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Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures | 
 enlarge | Author: Cynthia Saltzman
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 208120
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0670018317
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.94075
EAN: 9780670018314
ASIN: 0670018317
Publication Date: August 14, 2008
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Product Description
The Gilded Age race to bring Europes most valuable art to America
In 1870 a group of wealthy and culturally ambitious New Yorkers founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a Manhattan brownstone with a lackluster collection and not a single major work of art. Americans came late to the game of art collecting and raced to catch up. Soon, Americas new industrial tycoons began to compete for Europes extraordinary Old Master pictures, laying claim to works by Vermeer, Titian, Rembrandt, and others, and causing a major migration of art across the Atlantic.
Cynthia Saltzman recounts the fierce competition to acquire some of the greatest paintings in the world and the boom in the market. At the center of this enterprise were the steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar king Harry Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, as well as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Metropolitans president, Henry Marquand. Old Masters, New World is the story of beauty, aesthetics, and taste; money, trade, and power. It is a backstage look at the part played in American collecting by experts like Bernard Berenson and dealers like Colnaghi, Knoedler, and Duveenwho raced around Europe to negotiate purchases and sales of the rarest and most costly masterpieces.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 1 more reviews...
How Americans Got The Old Masters December 30, 2008
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 must it go to the cellar?'"
The art that was brought over here served to bolster collectors' self-worth. Sure, they were just manifesting greed but in a different way than in their workaday lives. As the collectors took more paintings over the decades, they complained about how much the prices were going up, but they did not complain about how much more valuable their assets were becoming. By the time the boom was over, most of them donated the works to museums, or made their own museums. A case could be made that these Old Master paintings provided an immediate art education for millions of Americans, that American artists were heavily influenced by them, and that American art in the last half of the twentieth century thereby became the most influential in the world. Saltzman's book, with its written portraits of collectors and dealers, provides an astonishing picture of an art craze that affected history, and the likes of which will not be seen again. We are unlikely ever to hear anyone speak of taste in acquisitions like Isabella Stewart Gardner did, to her advisor Berenson, when Rembrandt was every collector's favorite: "You know, or rather, you don't know, that I adore Giotto, and really, I don't adore Rembrandt. I only like him."
Fascinating Profile November 25, 2008
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
Old Tycoons Grabbing Old Masters October 27, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This excellent book is written for the general reader but is nonetheless 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.
Excellent overview September 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
An excellent overview of American turn-of-the-century collecting habits. Most of the source material is pretty familiar, but the writing is fun and lively, and the book really moves along. Nicely illustrated.
Old Masters, New World September 11, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
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
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