his head, stood in the
blazing sunshine of the tremendous patio of El Mirasol, his
Palm Beach home, and said to one of his architects, who had
recently added a wing to it, "It cost too much for ninety
days!" And when his wife spent two hundred and seventy-five
thousand dollars on Wingwood House, their place at Bar
Harbor, he said the same thing again. He felt the same way
about Whitemarsh Hall and Winoga, his two places at Chestnut
Hill. A European of comparable means who spent ninety days
in one of his residences would very likely have felt that
whatever he had spent on it was justified, on the principle
that ninety days was a segment of time that was worth
enjoying even if at the end of it he went somewhere else.
When the American millionaires of the era said, "I don't
care what it costs," as they often did, they were silently
adding, "So long as I have something to show for it." And
what they had to show for it had to be at once enviable and
uplifting. Duveen was like an answer to a prayer.
Duveen's dealings with the American monarchs were conducted
according to a carefully thought-out economic formula. He
more than once asked a prospective client, "Do you realize
that the only thing you can spend a hundred thousand dollars
on without incurring an obligation to spend a great deal
more for its upkeep is a picture? Once you've bought it, it
costs you only a few hundred dollars every fifteen years for
cleaning." It was a revolutionary sales argument, and one
admirably adapted to American royalty. By advancing it,
Duveen satisfied two conflicting desires in his little covey
of important customers: the desire for conspicuous
consumption and the desire for economy. An effective
supplementary sales argument, which he used repeatedly, was:
"You can always make more money, but if you miss this
picture, you'll never get another like it, for it is
unique." It was the sort of home truth Duveen's clients
understood.
Since Duveen's death, one of the sunniest of the
commentators on him and his era has been Mrs. William
Randolph Hearst. Most people remember Duveen with a mixture
of acrimony, envy, and admiration. In some instances, the
acrimony is undiluted, but the mixture is more typical.
After Duveen died, in 1939, a famous rival dealer delivered
himself of an ambivalent eulogy. "We miss him, but we are
glad that he has gone," he said. Certainly Duveen did plenty
in his lifetime to mitigate for his rivals any melancholy
they might have been expected to feel when he died. Mrs.
Hearst, a woman who views most of the phenomena of life with
sympathetic detachment, liked Duveen. She saw his side. She
regarded the collecting mania of her husband and his friends
(a circle that included Rockefeller, Mellon, and many
others) as a harmless, if expensive, exercise of vanity, as
something they indulged in to relieve the tension of their
workaday lives. It was a tax-free time, she recalled in a
recent reminiscent discussion, and the men in her crowd
thought nothing of buying a pair of hawthorn vases at sixty
thousand dollars apiece. Mrs. Hearst said that the richest
man in America—she described him affectionately as a "stingy
feller"—ended up by paying a million dollars for one
tapestry. She described Duveen as "a gentleman salesman in a
cutaway," and added, "He met you with everything he had."
Duveen's connoisseurship was so respected by her husband and
his friends that only with fear and trembling did they show
him the possessions they had garnered before they came under
his guidance. Mrs. Hearst remembered a touching scene. Her
own apartment was "full of stuff"—antique furniture,
paintings, sculptures, tapestries. The clou of the
collection, her husband's pride, was two Rossellino (or
allegedly Rossellino) bas-reliefs of angels. Mrs. Hearst
described Duveen's manner as her husband showed him around
the apartment for the first time. Duveen moved through the
clutter of antiques, tapestries, and statuary with the air
of a man who has plenty of thoughts but is too well bred to
voice them. Finally, the increasingly despondent host stood
him before the two angels. Duveen made a barely audible
remark that cast doubt on their legitimacy, then left,
presumably to comfort himself with the contemplation, at his
own place, of some genuine Duveens. There was a sad interval
after his departure; Hearst was like a college boy who,
after cramming hard for an exam, has the terrible feeling
that he's flunked it. He was suddenly seized by a
devastating doubt about everything he had. He shouted
despairingly to Mrs. Hearst, "If those angels aren't right,
then nothing is right!"
Duveen's losing fight against the campaigns of attrition
undertaken by Mrs. Hearst's husband and his friends to
loosen his hold on his cherished possessions was something
that she was in a position to observe minutely. A pertinent
episode began one day when she and her husband had a
difference of opinion about something of no real importance.
For the moment, Hearst was extremely upset by this
difference, and he left the house feeling the need of
solace. Unlike many husbands in similar circumstances, he
sought it at Duveen's gallery, a small reproduction of one
wing of the French Ministry of Marine, in Paris, built by
Duveen at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street. Duveen was
himself just about to leave there, with Van Dyck's portrait
of "Queen Henrietta Maria with Jeffrey Hudson and a Monkey,"
when Hearst walked in. He gave Hearst a peek at the Queen
and her companions. Somehow, for Hearst, this peek was just
what the doctor ordered; he felt that if he could only have
Henrietta Maria, he would feel better. Unfortunately,
Duveen, fond as he was of Hearst, was unable to give him
this assuagement. He had promised Henrietta Maria to Lady
Duveen, and it was a promise on which he could not possibly
renege. Things were a little delicate in his own home,
because of the high degree of mobility of the furnishings
and decorations there; her husband's softhearted inability
to say no to men like Hearst meant that in the morning Lady
Duveen often found herself missing familiar and lovely
objects that had been there the night before. After this
refusal, Henrietta Maria looked all the more desirable to
Mr. Hearst, and he insisted that he must have her. An
imperialist in his own domain, he was not used to being
denied anything that he wanted very badly. As Hearst begged,
Duveen became plaintive; he implored Hearst to see things
from his point of view. Hearst wouldn't. In those few
minutes, it had become somehow vital to him to take
Henrietta home. To take Henrietta home was, unhappily, vital
to Duveen, too. There was a tug of war. After some time,
Duveen suggested that if he did let Hearst take Henrietta
home, he would have to charge so much for the privilege that
he wouldn't advise him to insist. Hearst, poker-faced, now
felt he had Duveen. The tug of war continued for a
while, but Hearst's victory was no longer in doubt. Finally,
Duveen, in a sentimental conviction that Hearst's need was
greater than his own, weakened. "All right, take her!" he
said. The price was three hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars. By the time Hearst got home, he had begun to cool
off about Henrietta. He thought that perhaps he had spent
too much to coddle a temporary malaise, and he felt rather
sheepish when he had to confess to Mrs. Hearst what he had
done. "I've done a terrible thing," he said. "I've gone over
to Joe Duveen's and bought a picture." And, he went on to
say, he had paid three hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars for it. Mildly, Mrs. Hearst remarked that when
she was upset, she just went out and bought a hat.
However, when she saw the Van Dyck, she liked it and told
her husband to forget the whole thing.
"The fact is," Mrs. Hearst said, in relating the episode,
"you couldn't buy anything from Duveen! Everything was
either in reserve for somebody else or he had promised it to
his wife or for some reason he wasn't ready to sell it yet.
Rockefeller, for example. He used to collect colored tiles
and things in a modest way, and then he heard Duveen had
something better and he went in to his place one day to buy.
But he couldn't buy. Duveen wouldn't sell him anything. That
was true of my husband and all his friends." Among the many
people who have wondered at the miracle of Duveen's selling
method, perhaps no one has ever put it more trenchantly than
Mrs. Hearst. With a twinge of genuine sympathy for her old
friend, she said, "Duveen didn't want to sell his stuff, but
they always badgered the poor feller till he gave in."
Mrs. Hearst has recalled another odd fact about her husband
and his friends. This was their fondness for catalogues.
Speaking of her husband's coterie, Mrs. Hearst recently
said, "They were going after anything that had a book to
it." She watched the men in her circle collecting hard year
after year. "At the end," she commented, "they'd get a book
all done up." In this glancing remark, she pithily summed up
one of the great basic maneuvers of Duveen's selling
technique. While the American millionaires of the Duveen Era
could not become lords and ladies, they could buy the family
portraits and other works of art that had belonged for
centuries to lords and ladies, and this strengthened their
feeling of identification and equality with British nobility
and with the great rulers and merchant princes of the
Renaissance. In the provenance, or history of previous
ownership, of many of the Duveen works appeared the names of
kings and the mistresses of kings: Charles I of England,
Francis I of France, one or another Louis, Mme. Du Barry,
Mme. de Pompadour. "It is much easier to sell a second-rate
picture that has belonged to any English nobleman than a
first-rate one that has belonged to a great name in the
Italian nobility," Bernard Berenson, the eminent art
authority, once said in a reference to the American market.
