Otto Kahn: Art, Money & Modern Time.(Book Review)

by Theresa M. Collins University of North Carolina Press, 392 pp. $34.95

Otto H. Kahn, legendary arts patron and chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Company's board of directors from 1908 to 1931, played a dizzying variety of roles in newly modernist America. Possessed of clear, optimistic vision coupled with inexhaustible energy, Kahn led a cosmopolitan life that united Gilded Age opulence with Progressive Era vitality and encompassed public identities ranging from Wall Street financier to pop-culture icon (lampooned in the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers, in 1930). Two previous biographies have appeared since his death in 1934: Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's The Many Lives of Otto Kahn (1963); and John Kobler's Otto the Magnificent (1988).

This latest effort, by Rutgers University professor Theresa M. Collins, ambitiously relates the myriad spheres of Kahn's influence to emerging modernist impulses in American society. Cross-cutting almost cinematically, Collins follows the financier from Mannheim to Manhattan, charting his rapid rise at New York's esteemed German--Jewish banking house, Kuhn, Loeb & Company, through the astute handling of his client, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman. As the twentieth century got underway, Kahn aggressively pursued a leadership role on the Met board during the regime of Heinrich Conried and concurrently embarked on a three-decade cycle of artistic patronage then unprecedented in America. Collins shows how the new Maecenas gave away money nearly as quickly ...