On Being Bernard Berenson
Landes, David
ON BEING BERNARD BERENSON Bernhard Berenson, ne Valvrojenski, was born in 1865 in Butrimanz, a village near Vilna in Lithuania. We know little about his early years. We do not even know his birth...
...a paragon of civilization and good taste, and critics paid for their temerity with opprobrium Meyer Schapiro...
...Ernest Samuels entitles the first chapter of his Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur "A Lithuanian Childhood"—historically anachronistic, spiritually misleading, but geographically accurate and true to Berenson's selective memory...
...In 1907, the year that he purchased I Tatti for f6,000 down (equal to $300,000 of our money, plus much renovation), Berenson changed sides...
...This sense of failure, a guilty sense, makes me squirm when I hear myself spoken of as a "successful man" and as having made "a success of my life...
...But reading his application suggests another reason: it is full of self-praise, self pity ("I have never been anything but miserable at the thought of the burden I have been to [my father] from the expenses of my unremunerative education"), and complaint (he got only 80 per cent from Prof...
...2 Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson (New York...
...Jewish sponsors might have been more tolerant, because with Jews, sponging by scholars is something of an institution...
...was not soliciting business while she helped him| cultivate the "Squil-lionaires" [their word] whose company he tolerated...
...There was an outpouring of thoughts and reminiscences, in guise and in lieu of autobiography...
...as he was known to friends and writers, and his wife Mary were tireless correspondents, so that letters to and from them are everywhere...
...he was what we would now call a hawk...
...al., the more so as Duveen at least was a notorious improver of his merchandise...
...another from the University of Florence...
...But he needed the money, and so long as he served as agent for the buyer, he could justify his role by the services he rendered...
...Berenson was able to travel in style, to send remittances to his family in America, to bring his sisters to Europe, to begin his own art collection, to move from small room to spacious flat to country villa...
...If Episcopalian Protestantism was the right thing in Back Bay Boston, it was less appropriate to Italy...
...Besides the qualities of grandeur, aloofness and impersonality, besides the qualities of drawing and modelling which we find in all the authentic works, your 'Crucifixion' shows qualities of colour and handling that are a revelation...
...His father pushed his pedlar's wagon from door to door...
...He came to an understanding with Joe Duveen, the most active art dealer of the day, to place Duveen's stock among Berenson's circle of clients...
...Put briefly, it says that Berenson spent his life running away from his Jewish birth and education and paid for this Jearly in misdirected talent, shame ? Xi'ill...
...5 Sylvia Sprigge, Berenson (Boston...
...268-69, the amusing story of a visit by Duveen to his sister's luxurious house in Paris...
...He writes in fact: "I hated Zionism until Hitler's attempt to destroy the Jews...
...I Tatti, Settignano...
...those he did not work for resented his power in the market place...
...This volume takes the story to 1904...
...his mother cooked for boarders to eke out the father's meager earnings...
...His aim was more to be than to do—to be a gentleman, to live elegantly, to be surrounded by beautiful things, to be a living work of art...
...Buyers, sellers and intermediaries all often have a common interest in creating a myth and avoiding the truth...
...Yet he told the Countess Cicogna (Secrest, p. 394): "You only see the end of my life, but not what I could have been...
...Returned to England, Bernhard's enthusiasm rapidly cooled...
...Berenson's Values," Encounter, XVI, l(Jan...
...except for Bellini's Resurrection, "where he gives us a sky with crimson cloudlets that revive and inspire us with a fellow feeling for Him who rose from the dead as triumphant as the sun over darkness...
...now was the time of honors and recompense: doctorates at Oxford and Paris, in absentia...
...Although of small size it is large in scale and produces nearly the same impression as his famous frescoes at Arezzo...
...But this was also the time of introspection, of weighing up what one had done and might have done, what one had been and might have been...
...Like Mary earlier, he said he had done what he had done because he had to make a living: "My only excuse is, if the comparison is not blasphemous, that like Saint Paul with his tent-making and Spinoza with his glass-polishing, I too needed a means of livelihood" (Sketch for a Self-portrait, p. 47...
...What differences there are, are rather in favour of your painting...
...Even so, it is disquieting to say the least that of 69 paintings with problematic attributions, 21 were promoted from a lesser to a greater hand, 41 have since been downgraded, and four now look to be fakes...
