Artful Partners


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Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson


Book Description

Collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America’s Gilded Age was fraught with risk because of the uncertain identities of the artists and the conflicting interests of the dealers. Stanley Mazaroff’s fascinating account of the close relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the era’s preeminent connoisseur of Italian paintings, richly illustrates this important chapter of America’s cultural history. When Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, it was labeled as America’s “Great Temple of Art.” With more than 500 Italian paintings, including self-portraits purportedly by Raphael and Michelangelo, Walters’s collection was compared favorably with the great collections in London, Paris, and Berlin. In the midst of this fanfare, Berenson contacted Walters and offered to analyze his collection, sell him additional paintings, and write a scholarly catalogue that would trumpet the collection on both sides of the Atlantic. What Berenson offered was what Walters desperately needed—a badge of scholarship that Berenson’s invaluable imprimatur would undoubtedly bring. By 1912, Walters had become Berenson’s most active client, their business alliance wrapped in a warm and personal friendship. But this relationship soon became strained and was finally severed by a confluence of broken promises, inattention, deceit, and ethical conflict. To Walters’s chagrin, Berenson swept away the self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo and publicly scorned paintings that he was supposed to praise. Though painful to Walters, Berenson’s guidance ultimately led to a panoramic collection that beautifully told the great history of Italian Renaissance painting. Based primarily on correspondence and other archival documents recently discovered at the Walters Art Museum and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the intriguing story of Walters and Berenson offers unusual insight into the pleasures and perils of collecting Italian Renaissance paintings, the ethics in the marketplace, and the founding of American art museums.




The Artful Year


Book Description

Celebrating the seasons provides a wonderful opportunity to embrace creativity together as a family. It’s also a fun way to decorate for, prepare for, and learn about the holidays we celebrate. In The Artful Year, you’ll find a year’s worth of art activities, crafts, recipes, and more to help make each season special. These artful explorations are more than just craft projects—they are ways for your family to create memories and mementos and develop creatively, all while exploring nature, new ideas, and traditions. The book includes: • Arts and crafts, using the materials, colors, and themes of the season • Ideas and decorations for celebrating the holidays together • Favorite seasonal recipes that are fun for children to help make (and eat!) • Suggested reading lists of children’s picture books about the seasons and holidays The 175+ activities in this book are perfect for children ages one to eight, and for creating traditions that appeal to all ages.




Money in the Air


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This volume explores the crucial role of art dealers in creating a transatlantic art market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “There was money in the air, ever so much money,” wrote Henry James in 1907, reflecting on the American appetite for art acquisitions. Indeed, collectors such as Henry Clay Frick and Andrew W. Mellon are credited with bringing noteworthy European art to the United States, with their collections forming the backbone of major American museums today. But what of the dealers, who possessed the expertise in art and recognized the potential of developing a new market model on both sides of the Atlantic? Money in the Air investigates the often-overlooked role of these dealers in creating an international art world. Contributors examine the histories of wellknown international firms like Duveen Brothers, M. Knoedler & Co., and Goupil & Cie and their relationships with American clients, as well as accounts of other remarkable dealers active in the transatlantic art market. Drawing on dealer archives, scholars reveal compelling findings, including previously unknown partnerships and systems of cooperation. This volume offers new perspectives on the development of art collections that formed the core of American art museums, such as the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Frick Collection.




Duveen


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Anyone who has admired Gainsborough's Blue Boy of the Huntington Collection in California, or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owes much of his or her pleasure to art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). Regarded as the most influential—or, in some circles, notorious—dealer of the twentieth century, Duveen established himself selling the European masterpieces of Titian, Botticelli, Giotto, and Vermeer to newly and lavishly wealthy American businessmen—J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, to name just a few. It is no exaggeration to say that Duveen was the driving force behind every important private art collection in the United States. The first major biography of Duveen in more than fifty years and the first to make use of his enormous archive—only recently opened to the public—Meryle Secrest's Duveen traces the rapid ascent of the tirelessly enterprising dealer, from his humble beginnings running his father's business to knighthood and eventually apeerage. The eldest of eight sons of Jewish-Dutch immigrants, Duveen inherited an uncanny ability to spot a hidden treasure from his father, proprietor of a prosperous antiques business. After his father's death, Duveen moved the company into the riskier but lucrative market of paintings and quickly became one of the world's leading art dealers. The key to Duveen's success was his simple observation that while Europe had the art, America had the money; Duveen made his fortune by buying art from declining European aristocrats and selling them to the "squillionaires" in the United States. "By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. [Secrest's] inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century."—John Brewer, New York Review of Books




Odd Jobs


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To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.