The reason for this was that the American millionaires were
up on Debrett but had only a sketchy acquaintance with the
Almanach de Gotha. In an article, Miss Emily Genauer,
the art critic of the Herald Tribune, once spoke of
the "cachet of the hook." An example is the cachet that,
among American collectors after the elder Morgan's death,
attached to the owning of a "Morgan piece." Though Morgan
was a collector as indiscriminate as he was voracious ("a
checkbook collector," one of his biographers, John Kennedy
Winkler, has called him), he was able to create, by the
sheer weight of his name, a valuable provenance of his own.
To solidify for his clients this sense of neighborliness
with the great names of the past, to establish them firmly
on the historic field of honor in their own living rooms,
Duveen brought to its apotheosis the catalogue, and, on a
lower level, the brochure. A more ingenious apparatus for
flattering the ego than these Duveen publications has rarely
been seen. For each picture that Duveen sold, his overworked
librarian, the late George H. McCall, prepared a free
brochure giving the history of its ownership, listing the
places where it had been exhibited, noting its relation to
its artist's career, and so on. McCall, a gentleman of
distinction and a scholar, turned out handsome brochures. H.
E. Huntington, who wasn't an avid reader, merely looked at
his; Jules Bache memorized his. Once a client had acquired
enough brochures, he was in line for an even higher
accolade—the Duveen catalogue, which would cover a client's
entire collection and which the client would ordinarily pay
for himself. Some of the catalogues were prepared by McCall,
but for others Duveen called in the greatest art experts in
the world. They sometimes devoted months to preparing one.
The paper for the catalogues was usually made to order in
France, and had as its watermark the name of the collector.
On one page was printed the provenance of a picture, the
names of the famous owners serving as a decorous overlay to
the watermark, and on the opposite page was a reproduction
of the painting. The catalogues themselves were costly works
of art—they could run as high as fifty or sixty thousand
dollars—and they were unwieldy.
One Christmas, Duveen got up for Kress a sumptuous book
called "The Collection of Paintings, Sculptures, etc., of
Samuel H. Kress." It was an enormous weight, not easy to
lift. Nevertheless, its title was something of an
exaggeration, for the book contained histories and
reproductions of only what Duveen had sold to Kress; it
ignored entirely the vast reaches of Kress's other
purchases. But then these came from other dealers, so for
Duveen they were nonexistent. Another item that Duveen got
out for Kress—this one as an hors d'oeuvre instead of a
dessert—was three tremendous and encyclopedic volumes on the
medals and bronzes of the Gustave Dreyfus Collection. Duveen
had them expertly edited, and they were handsomely printed
by the Oxford University Press, all at his own expense.
These were noble, if sedentary, volumes. When Duveen showed
them to Kress, Kress felt that any objects that could
produce such massive and beautiful books were worth owning.
He bought the entire collection of medals and bronzes. He
bought them, but for several years he didn't send for them;
they remained in Duveen's vaults. An acquaintance of Kress's
was asked why he didn't take the medals uptown. "Well,
they're awfully heavy," he said.
Before his book-hungry clients Duveen dangled the
canonization of the catalogue as the proverbial carrot was
dangled before the donkey, except that they usually had to
pay for the carrot. He did not undertake a catalogue for
everybody, and when some of his clients asked why they
could not have one, Duveen would point out that their
collections were not yet ready for sanctification. He was
prepared to get them ready, he was at their service, but
great paintings, unlike money, were difficult to acquire. To
acquire a Duveen was no simple matter, even for Duveen.
Eventually, he found that there was a slight catch to the
issuance of a catalogue; once the donkey had the carrot, he
was no longer hungry. The clients refused to buy great
pictures not because they weren't fine but because it was
too late to get them into the catalogue. Once the client had
it, he felt he was registered, accepted in the club, with
nothing more to do except lift the heavy tome and turn the
pages, peering at his watermarked name in its gallant
company. Consequently, Duveen became chary of producing
catalogues; he dangled but he did not deliver. The creation
of the Bache Catalogue had a somewhat troubled history.
Bache asked for one, and Duveen said he would try to get the
distinguished art scholar Dr. W. R. Valentiner to do it. As
it turned out, he had McCall do it. When it was finished,
Duveen asked Valentiner to write an introduction. Valentiner
said that certain works of art would have to be deleted
before he could consent to do so. As the things he said must
be deleted were already hanging in the Bache house, Duveen
abandoned the idea of the introduction and took the book to
Bache. "Where is Valentiner?" Bache asked. Duveen said that
Valentiner had wanted his name too large on it; Duveen did
not wish Bache minimized and had refused to let Valentiner
appear at all. In the end, Bache took great pride in his
catalogue. Its epigraph read, "We needs must love the
highest when we see it: Tennyson." Duveen agreed with
Tennyson.
Duveen was not selling merely low upkeep, social
distinction, and watermarks; he was selling immortality.
Since most of his protégés were aging men, the task of
making them yearn for immortality was not hard. It was
shortly after the First World War that Duveen realized where
his future lay; it lay not just in selling individual
pictures but in selling the idea of assembling collections
that would automatically insure immortality to his clients.
Each of the Duveen millionaires wanted to get the particular
intimation of immortality Duveen offered, and, if possible,
to get a stronger intimation than the other millionaires
were getting. Thus, immortality was put on a competitive
basis. When the eider Morgan died, a large part of his art
collection was put up for sale. His collection of Chinese
porcelains, acknowledged to be the greatest in the world,
had been procured for Morgan by Duveen's Uncle Henry, the
first Duveen to set up shop in this country. Duveen now
bought the collection. Three of his honor pupils—Frick,
Widener, and Rockefeller—wanted it. It offered a quick
accession to prestige, and Duveen had to decide where to let
the Morgan mantle fall. He decided to let it fall on all
three men; each was to have a third of the collection. But
how could the division be made equitably? The solution of
this dilemma was a nice exercise in diplomacy. Duveen did
not wish to offend any of his star pupils, and especially
did not wish to offend Frick, who was still dickering with
other art dealers and who was a beauty lover with little
self-restraint and ample means of gratifying his love.
Duveen therefore decided to promise all three men first
chance. He would give each of the seekers after immortality
first chance at one part. This plan caused a certain
exacerbation among the objects of his benevolence, but it is
known that Frick believed (possibly without discouragement
from Duveen) that he had been given first chance at the best
lot, and for all anyone knows today the two other aspirants
believed that they had been the favored ones. Duveen
disposed of Morgan's collection of bronzes in the same
fashion. Again he gave Frick what Frick believed was first
chance at the best lot. All his life, Duveen had to walk a
tightrope among the men who were anxious to immortalize
themselves with the choicest samples of his taste.
The techniques of trading that the American millionaires had
mastered were useless when pitted against Duveen's
technique. Again and again, Duveen stressed the point that
it was easy to get fifty-thousand-dollar pictures but very
hard to get pictures that cost a quarter of a million. An
art-expert friend told Duveen that he knew of an exquisite
masterwork in London that could be bought very reasonably.
"For how much?" Duveen asked. "I think you can get it for
three hundred pounds," his friend replied. "I really cannot
afford to buy a picture that costs only three hundred
pounds," Duveen said. While dining in a client's house, he
was shocked to see hanging on the wall, among the Duveens, a
beautiful Monet. He professed an overwhelming love for it,
and his client, whose interest was perhaps piqued by the
sudden reversal of their positions, asked him what his love
would come to in dollars. Duveen—nobody was better
accustomed to Duveen prices than he was—told him exactly
what his love was worth. The deal was closed and Duveen took
the picture home with him. It was never heard of again. When
people who knew of the incident asked him where the picture
was, he was evasive. The former owner jokingly accused him
of having sold it at an unconscionable profit. To a close
friend, Duveen admitted that he had bought it to sequester
it in his basement. "I didn't want that fellow to get used
to buying modern pictures," he said. "There are too many of
them." Duveen was never eager to sell anything painted after
1800, because the fertility of the nineteenth-century
painters would have sadly upset the Duveen economy of
scarcity.