...was over eighty now, the fires banked, but his eye was as keen and tongue as flirtatious as ever...
...We are reminded of Giorgione, and, indeed nothing could be more Giorgionesque in colour than, for instance, the soldiers throwing dice for the raiment of Our Lord-Other paintings of Piero must have had such strong, beautiful coloring, but elsewhere it has faded, leaving paler and feebler tints behind...
...That will procure him respect from others the world over and of his neighbours in particular...
...Another irony: the name Epicurus in Hebrew, Apikoros, had come to be used of someone who derided the Law and the Rabbinic tradition...
...he was, after all, able on another occasion to tell a visitor that he did not like "crypto-dealers" in art.5 Was he excluding himself...
...Their character and 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...
...Once Berenson broke with Duveen, he withdrew into what Clark described as "a sort of retirement—almost forgotten as a writer, much less in demand as an expert...
...November 18...
...The terrible events of those years changed Berenson...
...Such are the anomalies of the law of property and inheritance, i Apparently the papers will pass to Harvard in 1984, al which time they will presumably be opened to all qualified scholars...
...lose a few...
...Harvard will not award honorary degrees to anyone who cannot make it to the Tercentenary Theater in Harvard Yard...
...Berenson's first years in Europe had been paid for by generous friends, who saw him as a deserving project...
...Some point to the shawl as evidence that he died a Jew...
...von Anrep—to paraphrase Sexrt'si—look the position thai he was nor free to grant her access to the Archive, probably bemuse of the commitment to Samuch Vo matter...
...The dealers in question deny this...
...The trouble with this sort of rationalization is that it only makes the hole deeper...
...Sylvia Sprigge, in her apologetic Berenson: A Biography (Boston, 1960), a semi-authorized work, provides us with an example of the kind of letter Berenson would write for purposes of authentication...
...an enjoyer of others' creations, not a creator...
...His idea is to have poems on 'modern subjects—Panama, the Tammany victory, the strife of Labour and Capital, and so on...
...Secrest adds a sequel: the painting was subsequently donated to the National Gallery in Washington, which has always considered it a Giorgione...
...Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979...
...They needed advice and were ready to pay for it...
...Even while he was still serving solely as adviser to buyers, he sometimes allowed himself to accept a dubious attribution, perhaps in order not to disappoint someone who wanted to believe the best of a picture in any case...
...Berenson, or B.B...
...Mary said later that they were trapped and unhappy to be put in such a position...
...and one can only assume that like Sherlock Holmes's dog that didn't bark, this silence on the part of an alert, articulate, politically interested observer was not mere forget-fulness...
...Without seeing many others, it is impossible to say how representative this one is, although she obviously chose it as a fair example and calls it "typical...
...an arbiter, not a player...
...85, No...
...Secrest shows—and this is surely her most important and sensational finding— that Berenson's judgment was significantly biased by his concealed role as middleman...
...I'm quite sure that he never yielded to pressure, as so many of his fellow experts did...
...How could it be otherwise...
...and the fact of his survival turned him into something of a monument historique...
...Duveen bought it for a fortune and sold it for a bigger fortune in the face of Berenson's opinion...
...Berenson s long-time secretary, companion, friend and literary executor, "to write of his life from the inside, so to speak...
...One thing he quickly assimilated from his new environment was the easy, patronizing anti-Semitism that marked the "polite" society of the day...
...To be sure, sheias been able to scrutinize the records of only a portion of these, and one cannot be certain that this portion is representative...
...Her list of acknowledgments Li an extraordinary compilation of hundreds of people and institutions that provided her with documentation—to the point where she was almost as well Informed as Samuels of the private as wtil as public side of Berenson's life There art thing* in the Samuels m/umr it would have helped her to know: but the reverse is also true \(ean-while she had two trumps: her decision to treat the whole of Berenson's lift as a unit gave her a more penetrating perspective on his character and aspirations: and her independence gave her the freedom to be outspoken...
...Bernhard began to make money, and his earnings increased with his reputation as a connoisseur...
...As he may be very useful to us financially, B.B...
...8 Berenson would not have disagreed...
...She reminded him in a letter of "my scheme . . . that thee should be nice to thy mother and sisters and that thee should extend thy 'relations' with millionaires like Davis" (Samuels, p. 196...
