Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  If this was the first time Frick was lauded for his fabulous taste, his sense of discrimination, his ability to choose fine paintings, it would not be the last. As years went by and the canvases heaped up, Frick’s pattern of buying only portraits and landscapes would never change. He had little interest in subjects from history, mythology, or religion. He never acquired a picture of a nude. In 1911, Carstairs left two Veronese allegories, Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength, in Frick’s ­house for weeks, waiting for the collector to decide whether to buy them. The figures are dressed in Re­nais­sance costume and one of the women (Wisdom) has a bare breast. Finally, after Roger Fry endorsed the paintings, Frick agreed to their purchase.

  If in matters of taste Frick followed other collectors, rather than lead, he was a follower with the keenest gaze and he learned fast. He watched what others ­were buying and refused to be bested. Where Isabella Stewart Gardner dreamed of owning certain paintings and sent Berenson on their trail, Frick rarely asked dealers to go after a par­tic­u­lar picture. He could afford to wait. Like all influential collectors, he fielded constant offers. Once he began amassing visible, expensive pictures, dealers gave him chances to buy others of the same caliber. Some of Frick’s outstanding pictures came to him because circumstances sent them his way and eventually he bought them. He insisted that the pro­cess of selecting pictures be mea­sured and deliberate. Dealers hung paintings on his walls and let him live with them, as he stood back and considered whether to purchase. “He seemed to lavish on art all the passion that he might have bestowed on human beings,” Charles Schwab observed.

  The character of Frick’s collection reflected in various ways his brilliance as a businessman, evolving from his method of buying and his shrewdness as a negotiator. While he spent millions on art, he constantly tried to acquire as cheaply as possible. Famous for cutting production costs at Carnegie Steel, Frick haggled over the prices of pictures, consistently refused to pay what the Knoedler dealers asked, and seems never to have paid a record price. Without fail, Frick based much of his final decision to purchase a painting upon what it cost. “He is really taking a very great interest in Art,” Charles Carstairs wrote Otto Gutekunst in 1905, “but has an idea that picture dealers want too much money or rather too much profit & he is a born trader and a close buyer & a ­d—— smart man, much more so in that way than Morgan.”

  In contrast to Gardner, who disliked discussing art and money in the same breath, Frick wanted to know the financial details of a transaction. A victor in the pitiless environment of coke and steel, Frick was competitive as a collector. He watched the art market closely. Trying to persuade him to purchase a van Dyck, Carstairs noted that the collector “needs the inspiration of a rising [stock] market.” He understood as well as anyone that even celebrated works of art have no intrinsic ­value—their market value depending only upon what collectors are willing to pay. As able as he was as a financier, he looked to experts to advise him. Not surprisingly, at first he relied mostly on dealers, who, like him, ­were men of business.

  Periodically, Frick made long lists of his paintings, sometimes on ledger paper. Beside each title he wrote the amount he had paid for the ­picture—a tally of his artistic fortune. By the beginning of 1905, Frick calculated that he had expended close to $1.4 million on more than thirty pictures, including eigh­teen Old Masters. Within a year he added the Ilchester Rembrandt and twelve more.

  Early in 1907, Frick took the first step toward constructing an appropriate setting in which to hang his new art. He spent $2.25 million on a piece of property that ran between Seventieth and ­Seventy-­first streets on Fifth Avenue, where the Lenox Library (whose books ­were headed for the New York Public Library) had stood for two de­cades. According to the New York Times, Frick planned “to build a home which shall rival, if not outclass, the Carnegie home, situated a mile further up Fifth Avenue.”

  Frick’s buying of Old Masters became part of a methodical project to surround himself with goods of the highest ­quality—clothes bought in Paris, Re­nais­sance bronzes, and a desk created by France’s finest cabinetmaker for Marie Antoinette. He always loved pictures, but he also enlisted them into a campaign to shape and control his public legacy. He knew that a fabulous collection of art had the power to atone for sins, and to change the public’s perception of who he was. If he had not succeeded in controlling the events that shaped his life as he had wanted to, he nevertheless would make his collection the final accounting.

  PART TWO

  The Painting Boom

  CHAPTER VI

  “Octopus and Wrecker Duveen”

  Joseph Duveen Enters the Old Master Market

  By far the most threatening competitor Charles Carstairs and Otto Gutekunst faced was the driven, ­well-­capitalized Joseph Duveen. “How can we stop the disastrous work of the’Octopus and wrecker Duveen? I don’t know,” Gutekunst wrote Bernard Berenson in 1909. Gutekunst did not realize that Duveen had already lured the connoisseur into his fold.