Toward the end of his life, Duveen said, "Except for
Rembrandt and Hals, I'll never buy anything but Italians. I
can sell any Rembrandt or Hals, no matter how homely, but
when you get to the High Renaissance, you get physical
beauty. My clients want physical beauty." Sometimes,
however, he violated his own rule. He bought a Mother and
Child by Reynolds because he thought it fine, even though
the mother was homely. Perhaps he counted on the American
principle that denies the possibility of any mother's being
homely. If so, his faith was misplaced. His clients didn't
want a homely mother. The picture was eventually sold at
auction; it was bought by John G. Johnson, a Philadelphia
lawyer, who was one of the most discriminating of American
collectors. Duveen's clients not only disliked homely
mothers but were apathetic toward fat women. This created a
coolness between them and Rubens, and made it difficult for
Duveen to gratify his own fondness for that painter. He was
considerate enough not to cater to his personal prejudices;
he considered it selfish. In one instance, though, he did
forget himself and buy a Rubens Madonna. When he had it
cleaned, it proved to portray a nursing mother. This was
disheartening to Duveen, but he had to let Rubens have his
way. Since his customers, in addition to not caring for
homely mothers and fat women, didn't care for nursing
mothers, Duveen was compelled to sequester that picture in
his basement, too. He later discovered that his customers
didn't care for homely pirates, either. He had bought a very
bold, striking Velásquez that completely realized his
concept of how a pirate ought to look. He was crazy about
it, but he couldn't get any of his clients to share his
enthusiasm. They thought the pirate looked too much like a
desperado—which was exactly why Duveen had liked him. So the
Velásquez went into the basement, which was by then crammed
with distinguished rejections.
One day, Duveen ran into the American artist Maurice Sterne
on Fifth Avenue. "I have two Tintorettos, Maurice," said
Duveen. "I'd like you to have a look at them before I put
them downstairs." Sterne went over to the Ministry of Marine
for a look, and the Tintorettos—two male portraits—took his
breath away. "Why are you putting them downstairs?" he
asked. "Surely you can sell them." "Unfortunately, they're
men," Duveen said. "If they were women—more particularly, if
they were pretty women—I could easily sell them here three
times over." He also showed Sterne two very fine pictures of
the Giotto school, but not by outstanding names. Duveen was
also putting those downstairs. "Can't sell them," he said
flatly. "In America, they want only the top-notchers. If I
had the Sistine Chapel, I could sell it tomorrow half a
dozen times over."
It was imperative for Duveen not to make a mistake either on
a picture or on the client he offered it to, because once a
picture had been turned down by one client, the others heard
about it and were cold. Still, he couldn't always avoid
mistakes in pairing off clients and pictures, and his
mistakes added to his basement stock. There were some
dangers even he could not foresee, like his clients'
rejection of pictures on moral grounds. He managed to sell a
Gainsborough portrait of Mrs. Elliott only because the
purchaser didn't find out until too late that she had run
off with her gardener. On other occasions, though, some such
scandalous gossip killed his sales, and the censored
paintings went into the basement. In addition, Duveen became
an avid collector of paintings he disliked, among them all
the Barbizons and other pardonable errors committed by his
clients before they had come under his tutelage. Duveen
bought them all, for his basement, and sold his customers
suitable replacements, not forgetting when he set the sale
prices the liberal prices he had paid for their mistakes.
Over the years, Duveen's basement accumulated quantities of
nursing mothers and homely mothers and unappetizing pirates
and men without women; of non-topnotch masterpieces; of
pictures that had been masterpieces but were beyond the
ministrations of the restorers; of pictures that had nothing
whatever against them except that one client had turned them
down; of pictures that had violated the seventh commandment;
of Barbizons; of moderns. That basement contained a
fascinating and bewildering miscellany: seepages from the
picture collections of kings, kings' mistresses, queens,
archbishops, cardinals, and Rothschilds, to say nothing of a
wilderness of furniture and objets d'art—altarpieces,
credenzas, suits of armor, tapestries, and thrones. In a
sense, the basement, full as it was of beautiful things,
summarized Duveen's eccentricities of salesmanship. Its
value became incalculable. His friends and financial
advisers kept importuning him to sell some of it. "Sell your
basement," his comptroller would plead. "Sell your basement
and pay your debts." But Duveen was fond of his basement,
and he was not aware of being in debt. It was once suggested
that if he didn't want to sell the contents of the basement
under his own name, he might turn the stuff over to
Knoedler's, who would get an immense profit on it for him.
He couldn't bear to let his prominent rival have a whack at
his basement; he felt a pang of jealousy, like that of a man
who hears that a discarded mistress is contemplating a new
alliance. "Why should I put Knoedler's in business with my
stuff?" he asked pleasantly. He quite ignored the fact that
Knoedler's already was in business. To the end, he
clung to his basement. Basement Duveens were nonetheless
Duveens.
Duveen's purchase of unworthy pictures and art objects
sometimes proved profitable. One day, in the drawing room of
an important figure in British diplomatic circles, he
noticed a very bad painting the diplomat had bought in his
youth for a few hundred pounds. Duveen asked if he could buy
it. ("Some Europeans of that era were so very rich that they
were always hard up," Berenson has said.) The man said yes,
and, without asking him what he wanted, Duveen paid him ten
thousand pounds for it, spot cash. The diplomat decided that
Duveen was not only a connoisseur but a gentleman who was
above the degrading minutiae of haggling, and later he
tipped Duveen off from time to time to pictures his friends
might be willing to sell. Someone has said that he performed
the functions of a runner for Duveen—a highly cultivated,
exhaustively informed, unpaid one. Duveen instantly wrote
his ten-thousand-pound purchase off as a total loss, but the
pictures he acquired from the diplomat's friends returned
him a profit many times as large as his investment. Duveen
sometimes varied this technique of flattery. Visiting
Clarence Mackay at his manor, Harbor Hill, in Roslyn, soon
after making his acquaintance, Duveen's gaze took in certain
tapestries on the walls. "Those tapestries, my dear Mr.
Mackay, are very good, but they are not good enough for
you," he said. "I can't bear you to have them in your
chateau. I'll buy them from you, as I have a customer
they're good enough for. I'll pay you thirty-five thousand
dollars for them." Mackay agreed. Duveen's check arrived
next day, and Mackay incredulously shipped off the
tapestries. They went right to Duveen's basement, but Mackay
became one of Duveen's best customers.
Compared to his clients, Duveen was a child in business, but
he almost always had his way with them. When they started
talking about prices, he started talking about values—values
that, as it happened, he himself had created. When customers
complained about the price of his masterpieces, he brought
into play, sometimes subtly and sometimes brutally, his
standard threat—that he had a rival collector whose sense of
values was more perceptive, whose taste, in fact, was
anything but vulgar. The rival collector was his trump card.
He capitalized on rivalry in perception, even rivalry in
philanthropy. A peculiar aversion was aroused in Frick by
Carnegie's propensity for endowing libraries. This quirk of
Carnegie's disgusted him. "What's the point of giving
libraries to all those towns that go busted trying to keep 'em
up?" Frick asked. Duveen gave him something that had a
point, and a chance to do in Carnegie, whom Frick detested.
It has been said of Kress, one of the biggest of Duveen's
customers, that he got more pleasure out of haggling with
Duveen over a picture's price than he did out of owning it.
He bought art on such a scale that when someone asked where
a certain picture was, all he could say was that he thought
it was in "that third lot that came from Duveen."