...Why didn't Harvard help him...
...yet he knew he had not, and that the appearances of success had been won by precisely that commercial enterprise and cunning that the fine people he cultivated imputed to the people he had tried to leave behind...
...Tell Frank [the obtuse angle in his matrimonial triangle] I mean 'business' at last...
...David Landes is Professor of Economics at Harvard, specializing in economic and social history...
...With Trans-Jordania Israel could support millions and make her authority felt in Cairo as well as Baghdad and Damascus and be a state even ex-Great Britain would want to be allied with.1 It was easier to settle with the Jews who had died and those who had survived than with himself...
...His role model was Walter Pater's esthete, Marius the Epicurean...
...Samuels HIW given access to Berenson s personal papers and those of his wife, and his biography reflects the abundance of material at his disposal...
...But I suppose that great pressures were put upon him to treat doubtful pictures optimistically, and, unfortunately for his reputation, his judgment did genuinely become more catholic and more inclusive during these years: he became more interested in the artist's invention and less in his execution...
...I trust you will let me know the ultimate destination of this most precious painting...
...To portray him as an innocent in these matters is the verbal equivalent of turning maps of Polynesia into Titians...
...his published lists of Italian painters and their works became the bible of dealers, collectors and curators...
...Name changes consecrated the rupture: Alter Valvrojenski became Albert Berenson...
...It may be this forbidden, uncomfortable grief that accounts for Berenson's changed attitude toward Zionism...
...After all, one had to live...
...250) feels he was keeping his inner conflict at bay "by such distorted and Machiavellian reasoning...
...Cecil von Anrep...
...Bernhard (he changed it to Bernard in World War I) was ten when the family came to Boston...
...Secrest was not allowed to see the Berenson papers...
...and indeed, he was tempted to call the book Dippings into Self but found the title too awkward...
...The move broke ties to family (the grandparents who had them over every Friday night for Sabbath dinner), village and custom and allowed Bernhard's father, a vehement Voltairian (that sardonic Judeophobe would have been amused by the loyalty of this Jewish admirer), to forbid his wife and children any further practice of the Jewish religion...
...But only with other Jews: he had another image for the goyim, and it was too late to change...
...Sicky Mariano had died intestate, and ownership of the archive passed to her sister and then to her sister's son...
...Now it is so natural to pray, to kneel down, to cross myself, and to use many of the symbols as if I had done so all my life" (letter to Mary of 1 February 1891, Samuels, p. 136...
...Anita Brookner ends her 7X5 review of the Samuels and Secrest biographies by giving Berenson the last word: a memoir at the age of 90 of a Tuscan dawn, "flat quiet light, mother-of-pearl tone with touches here and there of rose in the sky...
...Bernhard's mother Judith became Eudice or perhaps Julia (there was apparently some hesitation between Greek and Roman affiliations...
...Only his cherished Harvard was missing...
...The one introspective theme that recurs in these works and in some of the reported conversations is a sense of failure...
...Yet no sooner the confession given, it was withdrawn...
...Berenson had a lot to learn, but he learned fast...
...So the postwar Berenson recollected his Jewish ancestry, spoke of the primacy of his family in Butrimanz, renewed ties to Jewish relatives, harked back to an older puritan tradition than that of New England...
...Mary was nothing if not candid...
...That may seem strange coming from someone who died at the peak of his fame and prestige...
...The spiritual loss was great and in consequence I have never regarded myself as other than a failure...
...Berenson was apparently unable to do that...
...On a trip to New York in 1920 they were put up in the apartment of a young socialite whose walls were hung with Duveen's paintings—none of them paid for...
...6 Letter of December 29,1939, to Margaret Barr, wife of the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, cited Secrest, p. 349...
...B.B...
...Mary helped a great deal here...
...Bernhard was sheltered from care and disturbance and allowed to read...
...She might have cited, as evidence on the point, a letter written by Berenson from the very apartment to Professor Paul Sachs at Harvard asking for leads to possible clients: "It would be very nice if you gave us words of introduction to your relations and friends who collect...
...William James, whereas a student whom he had coached and "who knew nothing at all about the course" had gotten 92...
...He needed larger quarters: in 1899, after some years of what was then seen as sinful companionship, he married Mary Smith Costelloe, emancipated daughter of an old Quaker family, mother of two, widow of an Irish Catholic barrister who had refused to give her a divorce...
