Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures, 1880-World War I

You can go to any large American art museum and see Old Master paintings: Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Vermeer, and more are all well represented in our nation, even though the painters worked and sold their works in various European nations centuries ago. It might seem that such aesthetic riches would naturally spread themselves to our nation, but that the paintings are now on American walls only happened around the turn of the last century. It was not a matter of sharing the Old Masters all around the world, but was a product of deliberate, aggressive acquisition. In _Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures_ (Viking), art historian Cynthia Saltzman has told how the flood of Old Masters to America happened, looking at specific masterpieces, collectors, and dealers. It is an amazing story of the time when English aristocrats (most of the acquisitions described here came from Britain) were low on rents, and low on land value because American grain was so much cheaper. On the other side of the ocean, certain individual Americans acquired huge wealth due to the Industrial Revolution. Looked at this way, it seems a simple matter of one side having the goods and the other having the money, but there was also competition among the collectors and dealers, all of which Saltzman describes with verve. After the Civil War and during the industrial boom, Americans began concentrating on culture. When Henry Gurdon Marquand, the railroad and banking tycoon, was in England in 1886 on an acquisition trip for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was in a private gallery, not nearly the finest in Britain, but Saltzman writes that it "was grander than the hodgepodge of mostly mediocre pictures lodged in two rooms at the back of the Metropolitan's second floor." Looking at a van Dyke in the gallery, Marquand realized it was finer than any painting he had seen in America, including his own extensive collection. Marquand came away with four Old Masters, and thus the boom began. Another of the collectors profiled here was Henry Clay Frick, the violently anti-union head of Carnegie Steel. He liked portraits and landscapes; he never purchased a nude. Charles Schwab, another Carnegie partner, observed, "He seemed to lavish on art all the passion that he might have bestowed on human beings." Tycoons buying art is one story, and a fairly familiar one, but Saltzman also pays attention to the different dealers and advisors who helped enable the purchases. Professional art scholar Bernard Berenson figures often here, usually helping to arrange sales to Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston. Berenson was a social climber who clearly loved his partnerships with his wealthy clients, and made himself invaluable to them. When Peter Widener, the aging trolley car magnate, needed his collection evaluated, Berenson's wife described the collector "trotting around and saying meekly `Mr. Berenson, is this a gallery picture, or a furniture picture, or

I found this story fascinating both as a character study and a history of how America came into possession of so many great European works of art. I have an in depth background in art but this gave me a totally new perspective about the people and the works they came to possess. Like so many other art majors we had been led to subscribe to the "connoisseurship" of Berenson and Duveen but this book gave us an insider's view of their wheeling and dealing. I found it a page turner and a thrilling account of this period in American history

This excellent book is written for the general reader and is based on deep and solid research and thorough knowledge. Author Saltzman wears her learning lightly and her prose sparkles as she chronicles the nearly forty year (roughly from the mid-1880's until 1921) "raid" by American collectors with large personal fortunes on the great Old Masters privately held in Europe. She does this by concentrating on the preeminent collectors such as Henry Marquand, Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Harry and Louisine Havemeyer and Henry Clay Frick and others, together with the consultants and dealers who advised them, sought to manipulate them and sometimes were less than honest with them. The competition that resulted is the basis for several of the great art museums in the US today. Although some of the collectors were motivated in part by a desire to give America a great culture to match its rising power, most of them were fiercely competitive with one another, each seeking to outdo the others and possess the recognized top collection in terms of beauty or monetary worth or both. Each wanted to have the most "great works" by the "greatest artists." The only restraint was the size of their respective fortunes, which sometimes (as in the case of Granger) imposed limits. The narration is enlivened by adroit sketches of the lives and personalities of the salient persons involved in the race to acquire (by the collectors) and to become rich and influential (dealers and others). Saltzman is equally adroit in describing the power, appeal and importance of the great pictures the collectors sought. Although always discreet, Saltzman's pen portraits are filled with incisive observations on character and psychology. Marquand, for example, emerges as more altruistic in motive than most while Frick obsessively focused on amassing the most valuable collection in the US (priding himself on driving as hard a bargain as possible for each acquisition). Frick, in keeping with his personality and his occasionally ruthless business career, created his own posthumous museum where his collection would be displayed in his NYC mansion just as it had been in his lifetime. Granger did much the same thing with her collection. The famous connoisseur Bernard Berenson, for his part, comes across as something less than honest and straightforward in his interactions with dealers and collectors. This whole episode is well known to art historians but much less so among general readers. This brilliant book should remedy that.

I just finished Old Masters, New World, and I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Cynthia Saltzman possesses a rare talent for combining scrupulous research with lively narration and telling social commentary. She clearly possesses a firm and reliable background in art history, knows the art world and art market like the back of her hand, and her insights into the psychology of the major collectors of the Gilded Age are spot on. I write frequently on the history of collecting myself for Apollo magazine, and I know that I will be using Saltzman's excellent book as a ready reference in the future. My only regret is that I didn't get a copy of this book in galley form in time to review it professionally, as I would have loved to sing its praises in print. I can't recommend this book highly enough to people interested in art, art collecting, or turn-of-the-century American history. It's a blast! -- Jonathan Lopez, author of The Man Who Made Vermeers

A superior introduction to the profound shift from Europe to the United States in the economic balance of power governing the business of fine art. With the riches arising from the astounding growth of the U.S. domestic market, the very wealthy of Boston, Pittsburgh, and, above all, New York went on a highly competitive spending spree in the search for cultural glory, thereby enriching our nation to the present day in terms of Old Masters, which are now displayed at such world-class art museums as Fenway Court, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan, and the National Gallery of Art. Cynthia Saltzman is a talented writer, with a keen gift for describing individual works of art. Her book will be enjoyed by readers interested in the colorful individuals on both sides of the Atlantic who were involved over one hundred years ago in the hunt for great European paintings.