The Elevator at Claridge's
In 1921, in a descending lift at Claridge's Hotel in London, two men stood together for the first time. One was Andrew Mellon — financier, Secretary of the Treasury, possessor of a fortune built on aluminum, oil, and banking, a man so constitutionally silent that colleagues joked he conversed in pauses. The other was Joseph Duveen — art dealer, raconteur, a man so constitutionally unable to keep quiet that his associates sometimes wished he would contract laryngitis. Mellon was sixty-six, pale, frail, with the bearing of what one observer called "a double-entry bookkeeper afraid of losing his job — worn, and tired, tired, tired." Duveen was fifty-two, stocky, ruddy, apoplectic in coloring, radiating opulence like a furnace radiates heat. The meeting had the look of coincidence. It was nothing of the kind.
Duveen had engineered every variable. He had taken an apartment on the floor below Mellon's. His valet — inevitably a friend of Mellon's valet — had been monitoring the older man's movements. The timing was exquisite: as Mellon's man helped him into his overcoat and guided him toward the lift, Duveen's man performed identical services at identical speed one floor below. The doors opened. Duveen stepped in. "How do you do, Mr. Mellon?" he said, introducing himself and adding, with a casualness that had been rehearsed to the syllable, "I am on my way to the National Gallery to look at some pictures. My great refreshment is to look at pictures." Mellon, taken unawares, admitted that he too was in need of refreshment. They went together. Within a few years, Mellon would become the largest single client in the history of the art trade. The deal that eventually followed — forty-two works, twenty-one million dollars, the largest art transaction ever consummated — would form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
That elevator ride distills everything essential about Joseph Duveen: the fabricated coincidence, the lavish preparation masquerading as spontaneity, the irresistible friendliness deployed as an instrument of commerce, and the absolute conviction — unshakable, almost deranged in its intensity — that what he was selling was not merely paint on canvas but immortality itself. He was the most spectacular art dealer who ever lived, and the word "spectacular" is not ornamental. His entire career was a spectacle, constructed with the precision of a theatrical impresario and the nerve of a cardsharp. Between the 1880s and his death in 1939, Duveen transferred an enormous portion of Europe's artistic patrimony to the mansions and, eventually, the museums of America. He did it by understanding something that none of his rivals grasped with the same force: that the American millionaires of the Gilded Age and its aftermath were not buying beauty. They were buying permanence. They were buying forgiveness. They were buying a seat at a banquet table where Raphael and Titian and Rembrandt had already been served.
By the Numbers
The Duveen Empire
$21MPrice of the Mellon apartment deal — largest art transaction in history
95 of 115Paintings in the Mellon Collection sourced through Duveen
75%Share of best Italian pictures in America that came through Duveen
$4.5MPaid for the Gustave Dreyfus Collection in July 1930
$1MCost of building his Fifth Avenue gallery, a reproduction of Gabriel's Ministry of Marine
3Galleries maintained simultaneously — New York, London, Paris
69Age at death, in 1939, at Claridge's
The Blacksmith's Grandson
The story begins with a Dutch-Jewish blacksmith in Meppel, a town in the northeastern Netherlands so small that its primary distinction was its proximity to nothing in particular. Joseph Henoch Duveen, the blacksmith, manufactured stoves, iron safes, and secret locks. His son, Joel Joseph Duveen, born in 1843, inherited none of his father's interest in ironwork but all of his restlessness. In the 1860s, Joel left Meppel for Hull, the great port city of Yorkshire, where he began dealing in Delftware — the blue-and-white ceramics that the Dutch produced in industrial quantities and the English bought with undiscriminating enthusiasm. The business expanded. Delftware gave way to Chinese porcelain, then furniture, then tapestries, then the general category of "objets d'art" — a phrase capacious enough to cover nearly anything beautiful, old, and expensive. Joel's brother Henry opened a New York office in 1877; Joel established a London showroom on Oxford Street in 1879. The Duveen brothers were building something, though what exactly it would become neither could have foreseen.
Joel Joseph Duveen was, by the accounts of those who encountered him, a man of terrific dash and energy. He was also a showman. Summoned to the Madison Avenue home of J. P. Morgan — America's wealthiest banker, a man whose very mustache communicated the expectation of obedience — Joel was presented with five Chinese porcelain vases. Three, Morgan announced, were priceless; two were fakes. Joel examined them, raised his walking cane, and smashed two. The shattered vases were the fakes. Morgan became a client. The story may be apocryphal — the Duveen archive is rich in legends that shade into myth — but its essential truth is accurate: Joel had an eye, a nerve, and an instinct for the dramatic gesture. When he died in 1908, his estate was valued at £1.5 million. He had been knighted that same year for donating the Turner Wing to the Tate Gallery. He left behind twelve children who reached adulthood, the eldest and most formidable of whom was Joseph.