...Secrest does report stories, though, that Berenson took double commission, from sellers as well as buyers —a real no-no, though in my opinion very widespread...
...Berenson was only interested in profits...
...is too funny when business is talked," Mary wrote sister Senda from Koln, where they had gone to negotiate new financial arrangements with Duveen and his lawyer...
...If you haven't inherited money, you have to make it...
...Berenson found that more and more Americans were desirous of acquiring European art...
...Duveen would pay Berenson a retainer and a share of the price...
...But Berenson was more than simply pro-Israel...
...put it very well in a conversation recorded by Umberto Morra (he was talking about someone else, of course [D'Annunzio], not himself): To tell lies because they are useful, or through sheer malice, is not a great sin...
...According to this story, Berenson offered to trade an authentication of the Nativity as a Giorgione for a partnership in the firm...
...As his life lengthened, the years seemed to shorten, and Berenson drove himself to leave something behind that went beyond his works of connois-seurship...
...It is not clear that he ever resolved the contradictions, ever found peace with himself...
...What ordinary people might consider incompatible might not have looked that way to Berenson, who had never had trouble distinguishing between labels and commitments...
...Berenson (unwittingly...
...they had no observable effect on B.B...
...while those who were adults in the thirties and forties find it hard to justify their inaction or their inability to prevent or mitigate the catastrophe...
...Tfie two groups speak with different voices, but their judgments are convergent...
...It was as if Spinoza and Saint Paul had tried to make a business and a way of social success out of philosophy and religion...
...Bernhard, oldest son, young genius, Jewish-American prince, threw himself into the New World of opportunity with a passion...
...The wheeling-and-dealing was over...
...She is not an authorized biographer of Bernard Beren-Min Such a person does exist in the person of Ernest Samuels, whose first volume on the subject appeared only a few months before Secrest's...
...as he himself boasted late in life, they came to the United States with his visa on their passport...
...So I remain skeptical about my personality . . . expecting little and trying to be thankful for that, the serenity for which I am now admired...
...The art critics on the other hand were often beholden to him and in any event preferred to keep their animadversions within their own community...
...The hatred he expends he gets back in full measure...
...The idea was that the Berensons would invite friends and clients in and push the goods...
...As an intellect and esthete he despised or affected to despise the commercialization of art...
...Berenson's judgment as an expert...
...In his 1957 list of Italian paintings, Berenson finally conceded...
...She also has courage Berenson in his later years became something of a "wise man of the mountain...
...He knows the whole gamut of society and its milieux, but everywhere he has only enemies...
...Loeser told him he had lost his sense of humor...
...continued...
...We have an ideal of life," wrote Mary, "that alas requires us to have enough money for ourselves and the people we love, not to have to worry about it" (Samuels, p. 414...
...He did well by them...
...Even his carefully programmed way of life, his royal guests, his dressing for dinner, his chauffered rides, his fastidiously tailored clothes, pre-warmed wrist watch, his witty repartee never erased the fact that he was an outsider, not to the manner born...
...I Dr...
...In an article on contemporary Jewish fiction (Andover Review, 1888) he marked his distance: It is only by a study of Jewish institutions and literature that we shall begin to understand the puzzling character of the Jews...
...He writes of it in Sketch (pp...
...146, 395...
...These arrangements paid handsomely...
...Berenson went to Europe for a year...
...How did they handle these contradictions...
...By the time she set about to write his biography...
...Harvard, 1979...
...1961), p. 58...
...Or was he playing a little joke on his guest by a disguised autocritique...
...The asperity of the early lists is replaced by an almost exaggerated magnanimity...
...he minces no words (Secrest, p. 257): If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole...
...A psychologist would say he was doing what he liked best: Berenson was a consumer at heart, not a producer...
...B.B., ever sensitive to the imagery and passion of sacred art, was persuaded that he was a Catholic at heart...
...For Berenson this meant coming to terms among other things with his Jewish roots and the persona he thought he had destroyed...
...to this end...
...3 Most serious, however, for Berenson's reputation was the effect of monetary interests on his integrity as scholar and expert...
...He cultivated his teachers, whom he lent books to as well as borrowed from, and through them and his fellow students gained entry into the salons of the Back Bay...
