Bernard Berenson: A life in the picture trade

Picture: Amazon

Rachel Cohen Bernard Berenson: A life in the picture trade Yale University Press 2013, £18.99 

This short study is one of the best books written about Bernard Berenson, an art historian and one of the most fascinating figures in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. Rachel Cohen's beautifully written book brings balance and good sense to a subject that has has too often been distorted by hucksters and sensationalists. Mind you, his life was pretty sensational. Cohen describes him as "dignified and erudite but also capricious and heedlessly romantic; his arrogance was matched by his self-contempt" (p. 4). He was a great connoisseur, but his reputation is tainted by his secret association with notorious art dealer Joseph Duveen. He was a great reader and writer, and an art collector in his own right (unfortunately his collection is withheld from the world, cocooned in Harvard's study centre that has colonised his Villa I Tatti outside Florence). He was in many ways a nineteenth century figure stranded in the wrong time, a conservative - even a reactionary - who lived through Italy's fascist years, spending part of the war in hiding. 

Cohen's study focuses on a few key themes: his Jewishness; his relationships with women; and his life in the picture trade. The book was written for Yale's Jewish Lives series, but Berenson's relationship to his Jewish heritage, whilst interesting, is not central to his life. Fortunately it's not central to this book either. His relationships with the women he was close to are much more interesting. Cohen discusses his sisters, his early patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, his wife Mary Costelloe, his librarian/companion Nicky Mariano, Edith Wharton, and  J.P. Morgan's librarian and amanuensis Bella da Costa Greene. See also the cover photo, above! Berenson is renowned as a great conversationalist and correspondent who drew many of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century into his orbit (his correspondence with Hugh Trevor-Roper has recently been published). This book's focus on his more intimate relationships gives a different window on the life of his mind, and there are some wonderful quotations from his letters to Mary Costelloe, whom he later married. But most interesting is Cohen's take on Berenson's notorious connections to the picture trade.

Cohen appreciates the tension between Berenson's "passion for painting and his desire for wealth and security" (p. 272). Berenson's secret arrangement with Duveen is notorious, and he stands accused of puffing pictures that Duveen was trying to sell, and altering attributions to promote sales and earn his 25% profit share. Cohen rightly redresses the balance of blame, highlighting cases where he resisted pressure and recognising his internal conflict. She is nuanced on the question of Berenson's culpability, and rightly highlights the double standards between posterity's judgment of Duveen and of Berenson: "Toward both Duveen and Berenson, people were, and continue to be, indulgent, competitive, exculpatory, and dismissive - but, whereas Duveen is seen as charming, Berenson is both adulated and condemned" (p. 207).

Berenson had a major blind spot, which is that he dealt in images rather than painting. Cohen notes that he worked from photographs and "sometimes seemed almost unaware of what might be restoration" (p. 221). It's a flaw that we associate particularly with our own times, when internet images are so readily available. But many earlier art historians, curators and collectors were ignorant about pictures as physical objects. Berenson was sometimes critical of Duveen's outrageous restorations, but he was still complicit - and this is a far worse crime than signing a few optimistic attributions. His attributions transferred some wealth illicitly from American millionaires to himself and his partners - wrong, but relatively trifling in historical perspective. More damaging was the disservice to scholarship, but that's something that can be set right over time. It's his collaboration with Duveen's wholesale scrubbing of the works that passed through his hands that is most damning and most unforgivable because it has robbed us all of part of our artistic patrimony. Cohen's discussion of this is strong (pp. 221-223), but she could have made more of this shameful practice.

There are a few places where the art history is off-key. Rodolphe Kann did not own "ten glorious Rembrandts" (p. 167; some of his 'Rembrandts' are dreadful daubs, although he did own the great Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer), and his Castagno was uncertainly attributed when Duveen was negotiating its sale, though it is now generally accepted (interestingly its current owner, the National Gallery in Washington considers it a Castagno, but the author of its own catalogue, Miklos Boskovits, disagrees). But this short, erudite and articulate study redresses the balance of Berenson scholarship. I found the short length and narrow focus to be advantageous in addressing the most interesting controversies about this most interesting man, but our understanding could be enriched further by more research on the context of twentieth century connoisseurship and the art market.

