Duveen
One might well ask why I have shelved, as it were, my page about Joseph Duveen among the history books. Surely the man responsible for the greatest transfer of European art from the Old World to the New ought to be visited among artists and other creative types in the Audience branch of Portico. Perhaps. I might put a link up over there someday. But the page belongs where it is. Duveen’s achievement as a top-of-the-line art dealer, working at a time when the publicity of auctions was distasteful, was acutely historical, in that it couldn’t have happened much before or after his allotted term on Earth. Although a man of great culture, Duveen is best understood as a virus that found its window of opportunity. Conditions were propitious; Duveen attacked; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself, boasting the Bernard Altman collection that Duveen assembled, would be a far poorer place without the legacy of Duveen’s opportunism.
And then there’s the National Gallery in Washington. The founder and principal benefactor was the unhappy Andrew Mellon, but the guy who did all the legwork was Joseph Duveen. Both men died before the museum opened its doors, in 1941, but it remains a joint monument.
I hope that this page will inspire you to seek out a remaindered copy of Meryl Secrest’s flawed but impressive biography. Duveen is an ultimately unknowable man to know about.Â