Joseph Duveen was born on October 14, 1869, in Hull, and he inherited from his father the eye and the nerve, but not the patience. Joel had been content to deal in decorative arts — the furniture, the porcelain, the tapestries that furnished the drawing rooms of the prosperous. Joseph noticed, while still a teenager, that one of his father's best clients, Edward Guinness, the Earl of Iveagh and England's richest man, was spending vastly more on Old Master paintings at the rival firm of Agnew's than he was spending on furnishings at Duveen's. The observation was simple. Its implications were revolutionary. "My father was satisfied, my Uncle Henry was satisfied, my brothers were satisfied," Joseph later said. "But I was not." He pushed the firm into paintings. By 1906, he had engaged Bernard Berenson — the Lithuanian-born, Harvard-educated connoisseur who had installed himself in an Italian villa and become the supreme authenticator of Italian Renaissance art — as his advisor. By 1909, when Joel died, Joseph was president of the firm, and the firm was no longer in the business of Delftware. It was in the business of Duveens.
Europe Has Art, America Has Money
"Early in life," S. N. Behrman wrote in his celebrated 1951 New Yorker profile, "Duveen noticed that Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money, and his entire astonishing career was the product of that simple observation." The sentence has the compression of an epitaph. It also has the dangerous simplicity of a fairy tale. What Duveen actually grasped — and what the sentence elides — was that the observation was useless without the mechanism to act on it. Europe had plenty of art, yes, but it was locked in the ancestral homes of an aristocracy that was, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sliding toward insolvency as cheap American grain collapsed European agricultural revenues. America had plenty of money, yes, but it was concentrated in the hands of a few dozen industrial titans who had accumulated wealth on a scale without precedent in human history and who had, as yet, no idea what to do with it beyond accumulating more. The mechanism Duveen invented was himself.
Beginning in 1886, when he was seventeen, he traveled perpetually between Europe, where he bought, and America, where he sold. His annual itinerary, once established, had the regularity of a planetary orbit: New York through winter and spring; London in June and July; Paris for a fortnight; Vittel, in the Vosges Mountains, for a three-week cure; back to Paris; back to London; then the September sailing to New York. At each point, his establishments snapped to attention upon his arrival and dozed in his absence. His business was highly personal. It could not be delegated, because what he was selling was not inventory but an experience — the experience of being educated, flattered, bullied, and ultimately transformed by the most exuberant, most exhausting, most infuriating man in the trade.
The clients he targeted were a specific species: the first-generation American millionaire. Men like
Henry Clay Frick, the coke and steel baron from Pittsburgh, who had been born poor and had begun his career stoking ovens. Men like Andrew Mellon, Frick's quiet, inscrutable neighbor, whose financial empire encompassed aluminum, oil, banking, and an impenetrable reserve. Men like Collis P. Huntington, the Sacramento storekeeper turned railroad magnate, and his nephew and eventual successor H. E. Huntington. Men like Benjamin Altman, the department-store titan, and P. A. B. Widener, the Philadelphia traction king. These men shared certain characteristics: they had made unimaginable fortunes, they were socially insecure, they were suspicious of casual human contact, and they spoke slowly and sparingly, pausing before each verb to avoid the abyss of commitment. Duveen was the precise opposite of everything they were. He was voluble, impulsive, indiscreet, and physically incapable of silence. The tension between his temperament and theirs was the engine of every sale he ever made.
When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap.
The Art of the Fabricated Coincidence
There was almost nothing Duveen wouldn't do for his important clients. He provided entrée to the great country homes of the British nobility — the coincidence that those noble owners often had ancestral portraits to sell did not deter him. He wrangled hotel accommodations and passage on sold-out ships. He got his clients houses, or he provided architects to build them houses, and then saw to it that the architects planned the interiors with wall space that demanded plenty of pictures. He selected brides for some of his clients, and presided over the weddings with avuncular benevolence. These selections had to meet the same refined standard that governed his choice of houses: a potential receptivity to expensive art.
