December 30, 2004: It is a typical week between Christmas-and-New Year’s in New York. Cold, not so cold, a dusting of snow, lots of grey skies suggesting more snow, then warming temperatures. And quiet. I was reminded of how it felt when I used to come here during college vacations. Lots of people on the street, lots of touring around, but quiet, subdued.
I’ve just finished Meryle Secrest’s biography of Joseph Duveen, one of the greatest art dealers in the history of the great American collections of the 20th century. Lord Duveen of Millbank, as he was dubbed when made a baronet in the 1920s, was the first born (in 1869) of a large family (eleven children) of a leading dealer in porcelains and art in London, Joel Joseph Duveen. The child grew up to be imbued with an obsession for the business. He LOVED his business, and he was very good at it.
The book made me want to visit The Frick, which I’ve done many many times, just to look again at some of the pieces that Duveen brought to the collector, to re-visit with their stories in mind.
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Elsie, Sir Joseph, and Dolly Duveen making an Atlantic crossing to New York in 1919. Duveen claimed to have crossed the Atlantic more than a hundred times. |
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Many times I’ve heard people who are too young to have ever known him, but know or are related to people who did know him, say that Duveen was a crook. Implying of course that he conned and gypped his clients. Someone the other day (who also never knew him, or much about him) told me “He sold fakes.” According to Meryle Secrest, it was true, he did sell fakes from time to time. As does everyone in the art world. Not because he knew they were fake but because he’d been tricked. Fakes and the Art World are, I have learned from Meryle Secrest, are practically synonymous.
Duveen on the other hand dealt in “the best.” He paid top prices and he’d buy something that he didn’t have a client for and still pay a top price for it. He was also a very modern man (born at the height of the Victorian age) in that he knew how to market and how to merchandise. His public relations was often brilliant.
And thus he attracted or went after the biggest of the big rich American art collectors at the beginning of the 20th century. Otto Kahn, Jules Bache, H.E. and Arabella Huntington, Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Anna Dodge, S.H. Kress, P.A.B. Widener, Benjamin Altman, Marjorie Meriwether Post, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Henry Clay Frick were frequent buyers at Duveen’s galleries and they spent hundreds of millions with him over the decades.
The man was a charmer, a fast-talker, a deal maker, an impassioned man who loved art the way a gardener loves his flowers. He was always working it, albeit with an elegant veneer that was a birthright. A great many of his clients had come from nothing and made kingly fortunes. Duveen met up with them when they were in their spending mode, in their efforts to “raise themselves up,” to manifest that kingliness that money encourages in many an imagination.
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Henry Clay Frick |
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Henry Clay Frick was twenty years older than Duveen, a country boy from the hills of Pennsylvania who had made an immense fortune by the time Duveen came into his life. He was not highly cultured although he developed an interest in pictures as a young man. By the time he was prosperous, in the 1880s, he was buying, although his selections were not as refined as they became. He was, according to Meryle Secrest, basically a rich man who liked to listen to the organ playing “The Rosary” and read the Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular magazines of the first half of the 20th century.
Frick was drawn to New York after he made his great fortune, like his one-time partner Andrew Carnegie, and continued to do business here. For years he rented the Vanderbilt Mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue where W.H. Vanderbilt had his huge art gallery. Later, as his collection was taking on an important form, he decided to build the house on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. By this time he had become an important buyer of paintings in the world, meaning, Old Masters.
Occasionally he bought something through Duveen but for years Frick bought most of his works of art from Knoedler, an arch-competitor of Duveen. Rene Gimpel, another art dealer described Frick as a man with eyes of solid steel. He was a hard nut for Duveen to crack.
According to Secrest, Duveen regarded Frick as a man with a tendency to buy “junk.” He had never bought antique furnishings or objets from anyone. And he always said he never would. But by 1915 as the mansion on Fifth and 70th was going up, he needed something to put in it. Lots of things. Duveen sold only the best 18th century French furniture. He turned to Duveen.
The problem for Duveen was pointing Frick in the right (or rather, Duveen’s) direction. To gain the rich industrialist’s confidence required appealing to him with the possibility of obtaining something desirable. And since he wasn’t inclined to buy “beauty,” (Duveen’s idea of beauty), the question was: how could he be convinced?
The opportunity came to Duveen in 1913 after the death of J.P. Morgan. Morgan had one of the greatest private art collections in America. And Morgan was a titan of world finance, so therefore anything he owned had provenance. Some thought his collection would go to the Met. But Morgan wanted them to dedicate a wing, named for him, in exchange for the collection and this did not occur, so he left it to his heirs.
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Detail of a Fragonard panel |
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Morgan’s son Jack decided to sell much of his father’s collection. But before this was done, there was a large exhibition of Morgan art loaned to the Met. Among the items was the “Fragonard Room” – fourteen panels painted by Jean-Honore Fragonard called Romans d’amour et de la jeunesse.
These panels were commissioned in 1771 for a pavilion that Louis XV was building for his last mistress, Madame du Barry at Louveciennes. However, the king died three years later, du Barry was automatically exiled from the court and the panels remained in the possession of the painter until his death in 1806. J.P. Morgan bought them ninety-two years later in London from the firm of Thomas Agnew, and paid a huge price — $350,000 (millions in today’s currency).
Duveen was, at the time of Morgan’s purchase, involved in the decoration of Morgan’s house at Prince’s Gate in London. It was Duveen who decided the panels should have a special room. After Morgan’s death, they were removed along with the cornices and the woodwork from the Prince’s Gate room, and shipped to New York. |
