Customer Reviews

The American Leonardo: A Tale of Obsession, Art and Money

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2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In John Brewer's excellent new book, The American Leonardo, Brewer discusses one of the most controversial paintings of all time: the Hahn La Belle Ferronière. Was this work painted by Leonardo Da Vinci or was it an inferior copy of the La Belle in the Louvre? What was the reaction of the Art world? And how do we really know whether anything we see in an art museum is what it seems to be? Rather than let the story crackle on its own, Brewer has chosen to ponder more philosophical questions. Because of this, the book isn't the fastest read and may not suit some readers. Still, it is an incredibly well written account of the Hahn's story and an eye opening exposé of the underpinnings of the art world.

The story of the Hahn La Belle is an interesting gem of history in and of itself. Brewer, however, is less concerned about this story and, rather, uses it as a vehicle to contrast the differences between the lay person's conception of art and that of the art connoisseur. Brewer's interest does not lie in whether this particular painting was created by Da Vinci. The controversy that Brewer ponders is how can we truly know whether a displayed work of art can be considered authentic.

The Hahn La Belle rocked the foundation of the art world by changing people's perceptions of art authenticity and exposing the weaknesses of how the art community attributes and authenticates art. The public trial between Joseph Duveen, the most influential art dealer at the time, and the Hahn family brought the inexact 'science' of the connoisseur to light for a broader audience and in doing so changed the lay person's perception of art. Brewer skillfully guides the reader through this story.

And therein lies one of the difficulties of this book. Brewer's focus is such that the book reads more like the script of a documentary than it does a novel. He describes the colorful characters that populate the book well enough--the arrogant but charming Joseph Duveen, the blustery, bombastic, yet charming Harry Hahn, and Andree, Hahn's quiet, refined, and attractive wife, to name a few.

But Brewer zeros in more on the history of art authentication: how a small cadre of experts and dealers mixed business with connoisseurship. The prospect of making more money if a painting sold at a higher price often muddied the waters of authenticity. Brewer mostly succeeds in keeping up our interest by fleshing out the stories of each of these characters, but in between there are long stretches about the science (or the lack thereof) of early 20th century art attribution. If the question of art authenticity is a burning one for you, this book will appeal. If not, it will be slow going.

Given that this book is solidly aimed at the layperson, it would have been helpful to describe some of the more technical aspects of renaissance art and art restoration in the early 1900s. I was aware that the Mona Lisa, for example, was painted on a wood panel. But I was unaware that even at the turn of the last century it was a common practice to transfer paintings from wood to canvass in order to preserve them. Brewer makes reference to this, but seems to treat it as common knowledge. I found an article online from the New York Times in 1910 that describes how a restorer, Arthur Dawson, was able to perform this kind of transfer for wealthy clients. It would also have been helpful to know something of the techniques of renaissance painting, the pigments used, and how these elements came to bear when the expert analyzes a painting. A better knowledge of what was available in terms of scientific analysis at the turn of the last century and how this was performed would also have been of help.

Differences are described between the Hahn La Belle and the Louvre La Belle. There is a nice section of pictures in the middle of the book. What's missing here, however, would be two full-color and full-size panels with each of these paintings side by side. Without that, it is often difficult to fully understand what the experts were looking at during the trial and why they came to the conclusions that they did. The pictures in this section were of reasonable quality, but were in black and white. My review copy was not marked as such. Given that this book was already released in the UK, it is likely that I received a final copy. (As an amusing aside, the cover picture is that of the Louvre La Belle.)

The book could not have been released at a more auspicious time. The recent discovery of a 'new' Da Vinci painting may catapult sales of Brewer's book and may even put Brewer himself in the limelight. One can see that the stakes are quite high: if this painting turns out to be a Da Vinci a $19,000 investment could now be worth $150 million dollars. The fact that this latest find was legitimized using state of the art forensic techniques reminiscent of CSI, shows just how much things may have changed since the Old Master's art collection boom, where they relied mostly on the expert's eye.

