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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The English art dealer Joseph Duveen sold hundreds of Old Masters, for soaring prices, to American multimillionaires between the early years of the twentieth century and 1939, when he died, at the age of sixty-nine. Today, those works distinguish some of our greatest museums, notably the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1941 as a posthumous gift to the nation from the financier Andrew W. Mellon. Duveen's favorite architect, John Russell Pope, designed it, and Duveen clients--Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, the estate of Peter A. B. Widener--filled it with "Duveens," as canny visitors could tell at a glance. (The dealer's aggressive restorers gave old paintings a signature sheen of high-gloss varnish.) New York's Frick Collection is another, earlier Duveen co-production. Besides providing the decorator and, again, the architect (Thomas Hastings), he took a personal hand in outfitting the mansion's rococo "Fragonard Room." That wonderful chamber inclines me, for one, to forgive the man who created it almost anything. Reading "Duveen: A Life in Art" (Knopf; $35), a new biography by Meryle Secrest, puts that gratitude to the test. A tale of high achievement and compulsive flimflam--"the feints, subterfuges, and stratagems, the deceits, intrigues, and double dealings," in Secrest's words, of the trade that Duveen perfected--provokes nagging thoughts about the history of art values, of every sort, in the United States.
One of those values is entertainment. For sheer fun, Secrest's fat biography, which draws on masses of recently unsealed documents, cannot compete with a thin, rather sketchy study, titled "Duveen," which was written by the playwright S. N. Behrman and published in 1951, and is now back in print. The Behrman first appeared, in installments, in this magazine; Edmund Wilson deemed it "the best profile The New Yorker has ever printed." Written with lambent wit, in cascades of sparkling anecdote, Behrman's book remains the most enjoyable literary treatment of the art world since the Goncourt brothers' regular patrols of the Parisian scene. Secrest--the skilled biographer of, among others, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali, Leonard Bernstein, and the magus of Renaissance art scholarship, Bernard Berenson, known to his world as B.B., who reappears as a major, shady character in her present book--praises Behrman's work as "irresistible," which is the perfect word both for it and for Duveen, who was to the reluctances of wary moguls what fire is to tissue paper. But she is understandably touchy in her attitude toward the earlier author.
Secrest leaves many of Behrman's exciting tales oddly unmentioned, but she casts doubt on one of the choicest. Alas, Duveen may not have first met the reclusive Mellon, until then the devoted customer of a rival dealer, in a London hotel elevator in 1921--a stealth encounter, according to Behrman, entailing spies and split-second timing--after which Duveen led Mellon on an impromptu stroll through the wonders of...
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