  Joe Duveen dressed like a gentleman even if the roughness of his features jarred with the pristine cut of his starched white ­four-­inch collar. His legendary optimism and energy comes through in a photograph, where his ­tight-­lipped smile echoes the jaunty curve of the brim of his hat. He was “smooth, immaculate,” and his “well oiled courage knows no defeat,” wrote the collector Archer Huntington, who resented the dealer’s ability to persuade his mother, Arabella (widow of Collis Huntington, who ran the Central Pacific Railroad), to spend so much on paintings.

  Duveen was only a recent entrant into the Old Master market. Other dealers had tried to keep him out; in 1901 when he bought Hoppner’s Miss Manners at a London auction, they bid it up and forced him to pay a high price for a ­run-­of-­the-­mill En­glish portrait. Within six years he had put himself in a position to dominate the ­market— thanks to his high levels of energy and ambition, and to the funds generated by his family’s decorative arts firm.

  Duveen signaled his willingness to raise capital and risk it in 1907, when he purchased the collection of the late Rodolphe Kann, a German merchant banker, who had made a fortune in South African mining and lived on the avenue d’Iena in Paris. Next door was his brother Maurice, also a collector, and a picture gallery linked the Kann mansions. Rodolphe Kann’s collection contained “more stock’than in the ­whole of the [Duveen] London inventory, and it included some of the greatest pictures in the world,” explained Edward Fowles, who ran the firm’s Paris gallery. There ­were over one hundred Italian, French, En­glish, and Flemish paintings, and an extraordinary sequence of Dutch pictures: Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, Gabriel Metsu’s Visit to the Nursery, ter Borch’s Young Woman at Her Toilet with a Maid, and eleven Rembrandts, among them Aristotle with the Bust of Homer.

  The Kann collection cost Duveen 21 million francs or $4.2 million, which he paid to Rodolphe Kann’s son, Edouard. Duveen’s partner in the transaction was the French dealer Nathan Wildenstein, who (with René Gimpel, also a Paris dealer) had bought an option on the collection in 1906, and then took ­one-­quarter share (for $1 million). To help fund the Kann purchase, Duveen, according to Berenson, borrowed $2 million from the Morgan bank, and the dealer agreed to let the banker have his first choice of pictures.

  Joe Duveen was born in 1869, the eldest of eight sons and four daughters of Rosetta Barnett and Joel Joseph Duveen, a Dutch Jew who the year before had emigrated from the Netherlands to Hull, a town on the En­glish channel. By 1879, Joel Duveen had opened a gallery on Oxford Street in London and was dealing in all manner of decorative ­arts—from porcelain (imported from Holland), to bronzes, chandeliers, furniture, and tapestries. At the same time, Joel’s younger brother Henry launched a branch of Duveen Brothers in New York, on Broadway and Nineteenth Street. “I like amerika [sic] very well,” Henry wrote. “It is a ­first-­class ­money-­making country. It is a fine rich country. It beats En­gland in everything.”

  Joe Duveen went to work for his father in Lo
ndon in 1887, when he was eigh­teen. By 1893, Joel had moved the London gallery to 21 Old Bond Street, and in 1897, he opened a branch in Paris, at 20 Place Vendome, near the Ritz. Henry Duveen had much to teach his nephew about marketing decorative arts to affluent Americans who ­were building enormous ­houses with many large rooms to fill. In addition to original ­eigh­teenth-­century furniture, Henry sold reproductions, churned out by craftsmen in Paris. By the 1890s, so great was the American appetite for the newly minted antiques imported from France that, according to Edward Fowles, to meet the demand, the Duveens agreed to place “annual orders worth not less than $500,000” with the firm of Carlhian and Beaumetz “to ensure first call on its artisans.”

  Joseph Duveen ca. 1900. Jumping into the Old Master market a year later, the dealer soon became a dominant player.

  Henry Duveen’s practical commercial approach had taken the firm far. He was shrewd at appraising both inventory and clients. “I think you are making a grave mistake in showing Mr. A. [Altman] too many things,” he complained to Joe. “Let him be hungry and enquire for beautiful things, and he appreciates our things because we only show him the very finest.” He freely talked to collectors about the market. He told Frick he wanted him to realize “the artistic plea­sure of possessing fine objects of art” but also to “appreciate the important fact, that they are also in the nature of an investment.” The dealer emphasized that he had Frick’s financial interests at heart. “The spending of money is all very well, but to know that you have full value for your money, and that that value tends to enhance rather than decrease, is bound to add a little to the plea­sure of possession.” He also grasped Frick’s competitive ambitions, promising him that “my efforts are devoted to securing the greatest things for you so, that your collection of art trea­sures may, if not eclipse, at any rate equal, others.”