[ADDENDUM 1/28/2010: According to the New York Times, the Hahn's La Belle sold at Sotheby's to an unidentified American buyer for 1.5 million dollars (including fees), well above the $500,000 estimate. This is an interesting post script to the book. It remains to be seen as to whether the painting will be exhibited at some later date.]

Being something of an "art junkie", I really enjoyed this book. But if you are expecting the central tale to be one of art forgery, or if you are looking for a clear-cut resolution at the end of the book you may be disappointed.(No one claims the Hahn painting is a forgery. It's a question of whether it was done by da Vinci, a pupil of da Vinci, or a later copyist.) However, if you can just enjoy reading about some quirky personalities; the infighting between art dealers, museum directors, connoisseurs; and the argument over "subjective" evaluation of pieces of art vs. "objective" (scientific) evaluation of works of art, then I think you will be both entertained and educated by this book. Mr. Brewer is a scholar who both writes well and who has a nice, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor - so the book is not a difficult read. He also realizes that 300 pages of just talking about the Hahn painting might be a little bit boring. So he enlivens the book by bringing in a bit of historical information about how art experts have sometimes gotten egg on their faces by being fooled by forgeries. (Specifically, he writes about the forging of van Goghs by the art dealer Otto Wacker in the 1930's and the 1945 indictment in Amsterdam of the Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, for forging a series of Vermeers.)One thing that Mr. Brewer makes clear is that even though he is a scholar, he is not an art expert. I think this made him a bit gun-shy about drawing conclusions from the conflicting evidence and/or opinions presented by the various experts over the years. I found the "summing up" at the end by the author to be a bit wishy-washy and I think he should have been a bit more open about the conclusions he reached. (But he does present enough information for the average reader to draw his/her own conclusions.) One tantalizing storyline that popped up several times is the serious possibility that the version of "La Belle Ferronniere" that is in the Louvre was not painted by da Vinci. Apparently several well-respected experts have come to this conclusion, but Mr. Brewer does not devote much space in the book to talking about this juicy tidbit. However, on balance, this is a fascinating glimpse into the world of fine art and how ego gratification, wish-fulfillment, money and "protecting one's turf" sometimes clouds the judgment of otherwise sensible and intelligent people.

As a student of art history, I found John Brewer's book to be quite interesting, if not exactly entertaining. It was a slow read; I could only read it in short bursts, and took over a month to complete it. The writing's dry and covers a lot of territory. Brewer would introduce a man, for example, backtrack several years to tell his personal history and talents, sidestep to explain more about the man's field of expertise, and the history of that field, and then FINALLY come back and advance the main report about 'La Belle' and the painting's history. Ultimately, the book focuses on art criticism and its evolution throughout the 20th century rather than Leonardo Da Vinci and 'La Belle Ferronnière.'

Very little is actually said about the painting. It's described a couple of times, and we are presented with some black-and-white photos...but otherwise very little is said about it or its creator. All the drama focuses on its 20th-century owners and the fight to get it recognized as a legitimate Leonardo painting by "Big Art", the art historians and critics who time and time again dismiss it as a fake or a copy of the 'La Belle' painting found at the Louve (another heavily disputed piece). If any scientific analysis was done on the painting during its various trips to different museums for studies, the results aren't really looked at.

When I read the book, I was disappointed at at the end because there was no definite resolution to the story. 'The American Leonardo' ends with the painting, which had been on the market for decades but never sold, was involved in a court battle for ownership. It seems a pity that Brewer couldn't wait another year to publish this book, as the eighty-plus years attempt to sell 'La Belle' was concluded at auction in January of 2010, where the painting sold for 1.5 million. But perhaps the publicity from the printing of this book helped drive the auction price? Who knows. All I know is that the story of 'La Belle' as told in Brewster's book is unfinished, and for me that was very unsatisfying.

