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Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures

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I just finished Old Masters, New World, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Cynthia Saltzman possesses a rare talent for combining scrupulous research with lively narration and telling social commentary. She clearly possesses a firm and reliable background in art history, knows the art world and art market like the back of her hand, and her insights into the psychology of the major collectors of the Gilded Age are spot on. I write frequently on the history of collecting myself for Apollo magazine, and I know that I will be using Saltzman's excellent book as a ready reference in the future. My only regret is that I didn't get a copy of this book in galley form in time to review it professionally, as I would have loved to sing its praises in print. I can't recommend this book highly enough to people interested in art, art collecting, or turn-of-the-century American history. It's a blast!

-- Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers

This excellent book is written for the general reader and is based on deep and solid research and thorough knowledge. Author Saltzman wears her learning lightly and her prose sparkles as she chronicles the nearly forty year (roughly from the mid-1880's until 1921) "raid" by American collectors with large personal fortunes on the great Old Masters privately held in Europe. She does this by concentrating on the preeminent collectors such as Henry Marquand, Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer and Henry Clay Frick and others, together with the consultants and dealers who advised them, sought to manipulate them and sometimes were less than honest with them. The competition that resulted is the basis for several of the great art museums in the US today.

Although some of the collectors were motivated in part by a desire to give America a great culture to match its rising power, most of them were fiercely competitive with one another, each seeking to outdo the others and possess the recognized top collection in terms of beauty or monetary worth or both. Each wanted to have the most "great works" by the "greatest artists." The only restraint was the size of their respective fortunes, which sometimes (as in the case of Granger) imposed limits. The narration is enlivened by adroit sketches of the lives and personalities of the salient persons involved in the race to acquire (by the collectors) and to become rich and influential (dealers and others). Saltzman is equally adroit in describing the power, appeal and importance of the great pictures the collectors sought.

Although always discreet, Saltzman's pen portraits are filled with incisive observations on character and psychology. Marquand, for example, emerges as more altruistic in motive than most while Frick obsessively focused on amassing the most valuable collection in the US (priding himself on driving as hard a bargain as possible for each acquisition). Frick, in keeping with his personality and his occasionally ruthless business career, created his own posthumous museum where his collection would be displayed in his NYC mansion just as it had been in his lifetime. Granger did much the same thing with her collection. The famous connoisseur Bernard Berenson, for his part, comes across as something less than honest and straightforward in his interactions with dealers and collectors.

This whole episode is well known to art historians but much less so among general readers. This brilliant book should remedy that.

Old Masters, New World is 'light' reading by design, popular cultural history, an entertaining group biography of the Daddy Warbucks art collectors who emerged from America's Gilded Age with millions to spend on the sort of Art that would dignify their wealth and possibly erase the public image of their rapacious greed. In effect, the Economic Elite wielded their millions to assert themselves as the Cultural Elite, with the toady help of the Intellectual Elite, for the paternalistic benefit of the 99% of Americans who weren't Elite in any fashion. WE the latter thank them, to be sure, when we worshipfully elbow each other through the museums of New York, Boston, DC, Chicago - the mausoleums of their inordinate pride.

The great purchasers portrayed in this book, AKA the Robber Barons, were Henry Marquand, Isabella Stewart Gardiner, JP Mrgan, Harry Havemeyer, and -- most vividly and extensively -- Henry Clay Frick, the arch-villain of labor exploitation who callously incited the most violent incident of strike-breaking in American history. Author Cynthia Saltzman treats most of her moneybag subjects with a certain gentle 'detachment' but she plainly finds Frick hard to love. Her brief account of the Homestead Strike is less condemnatory than her depiction of Frick's egotism, his monumental sense of entitlement, his stingy bullying of living artists and art-dealers in his pursuit of the works of the dead Masters whose portraits of aristocrats 'validated' his own grandeur. The museum that Frick built, on the east side of Central Park in New York, by the by, is one of my favorites in the world. I go there whenever I have a 'day off' in the Big Apple, to gaze lovingly at the Vermeers, El Grecos, and Turners. I try not to disrupt my appreciation with thoughts about the odd compatibility of art and evil.