Ordinarily, Duveen showed his clients only one picture at a
time. He had it put on an easel in his gallery, gave a
discourse on the artist and the special glories of the
subject at hand, and ended by working himself up into a
spiral of irresistible enthusiasm. Some of his clients,
having achieved worldly success by buying wholesale and
selling retail, didn't care for this piecemeal method.
Looking at one picture at a time bored Kress, and once when
he was visiting the gallery, he finally asked to see a
bunch. Duveen, pained, ordered someone to bring in a bunch.
Kress admired them and asked the price of the lot. Duveen
quoted the price of each picture and added up the figures.
"Isn't there a reduction when you buy by lot?" Kress
inquired, out of habit. Duveen said there wasn't. Kress got
up abruptly. "I am not interested," he said, and departed.
Six months later, he returned to the gallery and casually
asked Duveen, "Have you still got that lot of pictures I
looked at that day?" "I have indeed," said Duveen. "In fact,
I am holding them for you." Kress looked at them again.
"What did I offer for them the last time?" he asked. "Your
offer last time," Duveen replied amicably, "was so small
that I can't even remember it." "What is the price now?"
Kress asked. Duveen named the original figure, and the two
men repeated the original routine. "In that case," said
Kress, getting up—in his relations with Duveen, Kress was
always getting up—"don't hold them for me anymore. I am not
interested." Duveen held on to the pictures, and eventually
Kress bought them, at Duveen's figure. Later, Duveen said
that he knew he had sold the pictures when Kress asked
whether he still had them. After his first transaction with
Duveen, Kress told a friend that he would never go to
Duveen's again, because he objected to the Duveen prices.
When, inevitably, he did go back, the friend said, "I
thought you were never going back to Duveen's. What made
you?" "Because he's got things I can't get anywhere else,"
Kress said. He was stating a simple truth, and one that each
of Duveen's clients had to discover for himself.
Once, Duveen had to grant, to a customer already persuaded
of this truth, a far greater reduction than the one he did
not give Kress. Mrs. Gilbert Miller, a daughter of Jules
Bache, walked into Duveen's one day to have a look at some
pictures her father contemplated buying. Duveen was not
there, but his chief assistant, Bertram Boggis, was. The
pictures did not arouse joy in her heart but, as her father
contemplated buying them and Duveen contemplated selling
them, she knew that they would presently he hanging in her
father's house and that she would have plenty of time to
gaze at them in the future. Somewhat hopelessly, she asked
Boggis if there was anything around that was younger than
four centuries. Boggis took her into another room and showed
her Goya's "Don Manuel Osorio de Zuniga"—the little Red Boy,
which, in reproduction, has become one of the most popular
pictures in the world. Mrs. Miller fell in love with the Red
Boy, as, on an earlier occasion, H. E. Huntington fell in
love with the Blue Boy. Mrs. Miller went home and told her
father that she could not face the future without the
companionship of the Red Boy. Bache was an indulgent father
and confided his daughter's passion to Duveen. Duveen, who
liked to further love affairs, especially if they got their
start on his premises, praised Mrs. Miller's taste and asked
for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars to make
the affair permanent. Bache consented at once, with a sense
of benefit received.
Bache's son-in-law, Gilbert Miller, the producer, proved to
be less grateful. In the first place, he stated flatly, no
Goya was worth two hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars. (The general public was less Goya-conscious then
than it is now; indeed, it is the various exhibitions of
this very Red Boy that have helped intensify the
consciousness.) Also, he was haunted by a feeling that he
had met this Red Boy somewhere before, and in surroundings
that didn't go with
two-hundred-and-seventy-five-thousand-dollar pictures.
Miller was tantalized. He hunted around in the picture's
provenance and found that it had once belonged to the wife
of the French playwright Henry Bernstein. Here Miller was on
his home ground. He went to see Bernstein. "Henry," he said,
"I feel I know that picture. I feel I've seen that picture."
"Of course you've seen it," said Bernstein. "I used it as a
prop in 'La Galerie des Glaces.'" "La Galerie des Glaces" is
a play of Bernstein's that ran in Paris in 1924, with
Charles Boyer as its titular star and the Red Boy as its
wallflower. "How much did you get for that prop when you
sold it?" Miller asked. Bernstein said that in a moment of
depression he and his wife had sold it to a Paris dealer for
fifty thousand dollars. Miller went in triumph to his wife,
and they both went in triumph to her father. Their attitude
about Duveen had for a long time been wary, whereas Bache's,
of course, had been idolatrous. They were sure that with
this information they could easily convert the believer into
an apostate. They were disappointed. Bache saw nothing wrong
in Duveen's asking him two hundred and seventy-five thousand
dollars for a fifty-thousand-dollar picture. The Millers
felt a certain frustration. Miller then called on Duveen,
and Duveen amiably reduced the price by a hundred and
fifteen thousand dollars. This was the best he could do, he
said, because he had had heavy expenses in the process of
acquiring the picture. Miller again went to his
father-in-law, bearing in his hand the gift of the markdown,
and presented it as stunning evidence that Duveen's services
came high. "Under the circumstances, I don't think so," said
Bache imperturbably. Miller inquired what these
circumstances might be. Bache broke down and confessed. The
price was not as excessive as superficial observers might
think, he explained, because he had, years before, made a
private deal with Duveen that if Duveen had an outstanding
picture to offer him, he would pay him a flat
hundred-per-cent profit. Taking into account Duveen's
expenses in getting hold of the Red Boy, the original price
he had asked was fair. Miller blew up. "Why on earth did you
make a deal like that?” he asked. Bache explained, and his
explanation should certainly rank high in the annals of
modesty. "Listen, Gilbert," he said, with the patience of
practiced wisdom before the spectacle of explosive
immaturity, "Duveen has the greatest men in the world as his
clients. He has Mellon. Why should he give a first-class
picture to me when he can give it to Mellon?" While Bache
was explaining, Miller could see that his father-in-law was
somewhat amazed that he had succeeded, merely by the promise
of so reasonable a profit, in winning Duveen's
consideration. Reminiscing with Miller about this episode, a
later collector, Albert D. Lasker, made a pertinent remark
about his own early days as a picture buyer. "As a novice in
collecting," he said with a modesty not unlike Bache's, "I
expected to have to pay the highest prices for masterpieces.
What I did not expect, what I was to discover, was
that I would also have to pay a large premium for the
privilege of paying the highest prices!" In effect, Duveen
was the king of an unconstitutional monarchy: His leading
clients—men like Frick, Morgan, Mellon, P. A. B. Widener,
Rockefeller, and Kress—were in the Cabinet, and Duveen
managed to hold out to each of them the hope of one day
being Prime Minister; clients of lesser rank—Bache, Henry
Goldman, Edsel Ford, Elbert H. Gary—were enthusiastic
backbenchers, content to support the chief.
Duveen was not snobbish in his selection of pupils; he often
lavished his knowledge on the backbenchers, and even on what
he regarded as the small fry. Hearst was in the small-fry
category; he probably spent at Duveen's no more than five
million dollars in all. Also, he was what Duveen termed an
accumulator, rather than a collector. Duveen made a strong
distinction between the two. In Duveen's opinion, Hearst's
collateral interest in ibexes, llamas, and Welsh castles
kept him from attaining the rarefied heights on which he
himself liked to operate. Duveen was always struggling with
the aimlessness of his clients' diversions; he labored
tirelessly at the task of focussing them. One day, Bache,
who was one of his favorite pupils, absent-mindedly bought
from a major rival of Duveen's in Italy, Count Alessandro
Contini, for thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars, an
illuminated page from an old hook, the work of an obscure
artist. Bache showed his master the page. Duveen was gentle.
He did not reprimand Bache. He spoke to him mildly. "Don't
scatter, Julie," he said, with the weariness of the much
tried. "An accumulation is never a collection. Concentrate."
After that, Julie concentrated.
