The dealer king

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Peter Dailey

Duveen: A Life in Art, by Meryle Secrest, New York, Knopf, 2004; 517 pages, $35.

For about 30 years prior to World War II--a period, cultural historian Kenneth Clark noted, when "the world of art dealing was in an unusually depraved condition" (1)--Sir Joseph Duveen, subsequently Lord Duveen of Milbank, was the preeminent merchant of old masters. In a portrait by a long-forgotten society painter reproduced on the jacket of Meryle Secrest's new biography Duveen: A Life in Art, Sir Joseph, dressed in banker's gray, his hair brushed away from his temples, wearing a neat moustache and holding a haft-smoked Havana in his hand, looks more like a captain of industry than did most of his clients. These included Benjamin Altman, Jules Bache, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Samuel Kress and H.E. Huntington, men who'd built enormous fortunes in steel and coal, finance, railroads or retailing, and who brought to art collecting their unbridled acquisitiveness and ruthlessly competitive instincts. As they went about amassing their great collections, Duveen, a master salesman, exploited these qualities with striking success. Clark considered him "irresistible," famously noting that "his bravura and impudence were infectious, and when he was present everyone behaved as if he had had a couple of drinks." (2)

Duveen (1869-1939) is remembered today primarily because in 1950 he was the subject of a series of New Yorker articles by the playwright S.N. Behrman. The author's urbane and amusing account of the special hazards awaiting collectors at the high end of the art market has seldom been equaled. Duveen emerges as a character of almost Dickensian richness and idiosyncrasy. Edmund Wilson found Behrman's pieces, which soon appeared in book form, "incredibly entertaining." (3) Later editions, profusely illustrated with full-page color plates of many of the paintings under discussion, remedied the profile's only obvious shortcoming.

Is there anything more to know? As it turns out, quite a bit. Some of it is to be found in a history of the family firm published in 1957 by James Henry Duveen, Sir Joseph's nephew. Edward Fowles, Duveen's former partner, authored a 1976 memoir evidently written, at least in part, as a corrective to Behrman, who was not the sort to let a niggling concern for facts stand in the way of a good story. Colin Simpson's Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen (1986), the work of an investigative journalist whom Fowles had employed as a ghostwriter, eschews documentation and contains numerous inaccuracies, as well as a great deal of a sensational nature. John Pope-Hennessy, in a blast of sanctimoniousness that bespeaks another age, branded it scurrilous, which would indeed be the case were not so much of it demonstrably true. In addition, Secrest, author of Being Bernard Berenson and a biography of Kenneth Clark, had at her disposal the archives of Duveen Brothers, now available at the Getty Center Library after having been stored, according to Pope-Hennessy, for much of the time since the firm's demise in 1980, "in a disused lavatory" next to his office at the Metropolitan Museum.

For Secrest, Duveen was "the most spectacular art dealer the world has ever known"; it is noteworthy that both she and Behrman employ the same carefully chosen superlative. In a trade where discretion is a byword, and rival firms like Agnew, Wildenstein and Colnaghi carried out their business with extreme circumspection, Duveen reveled in the publicity surrounding the record prices he paid at auctions, his feuds with rival dealers and his dramatic courtroom appearances, either as a defendant or star witness, in numerous high-profile lawsuits.

The New York headquarters commissioned by Duveen Brothers at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 56th Street, a striking edifice replicating parts of the facade of the Ministry of the Navy that Jacques-Ange Gabriel designed for Louis XV on the Place de la Concorde, does not suggest a personality much given to introspection or self-doubt. Duveen seemed to exemplify so many of the qualities that we ascribe to self-made men--dynamism, inexhaustible energy, single-mindedness and blind luck--that it is something of a surprise to learn that he was part of a large and prosperous family of Dutch Jews who had been involved in the art and antiques trade for several generations. Duveen's father, Joseph Joel Duveen, was a prominent London dealer of Chinese porcelain, tapestries, enamels, bronzes and objets de vertu. In the course of a long career, he transplanted the family from Hull to The Elms, a mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath, and secured a knighthood. Duveen's uncle Henry enjoyed an even more remarkable success pursuing the same line in New York and, by the age of 25, numbered J.P. Morgan, Benjamin Altman and the Widener family among his clients.

Duveen and his eight younger brothers were all expected to find a place in one or another branch of the family business. For this, a university education was judged superfluous, and certainly no substitute for a thorough familiarity with the type of objects they traded in, a point of view then shared in most galleries and auction houses. When Duveen gained control of the firm, he quickly forced out those family members he thought unsuited. From his Fifth Avenue office, Duveen was in constant communication with his younger brothers Ernest and Edward at the firm's Bond Street gallery and with his nephew Armand Lowengard, who managed the Paris headquarters off the Place Vendome. Transatlantic air travel and reliable telephone communication were still things of the future. Auction news from Prague, Berlin and Milan, as well as confidential information about the financial misfortunes of newly impecunious aristocrats, had to be imparted by coded telegrams.