...In England, the Catholic churches were less beautiful, the art less present, the sky greyer, ideas freer...
...but as prices rose, were more and more afraid of being deceived...
...First-class travel, ritualistic entertaining (a ceaseless round), study, art and book acquisitions—all had to be financed...
...and Secresl wrote and went everywhere to see them...
...from the wrong company...
...All of this put the Berensons in the wretched position of living a corrosive, potentially scandalous lie...
...She was the realist, the buffer between B.B...
...Secrest tells, pp...
...400): "A day scarcely passes without my feeling deeply penitential about my life...
...Some of America's most active collectors came to use him as their agent, Isabella Gardner foremost...
...Samuels, who came to know Berenson at I Tatti in his last years, was invited by Kicky Mariano...
...Bernhard found the study of art weltering in ignorance, guesswork, and fraud...
...and that one can be too ingratiating...
...He was surely the best...
...Her prose is not so smooth and well-organized as that ot Samuels, but it Li a lot more pungent...
...Selected Letters, p. 268...
...His features fade into what Nicky and I call his 'Russian steppe' expression and he seems to be thousands of miles away" (Secrest, p. 308...
...It is astonishing how interesting and un-boring society becomes when you have something to get out of it...
...He combined the method of Giovanni Morelli, the great pioneer in identifying and cataloguing Italian works of art (look at the small details), with his own extraordinary discernment and empathy...
...A. K. McComb, ed...
...Another thing was that, not having worked in a gallery, he hadn't seen enough of picture-restorers and didn't realise what marvellous craftsmen they are...
...but he was irresistibly drawn to the enjoyment and study of art...
...Meryle Secrest is living testimony to the ad\antages of adversity...
...291) has her saying, "If a person is a worm, you step on him"—no source given...
...Business also required the Berensons to connive at arrangements that some might perceive as unethical...
...Presumably because there was a better candidate...
...The merchants did not like him much: those he worked for were not always happy to pay his substantial commissions...
...It is not clear whether he was trying to "pass" during these years: Meryle Secrest implies that he concealed his Jewish origins and family...
...To write a good autobiography, one has to be prepared to look deep within, preferably through untinted glass...
...If one is tearing up one's roots, one hardly wants them trailing behind...
...Not until a court case of 1929 was the secret revealed...
...and they say that he accepted the last rites, not out of conviction or with a thought to Pascal's wager, but out of consideration for Nicky Mariano and the other Catholics who had ministered to him in final years...
...Mary Berenson was dead, her place taken by Nicky Mariano, devoted friend and servitor, ever keen to protect B.B...
...in a letter to his patron Isabella Gardner he gibed that they were probably selling old clothes to one another...
...And here is Kenneth Clark, long Berenson's protege and guest at I Tatti, telling the British radio public J about the late artmaster...
...He had never gotten on well with his father...
...ON BEING BERNARD BERENSON Bernhard Berenson, ne Valvrojenski, was born in 1865 in Butrimanz, a village near Vilna in Lithuania...
...We do not even know his birth name, which like that of all the other Jewish children of Butrimanz, was a Hebrew name...
...When Harvard chose not to award him a traveling fellowship on graduation, some of his friends chipped in to buy him a year abroad...
...Behind that calculated sweetness a high old roaring goes on...
...Writing novels and waiting on publishers was not to his taste...
...He was also Associate Director of the Fogg Art Museum in Harvard University...
...Houghton Mifflin, 1960) p. 269...
...All those years of acceptance of and participation in genteel anti-Semitism came back to haunt him...
...Berenson saw such refugees, she writes (p...
...Berenson would advise, authenticate, propose...
...There was more to Mary Smith than met the eye...
...And in another context: "I have not borne the fruit that as a plant I should have brought to full ripeness" (Ibid., 360...
...that the rules of good society require prevarication along with candor...
...The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson (Boston, 1964), p. 87...
...I Tatti became a place of pilgrimage, drawing important statesmen, art students, collectors and aspirant esthetes alike from all over: the King and Queen of Sweden, Harry Truman, Kenneth Clark, John Walker, Jacqueline Bouvier, Paul Getty...
...Perhaps...
...This is what Mary on another occasion called "a matter of bread and butter" (Secrest, p. 247...
...McComb, ed...
...Loeser need not have worried...