One of Duveen's dear friends was Lady Lavery, the second
wife of the painter Sir John Lavery. She asked one day if
she might bring a certain California industrialist to see
him. Duveen, who never denied anything to a friend, gave her
permission, even though he considered the industrialist
another of the small fry. Lady Lavery came a little ahead of
time and was sitting in Duveen's office when the Californian
was announced by an usher. "Keep him waiting a half hour,"
said Duveen. Lady Lavery protested. "You can't do that to a
man of his importance," she said. "Leave it to me and
watch," said Duveen. When the visitor was finally admitted,
Duveen took him and Lady Lavery for a stroll around the
Ministry of Marine. He showed them a Rembrandt. The
industrialist wanted to buy it. "The price is a hundred
thousand dollars," Duveen said. "That's all right," said
Lady Lavery's friend. Duveen made a few inquiries. "What
other pictures do you own?" he asked, finally. The
Californian admitted that he had none of any importance. "I
can't possibly sell a Rembrandt to a man who owns no other
pictures," said Duveen. "The Rembrandt would be lonely." He
persuaded the ardent customer that for him to take the
picture home would constitute a kind of cruelty to
Rembrandts. The industrialist saw that he would have to make
a more modest start, and here Duveen was able to help him.
Duveen sold him a relatively inexpensive picture. Within a
few years, the Californian had enough minor Duveens to feel
justified in asking for a major one. Duveen shipped the
Rembrandt to California with a nice feeling that he had
provided for its social life.
Still another of the small fry, in Duveen's opinion, was
John R. Thompson, of Chicago, the owner of the well-known
chain of one-arm restaurants. Thompson had begun to nibble
at paintings through a Chicago art dealer. As his chain of
restaurants increased, so did his appetite for paintings.
The dealer, drawing upon the resources available to him in
Chicago, gradually built up a small collection for him, but
there came a time when the dealer's intuition told him that
if he tried to keep Thompson to himself, he would lose a
valuable customer. The dealer came to New York and advised
Duveen that he had a client who had plenty of money and was
ripe for higher things. Duveen agreed to give the restaurant
man an audience, and the dealer a commission on any sales.
"You mustn't be shocked by my tactics, though," he warned.
Thompson, escorted by the Chicago dealer, presently appeared
at the Ministry. He was a large man, and was wearing a big
Stetson and smoking a big cigar. Duveen kept Thompson and
the dealer waiting for an hour, in which time Thompson
chewed up three cigars. Finally, the two men were admitted
to the Presence. Duveen was brisk and genial "I hear you are
in the restaurant business," he said. "Anything like Lyons?"
He went on to say that he approved of the Lyons teashops,
and that if Thompson's chain resembled them, he approved of
that. He revealed that he often snubbed Claridge's in favor
of a Lyons on Oxford Street. The absence of formality there
was pleasurable. He grew eloquent on the important social
service rendered by those who provided good food at popular
prices. He asked about the turnover in the Thompson
restaurants, and the problems of refrigeration. The
restaurant business, it became clear, was Duveen's liveliest
and most intimate concern. "Look here," Thompson broke in
desperately when he could stand the strain no longer, "I
didn't make this trip to New York to talk to you about the
restaurant business. I came to see you because I am
interested in paintings!" Snapped back so rudely to an
activity so marginal, Duveen made a quick adjustment. "Oh,
paintings!" he said, as if recalling an almost forgotten
acquaintance. "Of course, paintings! Oh, well, now, if
you're interested in pictures, come upstairs with me and
I'll show you some."
Duveen led the Stetson and cigar, as well as the Chicago
dealer, into the elevator, which bore them to sacrosanct
upper regions. Duveen strode swiftly through a thickly
carpeted, dimly lit room that contained six Old Masters
reclining on easels. Thompson, in his wake, was almost out
of the room when, like Mrs. Lot, he looked hack. He
lingered; from the blur of the six pictures he got a quick
impression of infinite desirability. He called the hurrying
Duveen hack. "Here are some pictures," he said. "What about
these?"
Duveen took his arm. "My dear Mr. Thompson," he said gently,
"there is nothing in this room that would interest you in
the least."
"Why not?" argued the new pupil. "Of course they interest
me. What would I be doing here if they didn't interest me?"
"These pictures, my dear fellow, I am reserving, as a matter
of fact, for a favorite client," Duveen said. "They will
interest him far more than they could possibly interest
you."
Thompson protested; he would yield to no one in acuteness of
interest. "Why do you think they wouldn't interest me?" he
asked. "I want you to know, Sir Joseph, that I own some
pretty good pictures."
"I am sure you do," Duveen said soothingly. "And if you will
just follow me, I am sure that I can add to your collection
and, if I may say so, improve it. But not these. You are a
busy man, and I don't want to waste your time. Not with
these."
"Why not?" repeated Mr. Thompson.
Pushed to the wall, Duveen dropped all pretense of tact. He
made it plain that he thought the pictures were over
Thompson's head, both aesthetically and economically.
"How much for the six?" Thompson demanded.
"A million dollars, I am afraid," said Duveen, as if pained
at having to demonstrate the truth of an unflattering
statement.
Thompson was ready with an answer. "I'll take them," he said
vindictively.
Behind the facade of Duveen's virtuoso salesmanship, behind
the intricate process of converting Midas into Maecenas,
operated his even more impressive process of financing. This
was, and still is, a source of wonder not only to his
competitors and his clients but to the whole world of art.
To this day people marvel that he was able over the years to
keep his financial structure firm, his credit strong. He
tied up immense amounts of capital in his inventory. All
together, in addition to the many millions he paid for
single works of art he picked up at auctions and private
sales, he bought eight large collections during his career,
investing in them, according to the best estimates,
twenty-five million dollars. He carried some items on his
hooks for more than three decades. Works of art that he
bought in 1906 and 1907 stayed in his warehouses until he
began filling in the crevices of the Mellon and Kress
Collections, between 1936 and 1939. The carrying charges on
those items, which undoubtedly increased the altitude of the
prices he got for them, were beyond calculation. Then,
Duveen, who always considered buying, not selling, the main
problem of his business, had to pay cash for what he bought,
whereas he gave his customers practically unlimited credit.
He would allow paintings to hang in a client's house for
years, on the theory that where art was concerned, the
aphorism about familiarity worked in reverse. To be sure, it
almost always did, but in the meantime, again, his capital
was tied up. Even when his clients got around to buying, he
never hurried them for payment. Although among them they
often owed him millions at a time, he never charged them
interest. On top of that, it cost him half a million dollars
a year just to run his three establishments, in New York,
Paris, and London. This included not only paying his staff
of runners, ushers, and experts but buying flowers and
presents for his clients and their wives on their birthdays
and for their sailings to and from Europe, and distributing
gratuities among their staffs.
Duveen has been called the world's greatest borrower. No
one, it has been said, knew so little about interest or paid
so much of it as Duveen. Not long after his father's death,
in 1908, he owed seventeen million dollars, including eleven
million to his eleven brothers and sisters, whose share in
his father's business he bought out; and after his Uncle
Henry's death, in 1919, he bought his share with notes for
an additional six million. Yet he was always borrowing more
to expand the business. Fortunately, the Duveen credit was
excellent. An idiosyncrasy of the Duveens—the father, Uncle
Henry, and the son—to have their bankers as customers or
close friends or both gave their operations in the broad art
world a certain compactness. A customer and great friend of
the father's was Lord Farquhar, the head of Parr's Bank, who
was also a great friend of Edward VII. The Duveens could
always count on Parr's for assistance. Early in the century,
it extended Duveen a credit of six million dollars, and it
kept renewing this six-million-dollar credit for the rest of
Duveen's lifetime. In America, too, some of Duveen Brothers'
major clients were bankers, or at least had banking
influence. Early in the game, Uncle Henry, operating in the
United States, acquired Morgan, Altman, P. A. B. Widener,
Collis Huntington, and George J. Gould as both clients and
financial advisers. At one point, Duveen counselled Uncle
Henry, "Don't ask Morgan for money. Ask him for credit."
Morgan, who was thinking of buying two million dollars'
worth of Duveen objects, was asked to give the Duveen firm
that amount of credit at the Morgan institutions. This
worked out beautifully for everyone. Morgan got the stuff on
approval, and he knew that, in the circumstances, the firm
wouldn't press him for cash. In the meantime, Duveen had the
prestige of Morgan credit behind him. Later, Mackay, who was
a director of the Guaranty Trust, bought from Duveen without
making any cash down payment. He agreed to pay off his debt
a bit at a time at stipulated intervals, and Duveen mentally
earmarked these payments to offset his own debt to the
Guaranty Trust.
