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A startling number of masterpieces now in American museums are
there because of the shrewdness of one man, Joseph Duveen, art
dealer to John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick,
and William Randolph Hearst. In a series of articles originally
published in The New Yorker, playwright S.N. Behrman evokes
the larger-than-life Duveen and reveals the wheeling and dealing,
subterfuge, and spirited drama behind the sale of nearly—but
not quite—priceless Rembrandts, Vermeers, Turners, and Bellinis.
Bold, rapacious, visionary, and a shrewd appraiser of human psychology—in short, a model for any businessman today—Joseph Duveen brought to America thousands of priceless masterpieces. He acquired these works from down-at-the-heels European nobility, then sold them to John D. Rockefeller, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and J. P. Morgan, self-made men who were willing to pay almost any price to own a Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, or Vermeer.
In a final stroke of genius, Duveen offered his clients the ultimate prize—immortality— by convincing them to bequeath their collections to museums. (If this enabled them to avoid burdensome inheritance taxes, so much the better.) The National Gallery in Washington, the Frick Collection in New York, and significant portions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art were all built upon collections in large part formed by Duveen. Because of Duveen, Americans are able to see much of the world’s most beautiful art without having to go abroad.
He has been called “the most symbolic figure of the twenties” for out-monopolizing the monopolizers, reveling in a good lawsuit, practicing “wondrous financing methods,” and mastering public relations. No gesture was too grand: once he lavishly furnished an entire apartment and handed the key to Andrew Mellon with a flourish; if Mellon liked it, the contents were his. Of course, Mellon did. He employed a butler named Morgan so that he could say that Morgan jumped when he, Duveen, clapped his hands. Fiercely competitive, and some say unprincipled, he had been known to peer closely at a rival dealer’s masterpiece and sniff, “I smell fresh paint.”
Samuel N. Behrman (1893-1973), the son of a Jewish grocer, studied
drama at Harvard and Columbia Universities. Before achieving success
as a playwright, he worked at The New York Times,
but was fired after it was discovered that the entertaining responses
he was writing for the “Queries and Answers” section
were to questions that he himself had submitted. He was acclaimed
for the rarefied wit of plays such as “Wine of Choice,” “The
Second Man,” and “End of Summer,” and was also
the author of a biography of Max Beerbohm. Upon his death, friends
in show business remembered him as “the eighth of the seven
lively arts.”
Glenn Lowry is the director of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City.
Paperback,
258pp.
5" x 8"
ISBN 10: 1-892145-17-0
ISBN 13: 9781892145178
Retail price: $14.95
Price: $11.96 (20% off)
“It is the best profile The New Yorker has ever printed—incredibly entertaining and at the same time a filling in of a chapter of American cultural history that hadn’t been written before.”—Edmund Wilson
Duveen … will probably stand out as one of the most eagerly read and widely discussed pieces that brilliant magazine [The New Yorker ] has published...[a] witty and hypnotically readable biography.” —Clifton Fadiman