...Truly yours, Bernard Berenson...
...Even Berenson could not gull Berenson that easily...
...Meanwhile the education and adaptation of B.B...
...The trouble should have begun in the thirties, with the rise of Hitlerism and an official anti-Semitism that one had thought forever exorcised in an enlightened, liberal Europe...
...First, by the usual device of two faces...
...It is worth citing, not only for what it says but also how it says it: The disadvantage of doing an unauthorized or unofficial biography is that one ? not given access to useful information The advantage ? temptation?I is that one it free to \a\ ¦that one likes To be sure, records are often opened to authorized biographers without strings attached: indeed, no self-respecting biographer will accept help on any other terms...
...When he went, he thought to become a novelist...
...Duveen refused, and the two men parted acrimoniously...
...Back in 1894, when she sent Bernhard home to America for his long-postponed reunion with his family, she had "foreseen" his killing two birds with one stone...
...The handling of your little picture reminds me of Cezanne...
...Secrest (p...
...Such dependency, however, could not be allowed to go on indefinitely, if only because the good people whom Bernhard most wanted to impress were conditioned to look on spongers with disfavor...
...but if he were in a cage with one of his detractors, he would not be the one to be devoured...
...Then in good time Israel must conquer Transjordania of which perfide Albion needlessly treacherously deprived it the very moment it promised the Jews a "National home...
...Now the experiment of a Jewish state is a necessity that can't be avoided" (Sprigge, p. 26, n. 3...
...348), "as carriers of an intellectual pestilence that would contaminate every American mind it touched...
...Albert and Julia just vanish from the biographies...
...He read so well that he gained admission, first to Boston University and then to Harvard, where he rapidly acquired the reputation of a prodigy...
...And he saw them everywhere: "He would not be surprised by an Act of Congress requiring all lectures, lessons, articles, and books dealing with art to be given in Yiddish...
...He had lived a Catholic in his fashion—no belief, but great empathy—and he died Catholic and perhaps a trace Jew, still in his fashion...
...At Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton had spurned him for his ambition, and Berenson could still feel the wound over half d century later...
...Thus, in a letter of 3 June 1951 to Lawrence Berenson, a Jewish cousin and his attorney: Israel must, in my opinion, first and foremost become the most powerful organization in the Near East...
...For that matter, there is nothing in the written record about the deaths of his mother and father...
...So, Catholic he became, and talked to his old classmate Charles Loeser of the presence of God...
...His memoir continued: . . . Those men of genius were not hampered in their careers by their trades...
...I should be at a loss to point to any other Italian work that was of a colour at once so powerful and yet neither warm nor cold, but fused in a manner soft and harmonious...
...Secrest (p...
...on the other hand, it is a rare writer whit is slntng enough to resist an involuntary, even unconscious desire to spare the feelings of those who have helped him...
...It was left to your 'Crucifixion to reveal how curiously like these two great artists are in handling as well...
...It was a new kind of Pascal's wager...
...But this sort of thing got much worse once he started working for Duveen, Wildenstein, et...
...The Berenson's second line of defense was sophistry...
...And then he is reminded of Giovanni Bellini and his followers and their "pallid, sunless" skies...
...For Norton obviously, a grievous fault...
...The little paradise of I Tatti had to be sustained...
...Now the opportunity to serve as adviser and negotiator on art purchases solved the problem...
...and later founder of the Loeb Classical Library] came to lunch," writes Mary in her journal (Secrest, p. 229), a handsome, fat, prosperous, philistine Jew, classmate of Bernhard's...
...but he continued to find comfort in the beauties of the Italian landscape, in the soft refulgent colors that he found again in the paintings he loved so well...
...and I listened politely while he expounded on these views...
...2186, 18 February 1971, p. 194...
...Paintings were unsigned, fraudulently signed, sometimes painted by one person, sometimes by a committee...
...Duveen had turned up his nose: "Your house, my dear Florrie, smells of the stables...
...With horror I think what I should have been if I had lived the life of an ill-paid professor, or struggling writer, how rebellious if I had not lived a life devoted to great art, and the aristocratically pryamidal structure of society it serves, and worse still if I had remained in the all but proletarian condition I lived in as a Jewish immigrant lad in Boston...
...Oh I have been so narrow and, what is more, absurd, bigoted," he wrote Mary in February 1891...