  In the 1890s, the Duveens sold few Old Master paintings. “It had long been Uncle Henry’s dictum that pictures ­were the last thing a man buys,” explained Edward Fowles. When clients inquired about paintings, the Duveens generally sent them to Agnew’s in London, or to Jacques Seligmann, or Wildenstein, in Paris. But, when Joe Duveen watched Old Masters become the most expensive works of art, he insisted on getting into the market. He “fundamentally disagreed with his father’s business methods,” notes Fowles. “He, quite rightly, saw that the time and effort involved in selling an article for a few pounds could be more fruitfully used if the article ­were worth one thousand times this amount.” The purchase of the extraordinary Kann collection allowed Joe to put his business plan into practice.

  To take the Kann pictures, Duveen lined up not only Morgan but also Arabella Huntington, and Benjamin Altman, the retailing magnate. Each spent at least $1 million and covered more than three quarters of the price Duveen paid for the entire collection. Duveen left Rodolphe Kann’s pictures in the late banker’s Paris ­house for over a year, inviting potential buyers (including Isabella Stewart Gardner) to inspect them in sumptuous surroundings. Morgan selected eleven ­paintings—three Memlings, the Metsu, a Solomon Ruysdael landscape, van der Weyden’s Annunciation, Ghirlandaio’s Giovanna Tor­nabuoni, and Portrait of a Young Man by Andrea del Castagno, which Isabella Gardner had wanted to buy. Arabella Huntington acquired five canvases, most importantly Rembrandt’s Aristotle with the Bust of Homer, for which she paid $315,000, making it the second most expensive painting on record. She also bought a second Rembrandt as well as Chinese vases, a Beauvais tapestry, a Louis XV desk, a sofa, tables, footstools, a clock, and other decorative arts. Altman got three Rembrandts (Titus, Pilate Washing His Hands, and Old Woman Cutting Her Nails), and a Pieter de Hooch, as well as landscapes by Hobbema and Cuyp, and Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep.

  Altman, the son of a German Jewish immigrant who ran a dry goods store on the Lower East Side, was building one of the most important collections in New York. By the age of ­twenty-­five, he had founded his own “Dry goods and Fancy Store,” and eventually expanded the business into a large department store at Nineteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, which happened to be a block from Henry Duveen’s first gallery. As affluent New Yorkers moved their residences north, Altman followed. At the turn of the century, he quietly accumulated parcels of land on ­Thirty-­fourth and Fifth; his new store, ­well-­positioned between New York’s Grand Central and Pennsylvania stations, would eventually take up an entire block. The ­neo-­Re­nais­sance building that he opened in 1905 would become the first in a line of New York department stores running north along Fifth Avenue to Central Park. Altman was unmarried and spent most of his waking hours working at his store. He began collecting by buying Chinese porcelain from Henry ­Duveen—antique versions of the decorative pieces he himself imported from China and sold. In 1905, the year he built his Fifth Avenue mansion, the retailer, then ­sixty-­five, bought his first Old ­Masters—Rembrandt’s Man with a Steel Gorget and Frans Hals’s Young Man and Woman in an Inn (“Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart”).

  From the start, Altman focused on ­seventeenth-­century Dutch portraits and landscapes. This taste was reflected in Henry Duveen’s comments to him, dismissing certain French pictures as “only fit for French taste, being all of a class which we call ‘finicky’ and effeminate, so much sought after by French people.” Similarly, the dealer assured Altman he would have no interest in a canvas by the Italian Mannerist Bronzino: It is “a very fine and striking picture, but after all it is Bronzino and therefore de­cadent.” Bronzino, Duveen instructed, “as you know is rather late as far as ‘great art’ is concerned, and he is not an artist whom we should consider of any very great degree of importance.” Recognizing that his clients wanted paintings to decorate their ­houses, Henry Duveen shied away from paintings even by the most celebrated masters if they had what he considered “unpleasant subjects,” such as “an ugly man with a knife in his hand,” or “an interior with a woman nursing a child.”