Berenson's life is fascinating, but because he was such a great exemplar of a certain kind of intellectual, because he was clubbable and connected and articulate, and because he was flawed and human, his role has tended to be exaggerated. He was one of many experts for hire, and Duveen was only one of many flamboyant art dealers. It's not a criticism of this book, but the literature on twentieth century art dealing and connoisseurship is rather one-sided. Berenson is especially interesting for the conflict between high-minded ideas and grubby dealings that he personified. Other experts were the same, except that they lacked the high-minded ideals. There is much more to be said about connoisseurship and the twentieth century picture trade. 

Marco Grasso has written a fine review for The New Criterion, with more background on Berenson.

New El Greco biography reviewed

Picture:Amazon

Fernando Marías El Greco Life and Work: A new history Thames & Hudson 2013, £60

El Greco's life is fascinating. He was born in Crete, moved to Venice where he may have trained with Tintoretto, then to Rome where he stayed at the Farnese court, before moving to Spain and spending most of his career in Toledo. He was a prickly and outspoken character who dismissed Michelangelo, was expelled from the Farnese household and was often in dispute with patrons. He never joined one of the confraternities that were at the centre of social life in Toledo and seems always to have been regarded as an outsider. This splendid new biography vividly evokes the cities where El Greco lived and establishes the influences that shaped El Greco's great and unique oeuvre. 

Marías opens by rebutting the myths that have formed around this enigmatic artist and introducing us to the surprising range of primary sources, including El Greco's annotated copy of Vasari's Lives of the Artists. He is attuned to "the precarious nature of any attempt at writing a biography or reconstructing the journey of someone's life, which may leave behind little more than a body of work and a reputation, which is not straightforward nor everlasting, but subject to the vicissitudes of elusive and fickle fortune" (p. 283). 

El Greco was successful in obtaining commissions for vast altarpieces, and he often obtained high prices. Marías focuses on the altarpieces, because they are the highpoints of his art and because they are more often documented. El Greco and his studio also produced many small devotional pictures, including many of saints and apostles. We know little about the circumstances of their creation or of their purchasers and they are discussed only briefly, but it's interesting to speculate about how critical opinion regarded these pictures that were so different from anything else produced in Spain at that time. Today El Greco is generally regarded as a Spanish artist, especially by the Spanish, but I've always thought him closer to the Venetians. London's National Gallery wisely hangs him with the Venetian school. 

El Greco moved to Toledo after failing to get a position at the court in Madrid. The Martyrdom of St Maurice was commissioned later for El Escorial (where it remains). It's an unusual interpretation, showing the future martyrs conversing in the foreground, with the scenes of their martyrdom relegated to the background. Its artistry was esteemed, but it was considered unsuitable for the altar for which it was painted and relegated to a sacristy or corridor. Fray José de Sigüenza quotes El Mudo as saying that "saints should be painted in such a way that our desire to pray to them is not destroyed; rather, they should inspire devotion, since this ought to be the principal effect and aim of painting" (p. 146). Notwithstanding fogies like El Mudo, El Greco continued to get commissions for great altarpieces, although the vicissitudes of fortune caused him to suffer periods of greatly reduced income.

The production of this book falls short of the text. The captions don't give dimensions, which is particularly important with El Greco because he painted the same images as vast altarpieces and as tiny modelli and ricordi (the book illustrates the diminutive El Espolio at Upton House and the full-size altarpiece in Toledo, but you wouldn't know relative sizes from these illustrations). Some of the references send you to the wrong pages and the images in the copy I read were not of the highest quality. El Greco's early Flight into Egypt from the Hirsch collection is listed as in a private collection in London, but it was acquired by the Prado several years ago. Splitting the face across a double-page spread in a detail photograph of the great portrait of Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino from Boston is particularly unfortunate (pp. 244-245); it means you appreciate the detail of the background and lose the face in the fold. 

This is still the best book published on El Greco for very many years. It's primarily a biography, but the discussion of the pictures themselves is excellent and I do hope Marías follows up with a new catalogue raisonné to replace Harold Wethey's, which was published back in 1962.