I fear that I cannot give this work a high mark. The primary reason for this is that it is a book in search for a genre. I accepted this book via the Amazon Vine Program in that it presented itself as a book dealing with the history of a particular controversial painting; a detailed account of the painting origins, id known, an investigative sort of book which also dealt with the various personalities involved in this case.

First, this case has already been written about numerous times. Most people who have even inkling as to what has gone on in the world of art is at least aware of it. This was not a story the broke new ground.

No, what we more or less got here was an extremely boring read; a book in which the author has indulged himself with the phenomena of American greed at the beginning of the 20th century...as if we did not already know that! The flinging around of wealth of the mega rich at the turn of the century is by now legendary. Again, no big enlightenment here.

Now I am one who dotes of dry and dusty books; books filled with small facts that are absolutely meaningless to but a very few. I have to admit that this one did even me in. Folks, for my taste, this was one very, very boring read.

I also had a bit of a problem with the author's use of source documents or information. All too often there simply were none. The author tended to make accusations, give accounts, interpret actions by various individuals, but he have little to no information as to the source or validity of his information and statements. For me, this was unacceptable. It is not that I doubt his word...but really!

I did finish this work, unlike several reviewers but I have to be honest with you...I do not blame those reviewers in the slightest for discontinuing the read after only a few chapters. I suppose that if I had more of a life, I would have hurled the book onto the "donation pile" long before I got halfway through the thing.

This is all a pity. The premise of the book is good. The history involved is good. The information of the inner workings of the art world of that day and time could have been oh so interesting. Alas though, the author simply did not deliver.

Throughout the read I kept feeling that I was reading a text book on art history that someone had tried to liven up a bit with a "mystery" and failed to pull it off. I have quite a number of shelves in my home devoted to novels and quite a number of shelves devoted to art history...all are better than this particular read.

I am giving this thing three stars though out of respect for those that did find some enjoyment in reading it. I am a firm believer in "to each his own." What is one man's cheeseburger is another man's sprout sandwich. This work was simply not my cuppa.

Perhaps, as other reviewers have pointed out, if this work had been presented and marketed differently...???

Don Blankenship
The Ozarks

The American Leonardo tells the story of a young couple, Harry amd Andree Hahn, who fetched up in the heartland of America--Junction City, Kansas--operating an automobile asset. They lived inauspiciously but shortly after their marriage revealed the secret which they considered a valuable asset--namely, a painting by the great Leonardo Da Vinci, "La Belle Ferroniere." It had been a wedding gift to the bride from a family friend, when the Hahns tried to sell it within twenty months of the wedding, Emily Post frowned on such etiquette but the rest of the USA cheered, patriotic pride exploding in the wake of a Great War in which many US doughboys had died.

When Duveen dismissed the picture as a fake and a fraud (without ever having seen it), the resourceful Hahns sued him for slander. The ensuing court case forms the heart of John Brewer's lengthy book, which I read about only recently in a New Yorker article about a disputed Leonardo drawing which is attracting attention today, under eerily similar circumstances, David Grann, speaks of Brewer's book as if it were some kind of New Yorker-like masterwork of nonfiction. It's not, but it has its good points, and I don't want to sell the book short, but it's boring,

Okay, the interesting-est parts all involve Brewer's continuous contextualizing of the art market circa 1920. We take it for granted that Old Masters were always the blue chip pictures on the market, but at the time of the Hahn case, we learn, such a state of affairs was a relatively recent development. Old Masters could be bought for a song in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s. It was not until the rise of a new class, the "connoisseur," (literally, the guy who knows), that Vermeers and Raphaels began to attain really good prices. The rise of the connoisseur couldn't have happened without an explosion in the number of rich American businessmen who wanted to get the best for their money: without being able to determine a consensus on what is the best, they might as well have continued buying up countries instead of works of art. The situation arose that continues even today, although today painters and artists, once anointed and plugged into the cabal, can sell new works still wet from the fabricators, at the prices it once took a painting a few centuries of patina to reach. Somehow I wound up not feeling sorry even for the Hahns, the little Davids trying to bring down the big Goliath of connoisseurship. They seem as greedy as the rest of the bunch. Every page of this book is an excoriating example of a market out of control, and yet Brewer looks on as though this were all great good fun.