Saltzman also depicts the art-dealers and professional connoisseurs who selected and supplied the "Old Masters" to their eager American clients, whom they did their very best to 'fleece' as often as possible. As usual, the 'aesthetes' held the plutocrats in amused contempt. The most contemptuous, and contemptible, of the lot was Bernard Berenson, who cozened and cheated Isabella Stewart Gardiner shamelessly. Berenson's books on the painters of the Italian Renaissance were still part of the 'canon' of genteel genius when I was a student in Boston in the early 1960's, though his reputation had already been tarnished. Even today I hate to treat Berenson disloyally; after all, I've spent several exhilarating sojourns at his villa 'I Tatti' near Florence, which is now operated as an institute by Harvard University. But he was a self-serving scamp for certain.

"Old Masters, New World" is not a history of art or a examination of aesthetics. It's a social history of the extended generation, from the end of the Civil War in the USA to the catastrophe of World War 1, which saw America rise to global economic might, and subsequently to the crude cultural arrogance portrayed in the novels of Henry James and Mark Twain. James, as one would expect, pops out of the closet here and there in Saltzman's narrative.

Saltzman writes deftly and colorfully, making her scholarship pleasant enough to read merely as a tale of adventure in the marketplace. It's definitely a worthwhile choice for anyone who enjoys a museum visit now and then, and who has ever wondered how the immense collections of the Met or the National Gallery were assembled. It's a story of pillage, to be blunt. The book's subtitle says it plainly: America's RAID on Europe's great pictures.

Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures
A lovely mix of gossip, history and skullduggery.

You can go to any large American art museum and see Old Master paintings: Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer, and more are all well represented in our nation, even though the painters worked and sold their works in various European nations centuries ago. It might seem that such aesthetic riches would naturally spread themselves to our nation, but that the paintings are now on American walls only happened around the turn of the last century. It was not a matter of sharing the Old Masters all around the world, but was a product of deliberate, aggressive acquisition. In _Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures_ (Viking), art historian Cynthia Saltzman has told how the flood of Old Masters to America happened, looking at specific masterpieces, collectors, and dealers. It is an amazing story of the time when English aristocrats (most of the acquisitions described here came from Britain) were low on rents, and low on land value because American grain was so much cheaper. On the other side of the ocean, certain individual Americans acquired huge wealth due to the Industrial Revolution. Looked at this way, it seems a simple matter of one side having the goods and the other having the money, but there was also competition among the collectors and dealers, all of which Saltzman describes with verve.

After the Civil War and during the industrial boom, Americans began concentrating on culture. When Henry Gurdon Marquand, the railroad and banking tycoon, was in England in 1886 on an acquisition trip for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was in a private gallery, not nearly the finest in Britain, but Saltzman writes that it "was grander than the hodgepodge of mostly mediocre pictures lodged in two rooms at the back of the Metropolitan's second floor." Looking at a van Dyke in the gallery, Marquand realized it was finer than any painting he had seen in America, including his own extensive collection. Marquand came away with four Old Masters, and thus the boom began. Another of the collectors profiled here was Henry Clay Frick, the violently anti-union head of Carnegie Steel. He liked portraits and landscapes; he never purchased a nude. Charles Schwab, another Carnegie partner, observed, "He seemed to lavish on art all the passion that he might have bestowed on human beings." Tycoons buying art is one story, and a fairly familiar one, but Saltzman also pays attention to the different dealers and advisors who helped enable the purchases. Professional art scholar Bernard Berenson figures often here, usually helping to arrange sales to Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. Berenson was a social climber who clearly loved his partnerships with his wealthy clients, and made himself invaluable to them. When Peter Widener, the aging trolley car magnate, needed his collection evaluated, Berenson's wife described the collector "trotting around and saying meekly `Mr. Berenson, is this a gallery picture, or a furniture picture, or must it go to the cellar?'"

