Trompe L'Oeil Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph

By R.Z. Sheppard

It is practically impossible to serve the muse without dealing with Mammon. That is what Bernard Berenson learned and accepted early in his long and lucrative association with Joseph Duveen, the enterprising head of an international gallery whose customers included most of the world's leading collectors. Berenson, born in 1865 in the Lithuanian ghetto-village of Butrimonys, emigrated to Boston, attended Harvard and eventually became the expert on Italian Renaissance painting. For three generations, until his death in 1959, he reigned as a kind of aesthetic Pope. From his "Vatican," a Tuscan villa known as I Tatti, he issued monographs, criticism and decisions about the authenticity of masterpieces. His verdicts could make or break a market, damage a museum's reputation or deflate amultimillionaire's ego -- and his tax write-offs.

Berenson conducted himself with what he called an "invincible passion for independence." This is not to say he achieved it. Colin Simpson's Artful Partners concedes that B.B.'s spirit may have been willing but that his flesh was weak. The evidence is incriminating: a secret 1912 contract with Duveen that reads like a textbook on conflict of interest, and a clandestine "X ledger," which details the artful partners' profits, losses and restoration expenses. There are also numerous examples that suggest Berenson relaxed his standards or changed his mind to accommodate Duveen and his brothers, who, as Simpson writes, were ignorant about Italian painting but knew that "pictures had to have a name put to them and the better the name the higher the price they could sell it for, so long as they could pronounce it."

The second and concluding volume of Ernest Samuels' biography of the connoisseur presents a larger, more complex picture. Berenson's scholarship is treated with greater respect than in Simpson's jolly romp through the mud. Samuels ascribes the controversial changes of attributions to advancements in knowledge and techniques, and points out that Berenson usually covered himself by stressing the tentative nature of his craft. Duveen is brushed in as a necessary evil that his aging colleague came to regret. "I cannot tell you," Berenson wrote to his wife Mary, "what loathing all that part of my past and present inspires me with . . . how much of life is scarred and fouled by that connection." It is unlikely that Mary Costelloe shared his fastidious conscience. Simpson places her in the thick of the compromises that were needed to support the Berensons in international high style. She is credited with having ghostwritten her husband's best seller The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894) and with possessing an eye good enough to attribute paintings in his name. She was also adept at smuggling national treasures out of Italy.

From the belle to the nuclear epoch, the world recalled in both these books seems remote from history. Mellons, Fricks, Altmans and Rockefellers vie for Giorgiones, Titians, Bellinis and Botticellis, while offstage monarchies disintegrate, nation-states aggressively come of age, and men are pulped in the trenches. There is a certain amount of glee in reading about rich innocents abroad who retained Berenson as an art consultant without knowing the extent of his ties to Duveen and other dealers. If the "squillionaires," as Berenson called them, did not always get what they paid for, they at least got royal treatment.

Not so for less cultivated suckers like John R. Thompson, a Chicago restaurant-chain owner, who was advised by Baron Gottfried von Kopp (one of Berenson's sources for market gossip) that the Arch of Constantine could be bought from the Italian government for $500,000. Thompson, perhaps the first but not the last man who thought an arch would look nice in front of an eatery, put $100,000 down and triumphantly sailed for home. The monument, which was authentic, did not move an inch from Rome. The Baron von Kopp, who was actually the son of a Swiss pastry chef, also stayed to sell Trajan's Column to American Investor Charles T. Yerkes for $250,000. Art is long; embarrassing stories about art also persevere.