Mellon was even more helpful. He controlled powerful
Pittsburgh banks and had influence in certain New York
banks. He was always considering vast amounts of Duveen
merchandise, which he might take a long time deciding about
but rarely returned. Duveen found that while Mellon was
meditating, he was completely willing to extend credit to
him. Mellon regarded this as good business. When he finally
paid, he ordinarily paid cash—he was the only one of
Duveen's big clients who regularly did, the others
preferring to pay in securities—and meanwhile he regarded
the works of art he had on approval as security for Duveen's
debt to his banks, on which he got interest from Duveen.
Thus Duveen was paying interest on what he had borrowed from
Mellon in order to buy art treasures for Mellon to keep on
approval. Nevertheless, there were compensations for Duveen
in this arrangement. One day, the manager of the Guaranty
Trust called the harassed John H. Allen, at that time
Duveen's comptroller, to complain politely that a debt to
the bank of three million dollars was past due. Allen
succeeded in diverting Duveen's attention from Botticelli's
long, unbroken line (which he was explaining to a client) to
this minuscule situation. "Telephone Mr. McEldowney, the
president of the Union Trust Company, in Pittsburgh," Duveen
said tranquilly. "Ask him for three million dollars for
sixty days." Allen telephoned the bank, which was
Mellon-controlled, and got it. The Guaranty Trust man felt
more cheerful. Sixty days later, Duveen, his credit with the
Guaranty now restored, borrowed the three million back and
sent it to Mellon's bank in Pittsburgh, thus bringing cheer
to Mr. McEldowney. His credit was then vigorous at both
banks.
Every spring, before Duveen went abroad on his annual buying
tour, whoever happened to be his comptroller would caution
him not to buy anything. The inventory was overloaded
already, the comptroller would point out, and the firm's
credit shouldn't be subjected to any more pressure. Duveen
would promise to be good, and then, once in Europe, would
buy two or three million dollars' worth of stuff. In 1927,
it was the Robert H. Benson collection of a hundred and
fourteen great Italian paintings, for which Duveen paid over
three million dollars in England. In 1930, it was the
Gustave Dreyfus collection of Italian pictures and
sculptures, for which Duveen paid four and a half million in
Paris. And so it went. He would keep the cables to America
hot with requests for the money. If the comptroller
responded too slowly, he raised it in England. Duveen never
worried about money or about credit. He worried only about
getting the most famous pictures in the world; that is, not
letting any other dealers get them. He always had absolute
confidence in the solidity of his financial position,
because he was in it. He knew that the value of his
inventory, together with what his clients owed him, far
exceeded his debts, and that, furthermore, every dollar he
put into his inventory automatically went up in value simply
because it was an investment in Duveens. He also knew that
whereas his Uncle Henry and his brothers and sisters and his
comptrollers took the narrow view that it was safer to have
money than to spend it, his security lay in his ability to
spend it prodigally on what he could sell. He did not think
that art should, or could, be sold overnight. He believed in
waiting for advantageous moments; he arranged them far in
advance, so he was not surprised when they came. In his
grand financial strategy, he calculated in terms of his
total life span. The final tally would not be in, he
figured, until he had made his last sale and died. His
strategy proved sound. It was not until 1937, after he put
over his last great deal with Mellon, that Duveen liquidated
his six-million-dollar debt to his London bank. When he had
made his very last sale, he was out of debt, and had fifteen
million dollars in the bank, an inventory worth ten million,
and his self-confidence intact.
In the early morning hours of April 16, 1912, Duveen found
himself sitting with the man who was then his comptroller,
Max Bruell, anxiously awaiting news of the steamship
Titanic. The passenger list was sufficiently distinguished
to include several Duveen clients, and Duveen's solicitude
for their welfare was almost obsessive. Many, including
relatives, waited for news that day, but it is doubtful
whether any of them waited with more anxiety than Duveen,
who had a passionate interest in the longevity of his
clients—an interest not always felt by the relatives of the
very rich. Incorrigible optimist that he was, he could not
believe the mounting reports of disaster as they came in. He
kept repeating to Bruell, "Don't you think George Widener
may have saved himself?" Bruell thought it unlikely. "I
think Widener will save himself," Duveen kept insisting.
Widener, a son of P. A, B. Widener, was the most important
Duveen client on board, and Duveen must have felt that
Widener's capacity for survival was commensurate with his
position as a client. Through the long hours of waiting,
Duveen sat clinging to this life raft, until the bitter
reality swept it away from him.
Bruell once cryptically remarked of his boss, "Anything that
Joe Duveen did he thought he could do"—an utterance as
prismatic with innuendo as any pronouncement ever made by
the oracle at Delphi. The ability to add and subtract is a
fundamental part of the equipment of a professional
comptroller, and this was an ability that Duveen not only
lacked but had no ambition to master. To him, money was
merely a convenience, as water is to a fish, and he detested
the point of view that regarded the momentary lack of it as
an obstacle. He simply didn't want to hear about it. When a
stringent financial problem came up, he left it to those who
were interested in such matters to work it out among
themselves. This inherent difference in orientation between
Bruell and the head of the firm often gave Bruell frantic
moments. One afternoon, Duveen, having bought some things
from Morgan, asked Miss Belle da Costa Greene, Morgan's
librarian, to drop in at the gallery. When she arrived,
Duveen sent for Bruell and introduced him. He followed up
the introduction with a casual suggestion. "Give Miss Greene
a check for a million dollars," he murmured. Bruell
remembers that it was, luckily, two o'clock—almost closing
time at the bank—so that he was able to ask Miss Greene
whether it would be all right if he gave her the million in
the morning. Miss Greene said it would. The next day, Bruell
got up very early, arrived at the bank at nine o'clock, and
spent the morning mixing ingredients that made it possible
to carry out Duveen's order. Duveen's insouciance in giving
orders like this drove Bruell crazy; he never seemed to
understand that, as Bruell has since complained, "it was not
quite so simple."
On the other hand, when Bruell presented Frick, one day,
with an invoice for seven million dollars, Frick understood
completely and responded precisely. He was a man
Bruell could talk to. He didn't just make an ample remark
and then expect you to leave the room. He gave the invoice a
sharp look and wrote down and handed to Bruell instructions
to take to his, Frick's, bankers, to deliver in payment
fifty thousand shares of Pennsylvania, thirty-five thousand
shares of Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and two million
dollars' worth of French bonds. Some of Duveen's customers,
unlike Frick, were petty when it came time to settle for
Duveen's illustrated lectures; they paid in driblets. In a
reflective spirit, the harried Bruell recently wrote an
acquaintance:
Mrs. Stotesbury, the former Mrs. Cromwell, when she
wanted to make a showing in Philadelphia, got acquainted
with Duveen. Duveen suggested she go away and leave the
entire matter up to him. Whereupon, he hired trucks, and
the whole Duveen establishment was practically
dismantled—the stuff going to Philadelphia. There, under
Duveen's supervision, the entire Stotesbury house was
redone for about $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. At the time,
Joe said that nothing would be returned—and nothing was.
Stotesbury paid up, though he drew all the checks
himself and never over $25,000 at a time till it was all
paid up. Stotesbury's main delight was to play the bass
drum at Stotesbury parties.
However petty Duveen's clients were about money (he forgave
them because, until he came along, they had had nothing else
to divert them), he himself was never petty about it. After
a big sale of art objects to Rockefeller, Rockefeller left
town—presumably to scrape up the money to pay. During his
absence, Bruell recalls, Mrs. Rockefeller rushed into
Duveen's one day saying that something terrible had
happened; one of her maids had dropped a vase, not knowing
it was a Duveen. Duveen calmed Mrs. Rockefeller down and
went at once to her house and examined the vase. The damage
was considerable, but he told Mrs. Rockefeller not to worry.