Art aficionados will enjoy this labyrinthian chronicle on the authenticity of da Vinci's purported "La Belle Ferronnière." Spanning nearly a century, "The American Leonardo" (2009) examines the distorted world of "the art racket" and its cultural conflicts. Historian John Brewer's style may be too dry and slow going for some readers, but his book would make a fascinating documentary as the painting's saga continues to unfold.

In 1919 newlyweds Harry and Andree Hahn arrived in Kansas City with a most unusual wedding present: a Leonardo da Vinci given to them by a friend of Andree's French family. La Belle Ferronnière was a lovely painting which seemed to bear some of the hallmarks of Leonardo's works, but also seemed strangely clumsy and lifeless, especially when compared to another painting of the same name, also supposed to be by Leonardo, which was in the Louvre. Harry and Andree began to market their "American Leonardo" and touched off a controversy which has lasted for ninety years.

The primary focus of John Brewer's history of the controversy around the Hahn "La Belle" is the question of what exactly constitutes a valid attribution, the identification of one particular artist as the creator of a particular art work. Connoisseurs tend to fall into two major camps: those who believe in using "scientific" analysis versus those who rely on observation and emotional response. Neither camp accepts the other's methods, and the result is endless debate and rancorous controversy.

The story of the Hahn's La Belle Ferronnière is full of intriguing characters, many of them highly regarded and brilliant connoisseurs and many others shady if not downright criminal. Arguments over whether the painting was really a Leonardo escalated into full scale lawsuits and decades long vendettas.

While in the end the final resolution of the identity of the creator of the Hahn "La Belle" is still undecided, "The American Leonardo" is nevertheless a very intriguing and satisfying history which will leave its readers, particularly those who know little or nothing about artistic provenance, with a better understanding of the difficulty of making correct attributions and a healthy skepticism towards the self-proclaimed experts who try to make them.

I have a confession to make--I've never been particularly interested in the artwork of the "Old Masters." Oh, I enjoy visiting art museums as much as anybody, and the Louvre is high on my list of places to see before I die. But I can go for years without thinking at all about the works of da Vinci, Raphael, Titian or El Greco. With that said, you will understand that I approached John Brewer's "The American Leonardo" with almost total ignorance of the subject. I was attracted to the book because, a few years ago, I watched with fascinated interest a PBS program (a "Nova" episode, probably) about the restoration of Michaelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. I was intrigued by the forensic techniques that scientists and art experts used to examine the centuries-old masterpieces before restoring them. I thought Mr. Brewer's book would describe how those techniques worked, albeit on a much smaller scale, to authenticate a small purported Leonardo painting, "La Belle Ferronnière." I expected there to be enough details about artwork forensics to satisfy my geeky interest in esoteric applications of modern science and technology.

"The American Leonardo" was not what I expected. Most of the "scientific" examinations of "La Belle Ferronnière" took place nearly 100 years ago, and didn't involve high-resolution multi-spectral digital scans or any other "modern" techniques--X-rays being relatively new at the time. Mr. Brewer's book is really a capsule history of the rarified world of art collectors, dealers, connoisseurs and authenticators. Much of the story takes place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when unsophisticated, newly wealthy Americans started buying up classical artwork indiscriminately, and thus changed the whole nature of the art business. It is a tale of men (rarely women) with massive egos, of intense emotions and personal rivalries, and of make-or-break deals that often hinged on the dogmatic opinions of "experts" who may or may not have been knowledgeable, competent or honest. It is a story of people, not technology. Nevertheless, I found "The American Leonardo" to be interesting and informative, and, from the perspective of a rank novice, a worthwhile read.