Bernard Berenson


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"Few would have predicted that Bernard Berenson, from a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, would rise above poverty. Yet Berenson left his crowded home near Boston's railyards and transformed himself into the world's most renowned expert on Italian Renaissance paintings, the owner of a beautiful villa and an immense private library in the hills outside Florence. The explosion of the Gilded Age art market and Berenson's work for dealer Joseph Duveen supported a luxurious life, but it came with painful costs: Berenson hid his origins and, though his attributions remain foundational, felt that he had betrayed his gifts as a critic and interpreter of paintings. This finely drawn portrait of Berenson, the first biography devoted to him in a quarter century, draws on new archival materials that bring out the significance of his secret business dealings and the central importance of several women in his life and work: his sister Senda Berenson; his wife Mary Berenson; his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner; his lover Belle da Costa Greene; his dear friend Edith Wharton, and the companion of his last forty years, Nicky Mariano. Rachel Cohen explores Berenson's inner world and extraordinary visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forces-new capital, the developing art market, persistent anti-Semitism, and the two world wars-that profoundly affected his life"--




Stewards of the Nation's Art


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Between 1890 and 1939, the groups of men involved in running Britain's four main public art galleries - the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery - were embroiled in continuous power struggles. Stewards of the Nation's Art examines the internal tensions between the galleries' administrative directors, the aristocrats dominating the boards of trustees, and those in the Treasury who controlled the funds as well as board appointments. Andrea Geddes Poole uses meticulous primary research from all four of these institutions to discuss changing ideas about class, education, and work during this period. The conflicts between aristocratic trustees and administrative directors were not only about the running of the galleries, but also reflected the era's strain between aristocratic amateurs and nouveau riche professionals. Stewards of the Nation's Art is an absorbing study that explores the extent to which the aristocracy was able to hold on to cultural power in an increasingly professional and meritocratic age.




The Museum


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This critical bibliography of museum studies comprises an organized collection of essays on the various types of museums--art, natural history, history, science and technology, and folk--and on general aspects--collections, education, exhibitions, etc.--that cut across the media. Most of the essays are cogent, substantial if not comprehensive, and clear. The editor has taken care to see that they follow a similar format of historical essay followed by a full bibliography of items discussed. Library Journal As the number of museums in the United States has grown to more than 6500 in this century, the museum profession has experienced similar growth. In addition to academic training and accreditation programs in the field, an expanding body of literature on museum history, philosophy, and functions has evolved, little of which has received the critical attention it deserves. This reference volume serves as an up-to-date guide to this wealth of literature, identifying and evaluating works that introduce the general reader, the museum studies student, and the beginning professional to the history, philosophy, and functions of museums. The volume presents a series of informative, historical outlines and critical bibliographic essays on all aspects of museum history, philosophy, and functions. Contributors treat such subjects as art museums, natural history museums, science and technology museums, history museums, collections, exhibition, education and interpretation, and the public and museums. Each chapter consists of an introductory historical narrative, a survey of sources, and a bibliographic checklist that contains cited and additional sources. A set of appendices include a geographically organized bibliography of museum directories, a guide to archives and special collections, and a selective list of museum-related periodicals. The book concludes with a comprehensive general subject index. This work will be an important reference tool for museum professionals and cultural historians, as well as for courses in museum studies. It will also be a valuable addition to both academic and public libraries.




Rogues' Gallery


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This “expert and elegantly written” book reveals how dealers have been a major force in art history from the Renaissance to the avant garde (The Guardian, UK). Philip Hook’s riveting narrative takes us from the early days of art dealing in Antwerp, where paintings were sold by weight, to the unassailable hauteur of contemporary galleries in New York, London, Paris, and beyond. Along the way, we meet a surprisingly wide-ranging cast of characters—from tailors, spies, and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, and connoisseurs, some compelled by greed, some by their own vision of art—and some by the art of the deal. Among them are Joseph Duveen, who almost single-handedly brought the Old Masters to America; Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists’ champion; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, high priest of Cubism; Leo Castelli, dealer-midwife to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art; and Peter Wilson, the charismatic Sotheby’s chairman who made a theater of the auction room. Full of unforgettable anecdotes and astute insight, Rogue’s Gallery offers “a front-row seat and a backstage pass to this arcane and obsessively secretive profession” (Hannah Rothschild, Mail on Sunday, UK).