The cigar vaults were typical. Jules Bache — financier, collector, one of Duveen's closest friends and steadiest clients — stored supplies of his favorite cigars in the vaults of Duveen's establishments in London and Paris. One day, rushing through Paris to catch a boat train, Bache realized he didn't have enough cigars for the Atlantic crossing. He made a quick detour to Duveen's. Duveen was not in Paris. Bache was greeted by Bertram Boggis, Duveen's chief assistant, who showed him a Van Dyck while he waited for the cigars. Duveen had earmarked it for him. Bache was so entranced that he bought it on the spot and almost forgot about the cigars. He finally went off to the train with both. There was no charge for storing the cigars. The Van Dyck cost $275,000.
This was Duveen's supreme art: casting bread upon the waters with such exquisite calibration that the return appeared spontaneous. His generosity was real — he spent lavishly on servants, deck stewards, museum directors, architects, decorators, restorers, and anyone else who might, at some future moment, prove useful — but it was also strategic. He paid household staffs so liberally that butlers and valets across the great houses of America became, in effect, his intelligence network. "They developed a feeling," Behrman observed, "that it was only fair to transmit to the generous nobleman any information that might interest him: what rival dealers had the effrontery to offer works of art to their masters, what purchases the masters were considering, what was said about Duveen's emissaries on the walls." One celebrated butler in a Fifth Avenue house that stocked Duveens accumulated over $100,000 in emoluments from the dealer before retiring. Duveen's rivals found that they could never see clients like Frick or Bache alone. Whenever they dropped in, Duveen was already there.
The deck stewards were another matter. For a hundred dollars — a sum that had a quaint sound to a man who dealt in hundreds of thousands — a steward on a transatlantic liner would place Duveen's deck chair next to the chair reserved for an American millionaire. Over the years, Duveen became very popular with deck stewards. Through one of them, he met Alexander Smith Cochran, the Yonkers carpet man, and over the course of three years — during which Duveen showed him Buckingham Palace, St. James's Palace, and the great Duveens hanging in private collections, without ever mentioning his own galleries — Cochran finally broke down. "Lord Duveen, I would like to see some of your things!" His back to the wall, Duveen took Cochran to his gallery. He couldn't spare any paintings — they were all on reserve — but he did let Cochran have five million dollars' worth of art objects.
Monopoly Was His Method
Duveen's central insight, the one that separated him from every other dealer of his era, was that scarcity was the engine of desire. He did not merely sell rare things; he made things rare by buying them. When he entered the American market, it was dominated by established firms — Knoedler's, Wildenstein, Seligman — that had comfortable arrangements with major collectors, often working on fixed commissions. Duveen despised the commission model. It made a dealer a mere merchant. It divested the game of adventure, of what he called "the mystery of the incalculable." His method was monopoly. He would identify a great work, pay whatever was necessary to secure it — often far more than any rational calculation would justify — and then wait, sometimes for years, for the right buyer to become desperate enough to meet his price.
His buying habits bewildered everyone. In July 1930, with art dealers across the world gasping for money, he paid $4.5 million for the Gustave Dreyfus Collection of Renaissance masterpieces. His comptroller in New York sent frantic letters imploring him to stop buying. Duveen, who was never as elated by a sale as he was by a purchase, usually laid out over a million dollars on his annual trip abroad, and occasionally three or four times that sum. Bache, who was a close friend, once said: "I think I understand Joe pretty well — his purchases and his sales methods. But I confess I am quite in the dark about his financing."
The principle was simple: always pay the highest conceivable price. A titled Englishwoman had a family portrait to sell. She asked for eighteen thousand pounds. Duveen was indignant. "Eighteen thousand pounds for a picture of this quality? Ridiculous, my dear lady! Ridiculous!" A kind of haggle in reverse ensued. Duveen extolled the picture's virtues as if he were selling it — as, indeed, he already was in his mind. Finally, the owner asked what he thought it was worth. "My dear lady, the very least you should let that picture go for is twenty-five thousand pounds!" The logic was perverse but airtight: Duveen could not conscientiously charge an American customer his standard markup on a picture that had cost him a mere eighteen thousand pounds. By overpaying, he created the price that justified his price.
With the British aristocracy, he employed a different register. No art patter — he reserved that for his American clients. He talked prices, and big prices. "Greatest thing I ever saw! Will pay the biggest price you ever saw!" The dukes and barons responded warmly. They were familiar with the technique from their extensive experience in buying and selling horses.
The Education of American Taste
When the twentieth century began, the American millionaires were collecting mainly Barbizons — the pastoral French school — and English "story" pictures. They owned the originals of the Rosa Bonheur prints that one can remember from the parlors of one's youth: pastoral scenes, morose cattle. Troyons, Ziems, Meissoniers, Bouguereaus crowded the interstices of the mother-of-pearl grandeur of their living rooms, and their owners dickered among themselves for them. When Charles Yerkes, the Chicago traction magnate, died in 1905, his Troyon, "Coming from the Market," had already appreciated forty thousand dollars since its purchase. The Barbizons were the art-market equivalent of comfort food — agreeable, unthreatening, and profoundly mediocre.