This summary from the Introduction pretty much nails it: "The story of [the] American Leonardo is labyrinthine and complex, a tale of intrigue, controversy and skullduggery. Shipped back and forth across the Atlantic, displayed in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Kansas City, examined in the Louvre and in London's National Gallery, the..."La Belle Ferronnière" was the focus of expert testimony taken in Paris in 1923 and the object of courtroom drama...in New York in 1929. The painting brought together crowds in the Midwest, puzzled experts from all over North America and Europe, attracted more than its fair share of dubious characters and cast its shadow over [the owners] for almost a century...[I]n the present...the painting languish[es] in an Omaha storage vault, the subject of a contentious lawsuit that remains, like so many controversies over the picture, unresolved to this day."

I don't know what a bona fide art expert would make of "The American Leonardo." But, as a casually interested outsider (and a techno-geek, no less) who sometimes got lost in the intricacies of this convoluted human story about an unfamiliar subject, I enjoyed reading it because I feel that I learned a lot. If this sort of thing appeals to you, by all means give it a try. It may take you to places you've never been before.

Upon opening this book I was disappointed to discover that I had to read almost 100 pages of background before reaching the part of the book devoted to the painting and the controversy over its attribution. But I realized after only a few pages that the first few chapters are not really "background," but instead are integral to the book, which is not just about the putative Leonardo, but more basically about collecting old masters in the "heroic" age of Bernard Berenson and his contemporaries. The Hahn painting is an exemplar rather than the full subject of the story, and the subject is seductive.

The painting "La Belle Feronniere" seems to appear out of nowhere in the early 20th century. The Louvre has the same painting -- at least one of the two must be a copy. All of the experts conclude, with little reflection, that the Hahn painting is a copy, and a poor one at that. But is this really evident, or are the expert opinions merely part of the experts' agenda to maintain control of the art market? All of them were making large amounts of money based on the willingness of the art world to spend vast sums of money for the expert's attribution of a painting to a master.

Certain comparisons to several recent financial crises come to mind.

I highly recommend this book to those interest in art or in history.

John Brewer's in-depth study of the history of Hahn's "La Belle" and it's repeated denunciation in the art market is nothing short of captivating. As an artist, I found it particularly interesting and had a great amount of joy while reading his tale, always rooting for the underdog painting and hoping for it's eventual sale for a fortune. However, much like Harry and Andree Hahn, (the painting's owners over the course of 60+ years) I would be repeatedly disappointed in the art world, critics, so-called experts and a huge cast of charlatans, hucksters and confidence men. I also found myself wondering about the art elite, those "educated" individuals who pronounce something great and something else a fake. Fortunes turn on their words, perhaps incorrectly, as Brewer reveals.

When most artists sit down to a canvas and create a feminine image of beauty, they don't ponder her future, and certainly don't foresee an amazing timeline of ups and downs 300 years later, deals made and broken, studies undertaken, testimonies given and lies told which haunt "La Belle" to this day. Even now, she sits in storage in Omaha, awaiting her fate.

Brewer takes us on an extremely detailed journey that spans nearly four centuries, from the painting's supposed creation in the 1600s (something that is still under debate), to it's present day existence in a midwest location which cannot be revealed due to legalities. His writing is factual and the style is well-suited to the subject at hand. Brewer avoids over-sentimentalizing the story and lets the facts speak for themselves. The timeline he lays out is direct and the afterward (which perhaps might be better placed as a prologue from which to flash backward in time) is nearly as compelling as the rest of the book.

Rather than list the cast of real-life characters that are for, against and neutral about the painting's authenticity and go into a rather long, laborious synopsis, suffice it to say that hardly a fact about the painting and it's various owners, admirers and detractors is left unrevealed. The only place in this partially hard-to-absorb tome where Brewer slows the pace to a crawl is in the chapters toward the end, as a bit too much unnecessary back and forth between various parties is kept in play, realities that may seem salient to a private investigator but which may bore the average reader. Otherwise, Brewer holds well the attentions of artists, art lovers and art historians in a book which should grace the shelves of each.