  The purchase of the Kann collection in 1907 was a watershed in the Old Master market, importing a group of major pictures to the United States and instantly elevating three American collectors to a new level of quality and spending.

  Otto Gutekunst had tried to or­ga­nize a syndicate to buy the Kann collection, but after losing to Duveen, he and Carstairs countered with the purchase of a spectacular group of seven Genoese van Dycks, painted in the 1620s for the Cattaneo family and left untouched in a palace in Genoa for close to four centuries. The reputation of the paintings had grown as information leaked ­out—“Eight beautiful van Dycks in a billiard room,” as one dealer put it. Then, in 1900, Wilhelm von Bode confirmed to Colnaghi that the Cattaneo portraits ­were in fact masterpieces. He had found them “hanging much too high & partly in the dark. They are all very much obscured by’varnish and dirt. Disfigured by additions’and some are badly repainted,” he wrote. But, several he found “extraordinarily beautiful and attractive.” He declared eleven pictures “unquestionably genuine,” and warned that “half a dozen Paris and London dealers” ­were “lying in wait.” Recently, William McKay discovered that the van Dycks had been moved to an apartment that was empty most of the year: “In the absence of the family, the rooms are left in charge of a servant who for a tip will show the van Dycks.” They should “be visited in the morning early,” he wrote. “The light is 1⁄4 bad especially in the last room where some of the most important pictures are.”

  The most dazzling of the portraits was an ­eight-­foot ­full-­length portrait of Marchesa Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo, which in its scale, colors, artifice, and sense of movement and life demonstrated exactly how van Dyck had taken the lead in constructing the image of confident beauty and grandeur that Eu­rope’s aristocracy sought to achieve. Elena Grimaldi Cattaneo depicts a tall, magisterial figure in a long black dress that is set off by a large red parasol above her head. She seems to have just stepped onto a terrace from a portico whose fluted stone columns shoot up to the top of the frame, and she is looking out, slightly warily and downward at us. Following h
er is a page, who is black and dressed in a gold silk jacket, his eyes gazing up at the parasol he holds dramatically over her head. In the distance, a cultivated green landscape, below a blue sky with a tumult of gray clouds, fills the ­upper-­left-­hand corner of the canvas. In the elongated proportions of her figure, in the assurance of her carriage and stride, and even in the graceful line of ­twenty-­one gold buttons that delineates the curve of her torso, van Dyck conspired to convey her nobility.

  In 1907, Carstairs, Gutekunst, and the Paris dealer Trotti risked close to half a million dollars to acquire the Genoese portraits, a purchase negotiated by the Colnaghi partner Edmond Deprez. It was Trotti who had removed the canvases from their frames and rolled them into a tube underneath his car to smuggle them out of Italy. He drove the pictures to Monte Carlo and then Le Havre, where Carstairs saw them and then arranged to have a conservator reline them, remove the old varnish and replace it with new. He had high hopes for the van Dycks. “If Frick took these 5 it would make them all sit up and even the National Gallery, Wallace Museum & Continental museums would have to bow down to him,” Carstairs wrote Roland Knoedler. “The question is will he give the price?” On February 18, he invited Frick to be the first to have an audience with the “superb 7 Van Dycks,” and the first to have the chance to buy them. “They are being photographed & in 3 weeks by the time they have thoroughly dried the frames will be ready.” He tried to convince Frick to come to Paris. “They are all being held for your inspection, approval or rejection. Will you come over and see them?”

  Carstairs answered his own question. “I presume not.” Therefore, he explained, “my present plan is to ship them from Havre Mch 23!” “Sail for Naples,” he urged. “I will motor you 1 day to Rome, 1 day to Florence. Magnificent trip. 1 day to Genoa & one to Monte Carlo & then we will take the train to Paris.” Carstairs singled out the Elena Grimaldi portrait. “There is no question, no argument, from every standpoint it is Van Dyck’s masterpiece.’Just think[,] they ­were painted for the family in 1623 to 5 and have never been out of Genoa.” The price the dealer asked for the portrait was $490,000—or more than twice what the collector had paid for his Rembrandt, and higher than the record $400,000 that Morgan had paid for the Colonna Madonna. Berenson told Isabella Gardner what he knew about the van Dycks. “The Colnaghis and Knoedler bought them together. They have sold the bust of the man to the National Gallery for £13,500 [$67,500]. That gives you some mea­sure of the prices. They expect Frick to pay them £100,000 [$500,000] for the Woman with the Umbrella, and I dare say they have sold it [to] him already.”