Duveen changed all that. He made the Barbizons practically worthless by beguiling their luckless owners into a longing to possess earlier masterpieces, which he had begun buying before most of his American clients had so much as heard the artists' names. He made the names familiar, and compelled a reverence for them because he extracted such overwhelming prices for them. Of the Barbizon school, only Corot and Millet retained any financial rating, and even that declined precipitously. A Corot that in its day brought $50,000 could be bought for $10,000 or $15,000; Millet was even worse off.
His pedagogical instrument was a highly visible nude by Bouguereau — an infinitely renewable bait that served to start many collections. Clients enrolled in Duveen's course of study would buy the Bouguereau, stare at it for some time, get faintly tired of it, and then, as they heard of rarer and subtler and more expensive works, grow rather ashamed of it. They would send it back, and Duveen would replace it with something a little more refined. Back and forth the Bouguereau went. Sometimes Duveen used it in reverse — to cure potential customers who had succumbed to the virus of the ultramodern. Collectors who had started with Picasso and Braque grew hungry for a flesh-and-blood curve after a while, and presently found themselves with the travelling Bouguereau. Duveen sent it to them for a breather, and afterward they went the way of the group that had started with it.
You can get all the pictures you want at fifty thousand dollars apiece — that's easy. But to get pictures at a quarter of a million apiece — that wants doing!
His educational mission, as he conceived it, was twofold: to teach millionaire American collectors what the great works of art were, and to teach them that they could get those works of art only through him. To establish this sine qua non required daring and money — vast quantities of both. When Gainsborough's "Pinkie" came up at auction at Christie's in London, a partner in Knoedler's suggested they buy it jointly. Duveen suspected the motive was to keep him from forcing up the price for Knoedler's prospective buyer. He declined. The Knoedler man said no one could outbid his client. Duveen said no one could keep him from buying "Pinkie." On the eve of the sale, he went to Paris, leaving behind an unlimited bid. He had told his friends the price might go to $200,000. It went to $377,000. When he recovered from the shock, he brought the young lady to New York and gave her a lavish reception at his gallery. He telephoned Mellon in Washington — he had known all along who Knoedler's rich client was — and offered her. Mellon said Duveen had paid an outrageous price. Duveen admitted the price was steep, but repeated his dictum: "When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap." Mellon was not interested. The next morning, Duveen telephoned H. E. Huntington in San Marino. "Pinkie" hangs there still.
The demonstration was worth all Duveen's trouble. Mellon did not make the same mistake again.
The Ministry of Marine
In 1911, Duveen gazed admiringly at the building occupied by the Ministry of Marine in Paris — a beautiful production of Jacques-Ange Gabriel, court architect to Louis XV, stretching its lovely length along the Place de la Concorde. In his lively imagination, he snipped off one of Gabriel's wings, reduced it in size, and saw it transferred to New York. He engaged Horace Trumbauer, a Philadelphia architect whose gift for palatial scale was unmatched, and Réné Sergent, a Paris architect, to put up a five-story, thirty-room reproduction at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street. Even the stone was French — imported from quarries near St. Quentin and Chassignelles. The total cost was a million dollars.
The building was not merely a gallery. It was a stage set. The eight or ten big clients who would enter it — the handful of men with whom Duveen did the major part of his business — were rulers in their own domains, and they must be provided with an environment that would tend to make them conscious of their right to inherit the possessions of kings and emperors and high ecclesiastics. No Duveen was ever visible in the windows. If you wanted to see a Duveen, you couldn't do it by strolling up Fifth Avenue; you had to penetrate the recesses of what amounted to a private temple, and this took some doing. The staff were invariably dressed in cutaways and striped trousers, like Englishmen. You could drop an "h" there with impunity, but under no circumstances pick up an Americanism. One day, a Duveen employee, throwing caution to the winds, said "O.K." Duveen was severe. This was unbecoming in an English establishment, a colonial branch of the House of Lords. After that, Duveen was yessed in English.