The art that was brought over here served to bolster collectors' self-worth. Sure, they were just manifesting greed but in a different way than in their workaday lives. As the collectors took more paintings over the decades, they complained about how much the prices were going up, but they did not complain about how much more valuable their assets were becoming. By the time the boom was over, most of them donated the works to museums, or made their own museums. A case could be made that these Old Master paintings provided an immediate art education for millions of Americans, that American artists were heavily influenced by them, and that American art in the last half of the twentieth century thereby became the most influential in the world. Saltzman's book, with its written portraits of collectors and dealers, provides an astonishing picture of an art craze that affected history, and the likes of which will not be seen again. We are unlikely ever to hear anyone speak of taste in acquisitions like Isabella Stewart Gardner did, to her advisor Berenson, when Rembrandt was every collector's favorite: "You know, or rather, you don't know, that I adore Giotto, and really, I don't adore Rembrandt. I only like him."

This is a marvelous account of how America managed, in only 60 years; to acquire a major collection of old masters paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the National Gallery, and my personal favorite, the Frick Museum. There were a number of factors involved. Not only were the rich getting richer in America, but the old line aristocracy was getting poorer due to electoral reform and people voting for their own interests. In order to pay high taxes on the wealthy, works of art had to be sold in the event that a stray American heiress could not be found to marry the second son of the family.

The cast of characters in this book is impressive. There is Isabella Stewart Gardner herself who manages to get in on the ground floor in acquiring an impressive array of masterpieces. Like all the other members of this story, it was her insistence on quality that led her to seek out some of the most impressive works of art available to the collector at the turn of the last century. Gardner unfortunately was unable really to take advantage of some of the paintings on offer because she did not command the vast resources of some of her rivals in the acquisition of great pictures. She would have had more resources had she not relied on Bernard Berenson who frequently would increase the price of a picture to permit himself several thousand dollars in walking around money. This practice of Berenson was brought to light by more than one of his biographers. One of Berenson's fellow art dealers, Joseph Duveen was not much better. Berenson was a scholar of Italian painting; Duveen was decorator who was looking at paintings as a way to sell antique French and Italian furniture (not all of which was really antique).

Probably the most interesting person involved in the acquisition of paintings was Henry Clay Frick who eventually constructed what became the Frick museum. Though vastly more wealthy than Mrs. Gardner, he was always anxious to try and undercut the seller, being every bit as difficult in the purchase of painting as he was in breaking strikes.

Along with Frick, there is J.P. Morgan who was so rich he kept his collection of Old Masters in London until he could persuade congress to cancel the import duties on works of art over 20 years old. It is a reflection both on Morgan and congress that it was cheaper to get congress to pass a law in the gilded age than to pay import duties.

If anyone is interesting in learning how so many fine works of art came to the United States between 1860-1920, this a great book to read, filled as it is with all the intrigue of one of the deals that Frick, Gardner, Morgan or any of the other millionaires in the book would have struck.

There is a lot of information in this book and it is well researched. Perhaps a bit too much on the gossipy side about the patrons and the descriptions of some of the works of art are too long-winded with flowery phrases but the book is essentially fascinating.

I found this story fascinating both as a character study and a history of how America came into possession of so many great European works of art. I have an in depth background in art but this gave me a totally new perspective about the people and the works they came to possess. Like so many other art majors we had been led to subscribe to the "connoisseurship" of Berenson and Duveen but this book gave us an insider's view of their wheeling and dealing. I found it a page turner and a thrilling account of this period in American history

A superior introduction to the profound shift from Europe to the United States in the economic balance of power governing the business of fine art.

With the riches arising from the astounding growth of the U.S. domestic market, the very wealthy of Boston, Pittsburgh, and, above all, New York went on a highly competitive spending spree in the search for cultural glory, thereby enriching our nation to the present day in terms of Old Masters, which are now displayed at such world-class art museums as Fenway Court, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan, and the National Gallery of Art.

Cynthia Saltzman is a talented writer, with a keen gift for describing individual works of art. Her book will be enjoyed by readers interested in the colorful individuals on both sides of the Atlantic who were involved over one hundred years ago in the hunt for great European paintings.