...He might have been, he felt, a second Goethe...
...They find no mention that I can see in the records thus far available...
...To be sure, they required the Berensons to stoop to conquer...
...He celebrated a new freedom—the chance to talk and joke about Jewish things for the first time since childhood...
...The year became two, then three, then a lifetime—much to his mother's sorrow...
...In everyone's eyes, he had "made it...
...His imperturbable air of authority carried the day...
...Mine took up what creative talent there was in me, with the result that this trade made my reputation and the rest of me scarcely counted...
...but to tell lies knorfTng that they are lies, and then, just because they've been said, to immediately take them for the truth and live accordingly, is a gross sin which falsifies all of life...
...And in Sunset and Twilight (published posthumously) he wrote (p...
...as Secrest shows, he also had an excellent personal acquaintance with some of the most skillful art restorers of his day...
...All Jews of any sensitivity whatsoever have trouble coming to terms with the meaning of the Holocaust...
...Did he die in peace...
...By then Berenson had made similar arrangements with Wildenstein and others for the European market...
...6 The Holocaust, needless to say, hardly lent itself to such frivolity...
...A defender of Schapiro then likened his name-caller to an ass...
...Samuels slides over the matter...
...But why should Secrest's revelations come as a surprise to anyone...
...Shapiro, "Mr...
...That alone will render the Jew the self-respect that he suffers from lacking...
...She could play the injured innocent, impute blame to others, announce that B.B...
...Here is Rene Gimpel, Jewish antique dealer in Paris, brother-in-law of Duveen, obligated to pay Berenson 25 percent of any sale he helps on, whether or not initiated by Berenson...
...He learned that women liked him more than men...
...Paul Sachs was the son of a partner in Goldman, Sachs, investment bankers, and related by blood, marriage or business to most of the wealthy Jewish families of New York...
...Berenson says almost nothing about it in his postwar publications...
...He made it a point to know every seeable Italian Renaissance painting in Europe...
...Win a few...
...Ambition'—but what is ambition in a college junior or senior...
...to which Duveen replied that the firm sometimes sold at a loss: would Bererison share losses as well as gains...
...It did not, because Berenson, Secrest tells us, was furious with those refugee German scholars who worked in the fields of art history and art criticism and brought with them anti-Berensonian or non-Berensonian principles and methods...
...It has been consigned to oblivion...
...the tone is I full of generous understanding, British understatement, nil-nisi-bonum euphemism: At this point I suppose one must face the question whether working for dealers influenced Mr...
...He died in 1959, muni des sacre-ments de I'Eglise...
...Connoisseurship had its rewards...
...The nearest he came to it was his Sketch for a Self-portrait (1945), which skirts gingerly around the subject, now and then tentatively probing and just as quickly retreating, like a bather testing the water and finding it unbearably cold...
...Secrest is not convinced...
...For Berenson, full of scorn and slurs for ghetto Jews and rabbinical Judaism, the death of six million must have come like the death of an unloved or uncared-for parent to a bereaved child...
...A visit to the great synagogue in Berlin that year brought pleasure and pain: he liked the cantor and choir, but the sight of the men rocking in prayer and individually praying aloud violated his sense of decorum...
...His books include Bankers and Pashas, International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt and The Unbound Prometheus...
...Secrest, conceding that Berenson's attributions were probably right 75 to 85 percent of the time (p...
...The Listener...
...Loeb [former partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co...
...Bernard Berenson, for all his chameleon adaptability, had still not caught the right tone for the Brahmins on Harvard's faculty...
...Provenances did not intimidate him: he outraged some of Britain's noblest families by questioning the attribution of their family treasures...
...But I keep hearing the furies, and never forget them...
...An economist would say he was pursuing his comparative advantage: he had a keen eye, an exquisite physical sensitivity to visual stimuli, a photographic memory (invaluable in a day when photography was barely beginning to serve as a tool for comparison and research), and boundless energy (needed to visit out-of-the-way churches and stand, sit, crouch and crane for hours to pore over a canvas inch by inch...
...51-52) and speaks of "marginals like myself, on the ragged edge of the social body, with nothing to recommend them but their Pandora's box of personal gifts and characteristics...
...Secresl has a thesis, a unifying explanatory theme, and she tells the reader about it frtim the start...