The building served a deeper purpose than intimidation. It was a filtering mechanism. Duveen ignored entire cities — he paid no attention to Detroit for years after it became rich — and within the cities he chose to notice, he cultivated only the uppermost tier. "He's not ready for me yet," he said when told that Edsel Ford was buying pictures. "Let him go on buying. Someday he'll be big enough for me." This was not mere arrogance, though arrogance was certainly present. It was market discipline. Every sale Duveen made at a high price raised the floor for every subsequent sale. Every client he turned away increased the perceived exclusivity of the clients he accepted. The Ministry of Marine was, in the vocabulary of a later era, a luxury brand — and Duveen understood, decades before the concept had a name, that a luxury brand's most important customers are the ones it refuses to serve.
The Silent Men and the Talking Dealer
The great American millionaires of the Duveen Era shared a quality that tormented him: silence. They had trained themselves to talk slowly, pausing lengthily before each word and especially before each verb, in order to keep themselves from sliding into the abyss of commitment. Frick, Morgan, Mellon, Huntington — they communicated in pauses, in glances, in the eloquent withholding of speech. Perhaps there is some mysterious relation between the possession of great wealth and parsimony of utterance. If silence was golden, these men had found an easy way to increase their capital.
Morgan, in Rome, liked the society of Salvatore Cortesi, an Associated Press correspondent. He would drive through the streets of Rome with Cortesi for hours, without feeling any necessity to say or hear a word. When someone asked Leland Stanford, then Governor of California, "How do you feel this morning, Governor?," Stanford threw the questioner an uneasy look and countered: "Wouldn't you like to know?" Frick and Mellon, before they had art in common, had silence in common. When Frick was thirty and had just made his first million, he proposed that the two men — both cautious, both conservative, both from Pittsburgh — join forces on a European holiday. Mellon nodded. But Frick, with the organizational genius he applied to his coal-and-coke business, decided they needed entertainment. He invited two companions: one was a popular young man who wrote poetry, sang gleefully, and told amusing stories — "someone along to do the talking," as Mellon's biographer delicately put it. The other was an older man, no more loquacious than themselves.
Mellon's taciturnity was legendary even among the taciturn. When he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury, he had to be introduced to the public; his footfall was so light that his name had rarely appeared in the papers. He praised Coolidge as one of the nation's greatest Presidents. The two men saw much of each other, conversing almost entirely in pauses. At a Founder's Day address at Carnegie Institute in 1928, Mellon, reading almost inaudibly from a prepared text, lost his place. He made an effort to find it, gave up. "That's all," he murmured, and sat down. The audience filed out not knowing whether Carnegie Institute had received a donation.
Against this wall of inscrutability, Duveen threw himself with manic energy. He would read a letter from a client twenty times, pondering each evasively phrased sentence. "What does he mean by that?" he would ask his secretary. "Is he interested in the picture or isn't he?" Before meetings with Mellon, Duveen went to bed to map out strategic possibilities and then rehearsed with his secretary, H. W. Morgan — some have said Duveen hired him simply because his name was Morgan. "Now, Morgan, you are Mellon," Duveen would say. "Now you go out and come in." Morgan would enter as Mellon, and Duveen would pepper him with questions. Morgan would try to inhabit Mellon's inscrutable state of mind and answer without saying anything. That Mellon's Pittsburgh speech was strongly doused in Cockney did not impair the illusion for Duveen.
The strain was ulcerating. Yet it also paid — spectacularly. Mellon's reticence meant that when he finally committed, he committed absolutely. And Duveen, for all his volubility, understood that silence has its uses too. He once allowed three Renaissance busts from the Dreyfus Collection — a Verrocchio, a Donatello, and a Desiderio da Settignano — to sit in
John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s mansion for a full year, unpurchased, at an asking price of $1.5 million. Rockefeller haggled, offered tapestries as lagniappe, suggested the Depression might make Duveen flexible. Duveen wrote back that he had some tapestries and didn't want any more, that he was not in the stock market and therefore not in the least affected by the Depression, and that — by his air of surprised incredulity at the existence of people who felt the Depression — if Rockefeller was in temporary financial difficulty, he, Duveen, was ready to come to his assistance. On the thirty-first of December, with a week of the option remaining, Rockefeller bought the busts at Duveen's price.
The Laughing Blimp
He looked like a conservative English businessman — middle height, stocky build, ruddy, almost apoplectic coloring, clear penetrating gray eyes, cropped mustache. He exuded opulence. He was interested in practically nothing except his business. He never carried more than a little cash; money in small amounts was something he didn't understand. His valet decided what he would need for incidentals and provided him with it — a few bills to enable him to get about. Once, when the valet was ill, Duveen said that he too would have to take to his bed, because there was no one to give him cash for taxi fare. He had the Oriental habit of clapping his hands when he wanted people; an acquaintance who visited the British Museum with him recalls that Duveen clapped his hands even in that august institution, and that the attendants came running.