He took the vase back to his place and got an expert
Japanese restorer to set to work on it at once. Duveen
insisted that the restorer work day and night on it, so that
the job would he finished by the time Mr. Rockefeller got
back to town. The restorer finished the job on the dot and
sent Duveen a bill for seventy-five hundred dollars. At
Bruell's suggestion that this bill might legitimately be
sent to Mrs. Rockefeller, Duveen was shocked. He forbade it.
The two men really did not understand each other. Duveen
didn't understand Bruell's successor Allen, in his turn, any
better; between him and his comptrollers there was always a
basic misunderstanding. Another great impresario, a
contemporary of Duveen's, was the princely and prodigal
Austrian theatrical producer Max Reinhardt. Reinhardt had
for years a general adviser who was devoted, informed,
practical, and profoundly pessimistic. Of this man, for whom
he had an abiding affection, Reinhardt once said, "In his
advice to me, K— is right ninety-nine per cent of the time.
But one per cent of the time he it wrong and I am right. It
is on that one per cent that I live." Duveen might well have
said the same thing about himself and his comptrollers.
Although Duveen was reluctant to talk about money, he didn't
mind spending it, and he didn't even mind giving it away.
His benefactions, public and private, were immense. Dr.
Wilhelm von Bode, the German art critic and museum director,
who was the acknowledged authority on Rembrandt, and who had
advised Duveen on the purchase of his first collections (the
Hainauer and the two Kanns), had by the late
nineteen-twenties fallen on evil days; he was ill, poor, and
going blind. When Duveen heard that von Bode was forced to
put his art library up for auction, he sent two emissaries
to Germany with instructions to make fabulous cross-bids for
the books, so that von Bode would realize a handsome sum.
This was one time when the pernicious activity known as
"rigging the market" had a pure, philanthropic impulse
behind it. Later, Duveen's close friend Lord D'Abernon was
in financial difficulties, and Duveen paid Duveen prices for
some of his paintings—paintings the dealer could never
possibly dignify with his own signature in his personal
market. Duveen also gave a million dollars to the British
Red Cross, presented to the British Museum the gallery for
the celebrated Elgin Marbles, and made large gifts to the
Tate Gallery and the National Gallery in London. All
together, he gave away ten million dollars, and his
benefactions compared favorably with those of his great
clients. Duveen was sensitive, however, about bringing up
the subject of money in conversation just because
literal-minded men like Bruell, and, later, Allen, felt he
ought to. It was all right for his clients to talk about
money to each other; they, poor fellows, hadn't much else to
talk about. But this was not the case between any one of
these clients and Duveen. Between them there was a more
intimate and absorbing and exalted subject for discussion.
Duveen was a millionaire, as they were. He was a
philanthropist, as they were. But there was a difference. He
dealt in the aesthetic and the immemorial, they in the
prosaic and the temporal. The fact that only through him
could they share in the excitements and rewards of his realm
aroused his sympathy and, privately, his condescension.
(Reproached, once, fur putting a high polish on his Old
Masters when he restored them, he replied that his rich
clients wanted only to see themselves reflected when they
looked at works of art, he found it expedient to give his
pictures a mirror surface. ) He was perfectly willing, in
his conversations with his clients, to give them everything
he had in the way of enthusiasm for his works of art. All
this was fine, but he wasn't going to clutter the high
plateau with dollar signs. It was perhaps in conformity with
this principle of his that he never consented to the
displaying of a Duveen in Duveen's window. He wouldn't make
a sandwich man out of Raphael, nor yet out of himself. If
money had to he talked about, there were people to do
it—people on his payroll, like Bruell and Allen, and people
in banks, like Mellon and Morgan. As for him, he had time
only for art.
Professor C. M. Bowra, of Oxford, has said that Duveen was
"the most symbolic figure of the twenties." Certainly Duveen
was a man of his time. It was a time of monopoly, and Duveen
outmonopolized the monopolists who were among his biggest
clients. In some people, the impulse to own everything
appears to be congenital. Beyond the first victories, the
horizons widen; they have to control not only the main
stream but its tributaries. The impulse becomes a drive that
demands the extermination not only of rivals but of
potential rivals—a refusal to allow them to live, or even to
be born. This temperament is not confined to businessmen.
Some artists, scholars, and professional philosophers have
it, and even, frozen in the dicta of ideology, some
humanitarians; once you've palmed truth, it becomes logical
to destroy those who don't share it. That is why the mass
murders of the dictators shine with altruism. Duveen's
career was dominated by his monopolistic drive. In June of
1920, it was announced that Mrs. Harry J. Hahn, a French
lady who had married a United States Army officer and was
living in Junction City, Kansas, had put on the market a
painting by Leonardo da Vinci called "La Belle Ferronnière."
The bidding for it was instantaneous and brisk. Anything by
the painter of "Mona Lisa" was newsworthy, and a reporter
from the New York World telephoned Duveen, as the
king of the art world, to ask him if he had any comment to
make. He had. He issued a statement on the picture sight
unseen. Among other things, he said, "The Hahn picture is a
copy, hundreds of which have been made. The real 'La Belle
Ferronnière ' is in the Louvre." Duveen's word carried such
weight that this simple statement put a dead stop to Mrs.
Hahn's negotiations for selling the picture. She brought
suit at once.
The resulting trial, although it didn't take place until
nine years later, was a sensation—a heresy case with a
picture as defendant. First, there was a preliminary hearing
at the Louvre, where the Louvre Leonardo was placed side by
side with Mrs. Hahn's Leonardo and peered at by experts.
Even at this hearing, the experts revealed a certain
astigmatism; a French newspaper made the acrid comment "The
experts came to examine the Hahn painting, but as it turns
out, the painting is examining the experts." The trial
itself took place in New York, and lasted twenty-eight days.
A journalist of the time said that the Hahn Leonardo trial
was "a lowbrow and a highbrow circus—the smartest show in
town." Duveen marshalled a gallery of experts for his
defense—including Berenson—such as had never before been
rounded up for an art suit. The "La Belle Ferronnière" case
has been called "the world's most celebrated case of art
litigation." In his address to the jury, the Honorable
Justice William Harman Black, who presided, gave the twelve
good men and true some comfort for the ordeal they had
undergone as the involuntary target of a bombardment of
disagreements in the arcana of expertise. He said,
"You have been privileged to sit in on one of the most
interesting cases ever tried in any court." According to the
testimony, neither Berenson nor, by this time, Duveen
himself believed the Louvre Leonardo, the exemplar beside
which they had found Mrs. Hahn's Leonardo wanting, to be
genuine. They both stated that they believed the Louvre
Leonardo not to be by Leonardo. At the same time, Duveen's
experts at the trial made every effort to prove that Mrs.
Hahn's Leonardo was not like the Louvre Leonardo and
therefore, of course, could not be by Leonardo. It was very
confusing, but possibly Justice Black's comforting
words—which appeared to felicitate the jury just for
being there—made it up to twelve befuddled victims in
their dark hour. Still, it is no wonder that, like the
experts, they disagreed. A fatal letter written by Duveen to
his manager in London on August 5,1920, was introduced by
the plaintiff into the court records. It read, "The Louvre
picture is not passed by the most eminent connoisseurs as
having been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and I may say that
I am entirely in accord with their opinion." Among the
experts with whom Duveen accorded was Berenson. In his book
"North Italian Painters of the Renaissance," published in
1907, he had written of the Louvre girl, "Paris No. 1600 La
Belle Ferronnière. One would regret to have to accept this
as Leonardo's own work." Justice Black, in his charge to the
jury, admitted that "it required a good deal of mental
agility to follow some of the experts from their positive
evidence on the stand to the diametrically opposite views
they had expressed in their books long before."
This was one lawsuit Duveen did not enjoy; the opposition
was too formidable. The jury turned in a mixed verdict—nine
to three in favor of Mrs. Hahn. Justice Black ordered
another trial, but Duveen avoided this by settling with Mrs.