Muckraking

Picture: Google

Art criticism is too often too uncritical, but writing about museums and galleries is an especially hagiographic genre.  I enjoyed Jonathon Conlin's well-received history of the National Gallery, The Nation's Mantelpiece, but it's very much an establishment history.  Stewards of the Nation's Art by Andrea Geddes Poole dishes some dirt.  It's a fascinating account of institutional politics on the boards of the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate and Wallace Collection between 1890 and 1939, full of great anecdotes that are unreported in the more sanitised official accounts. 

Geddes Poole remorselessly documents the failings of  the Trustees, which were astutely noted by the Treasury.  Treasury official R.S. Meiklejohn is quoted, "I have been told on good authority that one of the Trustees had never heard of Mantegna, another was ignorant of Masaccio, two of them seeing a photographic reproduction of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne were surprised to learn that the original was in the National Gallery" (p.166, quoting from National Archives T1/11995, Meiklejohn to T.L. Heath 27 June 1916).  A number of trustees are revealed as ignorant, bullying philistines.

The future King Edward VIII was briefly a trustee of the National Gallery, and I'd heard that he was somewhat disengaged.  But I had no idea that the NG acceded to his request to borrow a few pictures for his own house - which he proceeded to re-frame!  It seems only by good fortune that the original frames were found in a bedroom.  It's a great story that she tells well, highlighting the dereliction of duty by the board.  

The research is compelling, but the narrative is spoiled by Geddes-Poole's heavy-handed use of Pierre Bordieu's ideas about cultural capital to tell a version of the well-worn story about declining aristos versus the ascendant middle class. It's hard to justify such a broad claim on a tiny sample of connected individuals who served on museum boards.  The evidence is anecdotal, and there isn't enough to convince that we're seeing anything more than the usual frictions of office politics.  Moreover her unconcealed preference for commoners against aristocrats causes her to judge the self-serving dealer Joseph Duveen too generously, and to glide over many exceptions to the 'rule'.  It's implied that Kenneth Clark was an especially effective Director of the NG because he managed the board so well, but on the other side was ongoing strife with the staff, which is discussed in Conlin's book.

Geddes Poole writes that, "Noting the disparities between the two varieties of cultural capital (inherited and educationally acquired) helps to illuminate the divide between the amateur and the professional.  As professional expertise rose in value at the Treasury and in the director's chair, aristocrats on the board found their cultural capital devalued and their authority threatened." (p. 219)  That's a rather highfalutin way of saying that some people got onto the board because of who they were, others for what they knew - but it's not really such a clear-cut distinction.  Some aristos knew a lot about art, and some commoners had inherited a lot of money and social cachet.  The comment about threatened authority is question-begging.  The more interesting question is how professional expertise in art emerged and became valued, but that is assumed rather than explained.

She claims that "the value of amateur connoisseurship was about much more than knowledge or taste.  The issues concerned power and authority and were fraught with implications for an aristocracy in the process of being eclipsed by an emerging professional class" (p. 219)  This is lazy writing.  What does "fraught with implications" mean?  What implications?  It's just left hanging, and we're expected to nod obligingly at the impossibly vague claim that important things are happening in the background.

The book is also marred by a profusion of errors.  In one sentence she misspells three artists ('Wouvermand', 'Tenier', 'Van Dyke' p.143).  It's Fra Filippo Lippi not Fra Lippo Lippi (p.196), unless she means the poem by Browning rather than the artist.  Ingres painted Madame Moitessier not Madame de Moitessier.  She mentions "a rare Cima da Conegliano head of St Jerome" purchased for the NG by Clark (p.183).  There is a Cima St Jerome at the NG, but it's not just a head and it wasn't bought by Clark.  I simply don't know what she could be referring to.  She describes Titian's Diana and Calisto (sic) as the less  (sic) good of three Titians, when the Venus Anadyomene is clearly the least good (wrong on grammar, spelling and art, p.142).  She weirdly judges Sir Philip Sassoon's collection insignificant because "it was too diverse and did not concentrate on period, artist or country" (p. 25, a judgment repeated on p.200) - so I guess collections like Thyssen's and Frick's must be trivial too.   

The thesis doesn't convince, the social theory is a distraction and the carelessness rankles.  But I truly recommend the book.  There's a wealth of fascinating information, if you can tolerate its failings.