His laugh was famous — one theory held it was copied from a well-known British architect — and his enthusiasm was irrepressible. He engaged in a kind of buffoonery that was irresistible. Most of his friends were older men, and they enjoyed his company because he made them feel young. He was even able to rejuvenate some of his pictures. Once, in the late afternoon, standing before a picture he had sold to Mellon, expatiating on its wonders, a beam from the setting sun suddenly bathed the picture in a lovely light. It was the kind of collaboration Duveen expected from all parts of the universe, animate and inanimate. When his dithyramb had subsided, Mellon said sadly, "Ah, yes. The pictures always look better when you are here."
Sir Osbert Sitwell had a theory that Duveen was a master exploiter of his own gaffes. At an exhibition in the Leicester Galleries, Duveen rushed up to Sitwell and exclaimed, "Oh, my dear Mr. Lytton Strachey, I am so glad to see you again." Sitwell and Strachey resembled each other not at all — one was tall, fair, clean-shaven and stout; the other bone-thin, bearded, angular, with the reflective air of a pelican. Sitwell telegraphed Strachey: "Delighted to inform you that I have this morning been mistaken for you by Sir Joseph Duveen." Strachey telegraphed back: "One can only say again how utterly duveen." Duveen, far from embarrassed, subsequently demanded that Sitwell tell the story at every dinner party where both were present. "Being a remarkably astute man in most directions," Sitwell wrote, "I think that he enjoyed having the stupid side of his character emphasized; it constituted a disguise for his cleverness, a kind of fancy dress."
This was the key. The bluster, the gaffes, the infectious buffoonery — all of it served a purpose. When a client showed Duveen a Dürer bought for $450,000, and a visiting French count whispered that it was not the real thing, the client's daughter triumphantly summoned Duveen. His famous laugh pealed out. "Now, isn't that amusing?" he said. "Do you know, my dear fellow, that some of the greatest experts in the world, some of the very greatest experts in the world, actually think that this Dürer is not genuine?" Somehow, the expert who was present, as well as all the experts who were not present, became reduced in rank, discredited, pulverized to fatuousness. Duveen had reversed the normal order of things.
The National Gallery Gambit
Duveen's career had beautiful composition. In its final movement, all the themes converged. By the 1930s, the era of big houses was ending. Income taxes and inheritance taxes were making it impossible for men of wealth to buy art for themselves or leave collections to their heirs. Duveen had pegged the art market so high that no man was now rich enough to live with Duveens or to die with them. He saw the solution before anyone else: the public bequest. By earmarking purchases for museums, a collector could afford to buy art — at least, he could let the art pass through his hands on the way to the museums from Duveen. Gifts to museums offered not merely economy but immortality. Under Duveen's spell, one after another of his clients — Huntington, Frick, Mellon, Bache, Samuel H. Kress — took up this form of philanthropy.
The National Gallery of Art was Duveen's masterpiece. "It was a gleam in Duveen's eye," a close observer noted, "long before Andrew Mellon ever thought of it." The filaments of suggestion Duveen planted in Mellon's mind were the merest gossamer at first — but they accumulated. When the Soviet government began selling paintings from the Hermitage Gallery in Leningrad, Duveen went to look but found the prices too steep for a speculative purchase. He contented himself with telling Mellon about the expensive opportunity. Mellon, using Knoedler's as his agent, bought twenty-one paintings for seven million dollars — including Raphael's "Alba Madonna" for over $1.1 million. To any other dealer, this would have been a lethal blow. To Duveen it was a gusher. "Mellon has arrived," he told a gloating rival. "He's ready for me." Any man who would spend that much on pictures he had never seen was a buyer for whom Duveen was prepared to endure any anguish. In congratulating Mellon, he said: "These pictures are wonderful, but let me remind you, Mr. Mellon, that you paid Duveen prices."
In 1936, Duveen repeated his Claridge's maneuver. He persuaded the family living below Mellon's Washington apartment to transfer its lease to him, moved in forty-two works of art, installed a caretaker and guards, gave Mellon the key, and went back to New York. The caretaker reported charming vignettes of the tenant upstairs, in dressing gown and carpet slippers, descending to bask in Duveen's more opulent environment. Gradually Mellon began entertaining guests in Duveen's apartment rather than his own. There came a moment when he felt he couldn't go on living a double life. He sent for Duveen and bought the contents, lock, stock, and barrel. Twenty-one million dollars. He paid in securities.
