The art historian and art dealer Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) was the first of an art-world type that’s still with us: the big-time, wheeling-and-dealing broker, operating in an international market but always under a faint cloud of suspicion. Berenson was also the last of an old art-world type: the meticulous connoisseur. He discovered hundreds of previously neglected works of Italian Renaissance art, authenticated their authorship and provenance, carefully documented them, and—not least—guided much of the greatest of that art into the mansions of über-rich Americans. For them, collecting Renaissance art was proof that they were cultured as well as wealthy.
Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade
By Rachel Cohen (Yale University Press)
The upside of Berenson’s sometimes sketchy business dealings is that a lot of rich Americans to whom he sold art eventually bequeathed their collections to American museums—where we, the public, now enjoy them.
Known for his erudition and astonishing visual memory, Berenson developed his own method of studying and identifying pictures—which, when boiled down, amounted to looking long and hard to ascertain what he called their “tactile values” and “life enhancement” properties.
Measured by modern scientific assessment methods, this approach seems wholly unreliable, even like quackery. But in an age when there was no systematic cataloging of Renaissance art, Berenson was correct in his attributions about 80 percent of the time. Since the trade in art was—and still is—an unregulated business, where forgers lurk around every corner and pretentious clients will pay through the nose if convinced that a work of art is authentic, those who relied on Berenson’s eye mostly benefited.
Starting in the 1960s, Berenson’s style of connoisseurship waned among art historians and was gradually replaced by the sociopolitical analysis found in poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Lately, however, connoisseurship is making a comeback, as the study of premodern art increasingly emphasizes the object itself as a source of cultural information. Add to that the creation of new graduate curatorial and art-marketing programs, such as those at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, as well as the increased study of historiography, and we can see why the publication of this book—the first biography of Berenson in 25 years—is quite timely.
Extensive literature on Berenson already exists, including Ernest Samuels’s scholarly two-volume study, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1979) and Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend (1987), and Meryle Secrest’s Being Bernard Berenson (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979). There are also several excellent essays on Berenson, including Robert Hughes’s penetrating “Only in America” and Meyer Schapiro’s coldly unsympathetic “Mr. Berenson’s Values.”
What makes this biography, by Rachel Cohen, a professor of writing at Sarah Lawrence College, stand out from other Berensonia is the intense attention she gives to Berenson’s conflicted Jewishness.
At the age of 10, Berenson emigrated with his family from a Lithuanian shtetl to Boston. A natural talker and charmer, he became a precocious student who, despite his poverty, gained access to Boston’s decidedly non-Jewish cultural elite. In his yearning to be what he could never be—an aristocratic aesthete living off inherited wealth—he cut himself off from his Jewish roots. Cohen persuasively argues that this rejection of his past turned Berenson into a self-alienated man.
Even before he graduated from Harvard, in 1887, Berenson had converted to Protestantism, and then Catholicism—conversions, Cohen argues, that took place primarily for aesthetic, not religious, reasons. Influenced especially by the critic Walter Pater, who emphasized “art for art’s sake,” Berenson was drawn to Catholicism’s beautiful rituals. After college, Berenson headed to Europe, where he remained—save for a couple of trips back to the United States to promote his career as an art historian and art dealer—until his death.
By 1907, Berenson (with the help of his wife, Mary Costelloe) had established his scholarly art-history credentials by writing several books on Italian Renaissance painting. But his need to make money led him to dealing in art. The problem, Cohen writes, was that Berenson “desired money and abhorred trade.”
Beginning in 1912, Berenson signed secret contracts with the flashy art dealer Joseph Duveen, regularly renewed for 25 years, which gave him a cut from the sale of any painting he authenticated for Duveen. Although the money poured in, the conflict between loving art for its own sake and selling it for vast sums (giving Berenson a beautiful lifestyle at I Tatti, his renovated Italian villa, near Florence) caused Berenson terrible anguish his entire life.
This is where the tone of a Berenson biography gets tricky. How much empathy are we supposed to feel for a man who, by authenticating paintings, increased their prices as well as his profit, simply because he was a Jewish art dealer in an anti-Semitic world? Cohen chalks up Berenson’s questionable business behavior mostly to his “conflicted” situation. She attributes actual cheating to him only once, when he took a commission on both ends of a purchase by Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston patroness who gave him his start in both the Gentile social world and the art-dealing business, and for whom, over the years, he bought several Renaissance masterpieces.
Although Cohen’s insights into Berenson’s character are mostly compelling, occasionally she founders. Berenson had a “strange antipathy” to Leonardo, she tells us, yet then writes, “Perhaps Berenson in some way identified with Leonardo.” While both men kowtowed to powerful people, Berenson’s situation as a successful Jewish dealer who sold mostly Catholic art mostly to Protestants does not seem close to suggesting that he would “identify” with Leonardo—a procrastinating genius who was a bit of a failure in his own life but whose art nevertheless inspired awe.
Worse, Cohen’s empathy for Berenson leads her to bowdlerize the self-loathing of a Jew who could opine, as Berenson did:
[There is] the puzzling character of the Jews ... [and] comprehend them we never shall. Their character and their interests are too vitally opposed to our own to permit the existence of that intelligent sympathy between us and them which is necessary for comprehension.
Here Cohen merely remarks, “his tone becomes strangely self-alienated.” Later she temporizes by abstraction:
The capacity to convert was part of his character, and his desires to convert and be converted—to ideas, countries, religions, schools or art—stemmed in part from his childhood sense that you really could shed an old world and leave it behind forever.
Although this biography of a complex man is itself understandably complex (the book could use a chronology), commendably Cohen eschews art-history jargon. Nevertheless she relies relentlessly on the conditional tense, which not only creates chronological confusion but also leads to an enervating parade of sentences containing the word “would"—as in, “Later, he would write to Mary,” or “Berenson, who would eventually own three editions,” or, “This tendency would become more pronounced.”
Despite that rhetorical tic, Cohen makes a strong case that by rejecting his Jewish roots and reinventing himself, Berenson became a thoroughly modern man who, in his tortured, caught-between-cultures way, accepted the fact that dealing great art inevitably mixes the sordid with the sublime.
