Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson by Stanley Mazaroff

Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson by Stanley Mazaroff

Author:Stanley Mazaroff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00


9

BERENSON’S FAUSTIAN BARGAIN WITH DUVEEN

In an art market unrestricted by ethical standards, the dealer who was widely considered to be the most unscrupulous was Joseph Duveen. Duveen’s biographer Meryle Secrest has written that he became known to the public as “a magnificent, dramatic and astute plunger.”1 Around 1905, Duveen embarked on a program to corner the market on Italian Renaissance paintings, to attribute the paintings he acquired to the most famous artists, and to sell these paintings to American millionaires at the highest possible prices. In 1906, he enlisted Berenson to help him reach these objectives. Walters did not like Duveen, he found him distasteful, and he did not want to deal with him. He expressed his feelings to Berenson. According to one account, in 1911, Berenson wrote to Walters requesting his opinion as to whether he should become a paid adviser of Duveen. Walters replied that he should have nothing to do with him because he was “dishonest.”2 In May 1912, Duveen asked Berenson to bring Walters to his gallery to acquire paintings from him. Aware of Walters’s antipathy toward Duveen, Berenson deflected Duveen’s request.3

Berenson also disliked Duveen and later would grow to despise him.4 Berenson, to those who admired him, embodied the highest standards of cultural refinement—it was as if his life itself was a remarkable work of art. Duveen, on the other hand, was considered by many, including Berenson’s wife Mary, to be coarse and vulgar, the polar opposite of Berenson.5 Berenson was offended by Duveen’s commercialization of art and endless desire to increase the costs of paintings regardless of their quality. Berenson later referred to Duveen as “evil” and employed the pejorative phrase “king of the jungle” to express his disdain for him.6

Notwithstanding Walters’s suggestion to Berenson that he should stay clear of Duveen and Berenson’s own distrust of him, in July 1912, Berenson began negotiating with Duveen to become his partner. What influenced Berenson to become embedded with Duveen was, pure and simple, his need for financial security as he was advancing through the middle years of his life.7 Earlier that year, Berenson, in a very personal letter, had revealed to Walters his anxiety about this. “At forty we begin to look at things with the cold eye of reason, & reason is suicidal . . . The truth is life is a miracle enacted for the delectation of childhood & youth. Grownups go on till middle age on the impetus derived from earlier years. But after forty, it really does require faith, hope & very much charity to live without being a bad nuisance to one’s self, & worse yet one’s neighbors.”8 (A copy of the letter is in appendix A.) Around the same time, Berenson wrote to his longtime friend Henry Adams expressing concern about his “old” age and suggesting that his world was “coming to an end.”9

Among the variables that caused Berenson to worry about his financial security was the difficulty he was having in retaining the allegiance of individual collectors. By



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