Then came the marble. Mellon wanted limestone for the gallery building. Duveen's soul revolted against limestone. He thought it was dirty. He arranged an automobile ride with Mellon and Pope around Washington, pointing out example after example of Mellon's previous architectural commissions — all limestone, all shabby. "Thanks for the ride," Mellon said. "It has been the most expensive ride of my life." When someone asked Duveen why he cared — the extra five million for marble would mean five million less for Mellon to spend with him — Duveen diagrammed the obvious: "I'll have other customers besides Mellon. They'll want their pictures to go into the National Gallery. They'll be impressed by marble." The customer he had in mind was Kress.
Kress, the Mufflers, and the Five-and-Ten
Samuel H. Kress was born in Cherryville, Pennsylvania, in 1863 — Pennsylvania Dutch, modest circumstances, fortune entirely self-made. He had never married. He had devoted his long life to five-and-ten-cent stores, the acquisition of art treasures, and the preservation of his health. His stores were so numerous that for one period of eleven years he didn't sleep in the same bed for two successive nights. His worry about getting hygienic food caused him to move into three rooms in a New York hospital during the First World War, where he stayed for a year and a half.
Kress had led a singularly lonely life. His passion outside art collecting was travelling — but not directly. His chief relaxation was the gratification of his wanderlust offered by Burton Holmes and his travelogues. He could never see enough of the Holmes lantern slides. He had his secretary paste all the programs and even his seat stubs in a scrapbook. "He could have chartered the Olympic and gone anywhere in the world he liked," one companion said sadly, "but he preferred to do his travelling in Carnegie Hall."
His caution was formidable. At an Italian watering place, he stopped a Levantine peddler staggering under a load of tablecloths and mufflers and asked prices. Kress became fascinated by the possibilities of permutation. A gross of tablecloths and more than a gross of mufflers offer beguiling vistas in that direction, and Kress studied them until the poor Levantine lost touch with reality altogether. When the virtuoso casually asked what the peddler would take for the lot, the peddler gasped out a figure and dumped his stock in Kress's lap. Kress found himself with a gross of tablecloths and an infinity of mufflers. He sent them to his storehouse in downtown New York, where they still reposed.
Duveen had known Kress for eight years, watching him dabble with other dealers. "Mr. Kress isn't ready yet to be a customer of mine; he's got to make a few more mistakes," Duveen said. Kress made them. When Mellon died in August 1937, Duveen conveyed to Kress that there was no longer any reason to deprecate himself; he had the stature to become No. 1. "You're not going to let Mellon have the whole National Gallery to himself, are you, Mr. Kress?" Kress, with a quick sense that Mellon was crowding his immortality, saw the point.
The indignity came at Christmas 1938. Walking down Fifth Avenue, Duveen spotted a picture in the window at Thirty-ninth Street. He stopped to stare incredulously. He felt no impulse to denounce. The picture was a Duveen — one of the greatest and most costly of all Duveens, "The Adoration of the Shepherds," which he had sold to Kress as a Giorgione. This gift to the National Gallery was still a closely kept secret. And here it was, the lovely thing, quite naked in the window of Kress's five-and-ten, set there to lure the Christmas trade, an effulgent replacement for hairnets, pincushions, and soap dishes. Duveen had to swallow this humiliation, as he had to swallow so much else in his dealings with Kress. In terms of sheer quantity, Kress became the biggest customer of Duveen's entire career — more than twenty million dollars' worth of art, all bought in a fierce cataract of purchases in the last two years of Duveen's life.
The Children of Silence
What were the ultimate reasons? Expensiveness helped. The desolation helped. Acquisitiveness helped, the impulse for conspicuous consumption helped, the social cachet helped, the Medici complex helped. But in their consuming avidity there was something more: a hint of desperation, of loneliness, of futility, even of fear.
The private lives of these sad tycoons were often bitter. Their children and their family life disappointed them. The fathers had too much to give; the returns were often in inverse ratio to the size of the gifts. Their children made disastrous marriages, got killed in racing cars, had to pay blackmail to avoid scandal. But with the works of art it was different. They asked for nothing. They were rewarding. They shed their radiance, and it was a lovely, soothing light. You could take them or leave them, and when you had visitors you could bask in the admiration the pictures excited, which was directed toward you even more subtly than toward them, as if you yourself had gathered them and, even, created them. The works of art became their children.
Toward the end of Joseph E. Widener's life, before his pictures were packed and sent to the National Gallery, he made the rounds and had a long, last look at each of them. He had arranged for them to have a good home and he knew they would be well cared for, but now that they were about to leave, he was like a father losing his children, and he wept.