...Bernhard had some trouble at first with his role as middleman...
...But Secrest tells another story: that Berenson wanted to change his contract with Duveen from a fixed retainer to a share in the firm...
...His sleep was broken by nightmares in last years...
...They had, for example, to cultivate rich Jewish art fanciers...
...Attributions were free and easy, often a la the du client...
...and for Henry Adams, and for Edith Wharton, and for all those who were pleased enough to break bread with Berenson but never forgot he was a Jew— even when he wrote to them of "our Puritan forebears" or pretended to some kind of relationship with Robert the Bruce (Secrest, pp...
...1915...
...These quiet years continued through the war, when he had to go into hiding from the Germans: the Italians would never have bothered him, but the Germans, as we know, were deadly Jew hunters and not to be put off by religious affiliation— even when one could say that before one became a Catholic, one had been an Episcopalian...
...She was a theeing-thying Quaker, and like her grandfather, a glass manufacturer who had combined "piety and pence," she knew how to count...
...He is founding a poetry prize, to be ? given to the best poet of each year...
...No one else would know, for obvious reasons...
...To which Meyer Shapiro responded: ". . . wordly aims soon contaminated his intellectual goals...
...that the matrons of Back Bay were more impressed by his intellectual brilliance than their husbands...
...Fixler, Secrest's inspiration, prefers to end his psychological study with the last thing Berenson ever wrote, a diary entry at the age of 93: Short of violence, I seem to have been capable of any sin, any misdemeanor, any crime...
...The one instance of underevalu-ation by Berenson was the so-called Allendale Nativity, which everyone thought to be by Giorgione (very rare) but which he wanted to call a Titian (more common...
...They buried him in a cashmere shawl...
...Bernhard and Mary became anticlericals, denounced papal despotism, joined the thinking establishment...
...Mary dropped the speeches and tracts, took up art, and became an invaluable collaborator...
...Instead he was a connoisseur, a trader, a fraud...
...Some of the pictures he authenticated, if scrupulously cleaned, would look like a map of Polynesia.4 One point of fact: Berenson never worked in a gallery, but he worked for them...
...America owes many of its finest old masters to Berenson's enterprise, Italian paintings especially...
...Mary had been active in progressive, Fabian politics...
...and the "horrible," "accursed" world of commerce...
...Berenson's story is that he stood up for what was right and broke with Duveen at high cost in order to preserve his integrity...
...Still, the very fact of such passionate admiration end loyalty is testimony to Berenson's charm and intellectual qualities...
...It has become a commonplace to assert that this greatest of modern French masters had a sense of form and a feeling for atmosphere and placing singularly like Piero's...
...Dear Messrs Duveen, The 'Crucifixion' that you ask about is an autograph painting by Piero della Francesco...
...Begin to understand, I say, for comprehend them we never shall...
...That kind of thing had no appeal for Bernhard, who had little compassion for the common man and who, in matters of politics, had adopted the attitudes of his wealthy friends...
...To which his sister retorted, "It's better than the smell of fresh paint on your pictures...
...It also has the judicious, euphemistic tone one would expect of an honest, well-bred guest asked to comment on the dinner he has just been served...
...252), finds a much lower batting average on the paintings he helpedto-eell...
...So have all the other details of his childhood, except some negative recollections of his Jewish education (too many rules of conduct, rabbis who wiped their noses on their sleeves), warm memories of the Lithuanian landscape, and romantic dreams about Lithuanian folk heroes...
...My own preference is for Secrest's epigraph, an old Hasidic tale: Before his death Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?' " 1 Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, Mass...
...In any event, he settled these ambiguities at the age of 20 (Secrest says 15 in her Being Bernard Berenson,2 which makes it sound like soul-napping) when he had himself baptized as an Episcopalian by Philips Brooks, the charismatic preacher of Trinity Church in Copley Square...
...It would appear that Berenson's latitudinarianism was a matter of common knowledge in the art trade and in the field of art criticism...
...Of Jewish practices, he retained into later life only a touch of superstition: he made it a point to see the new moon if possible and touch coins in his pocket—he could not say why...
...one of the few bright young an students of the interwar period who successfully resisted his spell, wot likened to a hyena for his thoughtful hut critical article of 1961...
Vol. 5 • October 1980 • No. 9
