The Old Masters - Berenson and Duveen

Joseph Duveen (1869-1947) was from a Dutch-English family. He loved pictures and knew a lot about British art, but he was not an academic. Lithuanian-Italian art scholar and critic Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) was not a smart businessman, but he had a very expensive lifestyle. So it was sensible that the two men should get together in a professional partnership, as I noted in an earlier post. Berenson found and authenticated pictures for Duveen, and Duveen paid him a share of his firm’s profits.

The Old Masters opened up in New Haven with an American cast, 2010

Clearly the Jewish contribution to the European art world was in part a function of specific historical and sociological circumstances. Consider the major art dealers and scholarly art connoisseurs of the early C20th: Alfred Flechtheim, Herwath Walden and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, Joseph Duveen in London, Jacques Seligman, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Berthe Weill in Paris. Heinz Berggruen and Daniel Wildenstein came a decade later. Every single one was Jewish! Even Bernard Berenson, a convert to Catholicism decades earlier, was still thought of as having a fine Jewish brain.

I wonder how much interaction there was between this amazing group. I also wonder how much opposition they faced, given they were at the forefront of the avant-garde, especially French modernism.

"The Old Masters" is the name of a play that was first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in June 2004, then at the Comedy Theatre London from July 2004. It was written by Simon Gray and directed by Harold Pinter. The play opened in Bernard Berenson's gardens, Villa I Tatti near Florence, one summer night in 1937. Berenson, the famous art critic, was increasingly anxious about the state of his finances. His wife, Mary, was in poor health while he continued to have an affair with his secretary.

Joseph Duveen's assistant Fowles arrived to deliver a copy of a painting, and to tell Berenson that Duveen would like him to reconsider his attribution of a painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Berenson had already declared it to be by Titian, but Duveen wanted him to change his mind and attribute it to Giorgione. Duveen was keen to sell the painting to the American art collector, Mellon, who specifically wanted a Giorgione. Other art critics had already decided it was a Giorgione, but Berenson, whose reputation was pre-eminent, refused to change his mind. Fowles left.

Berenson examining a painting

Duveen on a cruise to the USA with wife and daughter

Later that evening Duveen arrived, unannounced, to convince Berenson to change his mind in person. From there, the intense nature of their long and largely satisfying working relationship unfolded. The timing in 1937 was not coincidental. They were two Jewish intellectuals with anti-Semitic chaos gathering around them, particularly worrying with the rising power of Mussolini and fascism.

I hadn’t read or seen the play, so my class here in Melbourne had to rely on one of our art history students who had seen the play in Britain. She said the play tackled the confusing world of the art market, raising questions of taste, provenance, financial values, the honesty or otherwise of private interests in the marketplace, and the historically documented relationship between Duveen and Berenson. At the end of the play, the student was still not sure what was most important - professional connoisseurship, popular taste (which changes from generation to generation) or realistic financial valuations.

The play is of particular interest to American audiences because Duveen truly did help wealthy Americans (eg Mellon, Rockefeller, Frick, Huntington, Morgan and Kress) to amass great collections of Renaissance, early modern and modern art. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters opened in New Haven Connecticut in 2010 and will move onto Broadway this year (2011).