Many of the major Duveen clients became either totally blind or nearly so — Goldman, Altman, Arabella Huntington, and, in recent years, Kress. The fact that the pictures were invisible or almost invisible did not in the least deter them from buying. An art critic, returning from Washington, where he had just inspected the Kress pictures in the National Gallery, sat by Kress's bedside and praised him for contributing to the nation a beauty he could no longer see. Kress's face lit up with pleasure, perhaps from his memory of a time when he had beheld it.
Was it that these men, whose material conquests were unlimited, felt the need, as they grew older, to ally themselves with reputations that were solid and unassailable and, as far as the mind could project, eternal? The paintings were Kresses and Mellons and Wideners, and before that they were Duveens, but if you traced them far enough back, they were Botticellis and Raphaels and Giottos and Fra Filippo Lippis. These old names had lasted a long time. It was reassuring.
And the millionaires had perhaps become uneasily aware that the reputations of their new partners were unambiguous in a way that their own were not. They were grilled about the machine-gunning of strikers; they were caricatured as exploiters of the poor; the very possession of wealth was beginning to be regarded with suspicion. Their new partners had miraculously avoided all this; for their moral lapses the world had long since forgiven them. And, above all, they had got what they wanted; they had been themselves, they had enjoyed life, they had been gay. What the rich men had accumulated was slipping away from them. As they aged, as they felt futility and hostility closing in, they longed passionately for the happy company, in the even darker regions ahead, of these magical and secure and vivid shades.
Well, I Fooled 'Em for Five Years
In 1934, Duveen fell ill with cancer. He knew from the beginning that he could not recover. For his remaining five years, he had a nurse with him constantly, and one by one he gave up all the little indulgences that relieve the pangs of existence. The only indulgence he did not give up was selling pictures; here his tempo, if anything, accelerated. A chain smoker forbidden to smoke, he devised an ingenious solution: an imitation cigarette made of ivory, with an imitation light at the end made of phosphorus, kept constantly in his hand or between his lips so that no one would offer him a real cigarette he would have to refuse.
Something of a gourmet, now hardly eating anything, he would account for his abstemiousness by saying the doctor had put him on "a bit of a diet." His amiability and storytelling never faltered. Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark both said he was one of the best storytellers they had ever met. Osbert Sitwell said it was always Duveen's chief concern that everyone he came in contact with should have a good time.
On May 16, 1939, the day before he sailed for London — what he called home — Bache called on him. "I'm afraid we'll never see Joe again," Bache said afterward. That same day, Duveen telephoned an assistant at the Ministry of Marine and asked him to drive through Central Park. At Seventy-second Street, Duveen proposed they get out and walk, but after a few steps he had to sit down on a bench. He was mortally ill and looked it. Nevertheless, he asked his associate to help him tackle a new project: buying the entire Widener Collection for twenty-five million dollars, splitting it between the National Gallery and his own resale inventory. He instructed his man to get going immediately and send progress reports to London.
Eight days after he sailed, he died at Claridge's. His last words, addressed to his nurse, were: "Well, I fooled 'em for five years."
Well, I fooled 'em for five years.
His last letter, written on shipboard in his own hand, arrived in New York the day after his death. It urged his associates to expedite the Widener deal. Two years later, Kress bought all the pictures that had been hanging fire. Duveen went right on selling.
Unlike the death of many of his clients, Duveen's death was beautifully timed. When Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, Duveen had acclaimed him as the greatest man in the world. Four months after Duveen's death, his country was at war. The holiday was over, but Duveen had lived to the last minute of it. In the years that followed, the outstanding collectors were Hitler and Göring, who never had to pay Duveen prices. The American collections went underground, against air raids that never came.
Lincoln Kirstein wrote in the New Republic in 1949: "Twenty-five years from now, art historians may investigate the ledgers of Duveen, as today they do the Medici." He was not wrong. The ledgers are now at the Getty Research Institute — stock books, sales books, invoice books, shipping receipts, customer ledgers, photographs, two thousand glass negatives, hundreds of correspondence files. They chronicle an era in which one man, by amazing energy and audacity, transferred a civilization's patrimony across an ocean, not by force of arms but by force of personality.
Ninety-five of the one hundred and fifteen paintings in the Mellon Collection came through Duveen. More than a hundred and fifty of the seven hundred paintings in the Kress Collection were supplied by him, and these are the finest. Seventy-five per cent of the best Italian pictures in America came here through his hands. Nineteen million visitors have passed through the National Gallery since it opened in 1941. They are looking at Duveens.