Hahn out of court for sixty thousand dollars. What the whole
thing cost him, in time and money, cannot be computed, but
the sum was certainly vast. And the trial did not even
enhance his prestige. But it did ruin Mrs. Hahn's chance of
selling her picture. Since Duveen had not seen it at the
time he made his original statement, he could have had no
precise knowledge of it. There was one thing, though, that
he did know. This was that he did not own it. As he did not
own it, he could not sell it. For the moment, then, Mrs.
Hahn became a business rival, and, as such, she had to go to
the block. During the suit, Duveen's associates couldn't
understand why he should deny the authenticity of a picture
with which he had nothing to do, and thus involve himself in
expensive litigation, but his recklessness in expressing his
opinions about other people's stuff was not without value.
Duveen looked upon himself as the Pontifex Maximus of the
art world; he was tolerant of an associate who customarily
called him Josephus Rex. His lawsuits, even those he lost,
helped establish his preeminence as a monopolist not only of
merchandise but of opinion. Absolutism in opinion was as
important to Duveen as freight rebates were to his clients
in oil, aluminum, or steel. And he achieved it. H. E.
Huntington, chatting one day with a member of Duveen's staff
in the drawing room of his house, nodded toward the andirons
in his fireplace. They were just two nice, ordinary
andirons. "If Duveen offered me two identical andirons," he
said, "and told me that they were remarkable and asked me
seventy-five thousand dollars apiece for them, I would
gladly pay it."
To establish this kind of absolutism took unremitting
vigilance and unremitting ingenuity. Duveen's name must be
inseparably associated with not just great works of art but
the greatest, and he would allow nothing to tarnish this
glittering trademark. That is why when he bought pictures by
first-rate painters who had had the bad luck to do their
work in periods that he did not specialize in and, having
decided for one reason or another not to put them in his
basement, he shipped them to London dealers to sell for him,
he always stipulated that they must be sold austerely under
the names of the artists who painted them, not as Duveens.
Just as Duveen would not go into partnership with certain
artists on their signatures, so he repudiated more
conventional partnerships after he had entered into them. On
one occasion, he and a London dealer bought two fine
Lawrences in England in partnership. Shortly afterward,
Duveen sold them to Mrs. Stotesbury, but he did not inform
the London dealer that he had made the sale. When the dealer
began to dun him, Duveen said that the pictures would be
tough to sell but that nevertheless he believed in them; he
offered the dealer a handsome profit for his interest, and
the dealer gratefully accepted it. The amount Duveen paid
the dealer was larger than the amount he actually owed him
on the Stotesbury sale. But Duveen simply did not wish to
impede his own flight as the lone eagle. Another partnership
that Duveen transmuted into a solo flight involved the
purchase of a Velásquez "Infanta Maria Theresa." Harry Payne
Bingham, its owner, had promised it to Knoedler's, for a
very high price. Duveen knew about it, as he knew about most
things that were going on in his world, and he went to
Charles R. Henschel, the head of Knoedler's, with the
proposition that they buy it jointly. He would put up all
the money, and in return he was to have the exclusive right
to sell it. Henschel agreed. Duveen took the picture, and a
long silence followed—two years of it. Henschel became
restive and called on Duveen to ask him why he hadn't sold
the picture. Duveen said blandly, "How can I sell it? I
don't own it!" In order to make his sense of ownership
complete, he was willing to pay Henschel a large sum. He
didn't care in the least that the sum he had paid Henschel
far exceeded his own profit on the transaction when, soon
after, he sold the picture to Bache. He had proved once more
that an important picture could be bought only from him.
Sometimes, Duveen was unusually generous with the rope he
permitted his competitors to hang themselves with. The
Marquis de Talleyrand had a Mantegna (though Berenson said
it was not a Mantegna but a Girolamo da Cremona). He sold it
to Duveen's Italian rival Count Contini. The Count sold it
to Bache. Mantegna is an artist of the first rank, and for
Bache to buy a Mantegna from a rival dealer was to
contradict the major premise of Duveen's philosophy. Duveen
settled the matter for eternity when he got out the Bache
catalogue. There, Contini's Mantegna is reproduced and
listed as a Girolamo da Cremona. Compared to Mantegna,
Girolamo is a small potato, and Duveen didn't mind at what
shop Bache or anybody else bought his small potatoes.
Besides sustaining the major premise, this listing in
Bache's catalogue paid Duveen another satisfying dividend.
It demonstrated, in Bache's own publication, that he had
bought a Girolamo da Cremona when he thought he was buying a
Mantegna. Bache never bought from Contini again.
One rival dealer, who suffered much from Duveen, still
speaks with mixed resentment and awe about Duveen's
monopolistic grip on the art market. He also recalls an
occasion on which Duveen gave him a chance to retaliate.
Duveen was as prodigal of talk as of money, and couldn't
resist telling everybody—even his rivals—about his plans.
Today, this particular rival unashamedly confesses the
pleasure he took in exploiting this weakness of Duveen's,
though he still refers to him as "a miracle man in a miracle
time." Duveen had gleefully announced to his rival that he
was going to buy the Gustave Dreyfus Collection, and he was
going to buy it cheap—for a million dollars. As it happened,
this dealer himself knew all about the Dreyfus Collection;
it had recently been offered to him for a million dollars.
Duveen found that the price of the collection was going
up—to a million and a half, then to two and to three. It
kept ascending. He kept confiding his grievance to his
rival. "Somebody is bidding the Dreyfus up on me," he said
bitterly. The rival sympathized and, knowing that Duveen
would never let the collection go, quickly went behind the
scenes to add to Duveen's grievance. He bid it up beyond any
possibility of buying it himself, but he did bid it
up. He forced Duveen to pay the four and a half million he
finally paid for the Dreyfus Collection. "Somebody might
ask," the dealer recently said, "why I didn't buy the
collection myself when I could have had it for a million
dollars. Well, the answer to that is that there would have
been no use whatever in my buying it, because I couldn't
have sold it. There were only a few men in America rich
enough to buy it from me. Those men were all Duveen clients.
Had I bought it, all Duveen would have had to say—and he
could have tossed it off in the most casual way—would have
been 'Oh, yes, the Dreyfus. I know all about the Dreyfus. It
was offered to me first, naturally. Had it been interesting,
of course I would have bought it.'" Duveen had attained such
power that the word "interesting," properly inflected, would
have killed for this rival any chance of selling the
collection, excerpts from which now form part of the glory
of the Mellon and Kress contributions to the National
Gallery in Washington.
One way Duveen maintained his position was to make sure that
no picture of his ever declined in price. He was constantly
buying back himself—or having his clients buy—Duveen
pictures from the estates of customers, to keep the market
up. When Elbert H. Gary died, in 1927, Duveen was afraid
that an auction of his art works, most of which had come
from Duveen Brothers, might bring such low prices that his
business would be injured. He therefore offered to purchase
the lot for a million and a half, cash. The offer was not
accepted, so Duveen took the necessary precautions. At the
auction, he bought Gainsborough's "Harvest Waggon," paying
three hundred and sixty thousand dollars for the picture,
which he had sold to Gary for one hundred and sixty-five
thousand, and he persuaded several of his clients to buy at
the auction. The sales totalled nearly two and a half
million dollars, which was far more than Gary had spent on
his collection. From then on, any client of Duveen's could
die secure in the knowledge that as long as Duveen was alive
his collection would never depreciate in value. Clients who
were so imprudent as to survive him were not so lucky.
It was by methods like these that Duveen kept up the prices
of celebrated Old Masters and gradually set up his virtual
monopoly. He both paid and got higher prices than other
dealers, and he succeeded in selling the pictures for the
very reason that he was willing to pay those higher prices.
"You are a great man, and your name is magic," he once said
to Mellon. "But even your name won't get you Duveen
pictures." He let that sink in. "Neither will my name get me
Duveen pictures," he continued, with a rare access of
modesty. "I get them because people know I will pay the
highest prices in the world for them. I can't afford to get
you these pictures unless you are willing to pay me a profit
on them." He paused for effect, then said, "You get them,
Mr. Mellon, because I get them!"
(This is the third of a series of articles on Lord
Duveen.) |
