Daily Blague

Joseph Duveen, the grandest of all the fine-arts dealers, enjoyed a career that he could probably not have had at any other time in history. Born in 1869, he came to maturity with the beginning of the Twentieth Century; he died on the eve of World War II, in 1939. It was during this time that a dozen or so very rich Americans traded mountains of cash for masterpieces of European art. Such a transfer could not occur today; there are laws everywhere that protect national patrimony from foreign plunder. Such masterpieces as remained behind, moreover, have wound up, like their American cousins, in great museums. Great museums, if they existed at all, were pale intimations of their present selves when Duveen got to work. Indeed, his clients would contribute the backbones of at least three major American museums' holdings - the Metropolitan, the Huntingdon, and, housed in a building designed by Duveen's favorite architect, the National Gallery in Washington. So, far from rivaling the museums, Duveen may be said to have created them, however indirectly. The works that passed through his hands make up an extraordinary catalogue; it is difficult not to see him as a grinning pirate, swimming in jewels and plate. A grinning pirate with little taste for possession, that is. Duveen kept only what his idea of his stature demanded. The rest he was only too delighted to sell, sometimes two or three times during his fabulous career. His principal ostentation, indeed, was in the prices that he paid for things - always top dollar. Simply by spending a small fortune on a painting, Duveen could make it a masterpiece.

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