Old Masters, New World

June 16, 2008
As these two books show, art has long been about business, status—and sometimes even the love of art.
Old Masters, New World: America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures
Cynthia Saltzman
. Viking
, $27.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-670-01831-4

In this vividly narrated and highly informative study, Saltzman (The Portrait of Dr. Gachet
), a former reporter for Forbes
and the Wall Street Journal
, examines American collectors like Henry Clay Frick and J. Pierpont Morgan who developed America's great Old Master collections, like those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Banker and railroad magnate Henry Marquand gave 50 Old Masters to the Met, among them Vermeer's Young Woman with a Water Pitcher
. Marquand believed in the museum's capacity to educate the public, while Gardner and Morgan modeled themselves after Renaissance patrons. A Gainsborough and Raphael were among Morgan's cultural conquests in a “vast, encyclopedic collecting project.” Gardner's passion for Italian Renaissance art and her complicated relationship with Renaissance specialist Bernard Berenson, who arranged for the acquisition of the most important work in her collection, Titian's Rape of Europa
, is one of the book's highlights. Saltzman deftly demonstrates that the often highly competitive process and volatile acquisition of “cultural capital” by dealers and their eager employers gives fascinating and important insight into the often fraught fusion of culture and commodity that built world-class American collections. Photos.

August 1, 2008
The frenzied acquisition of Old Masters by Gilded Age industrialists determined to prove that raw, booming, mercantile America had culture was a blood sport, involving cutthroat competition and calculated deceit. Saltzman (The Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1998) draws on both her art history and business backgrounds in this vivacious, anecdotal, and perceptive chronicle of the great migration of art across the Atlantic. Saltzmans close scrutiny of overlooked financial documents led to the resurrection of forgotten players and the exposure of all kinds of shenanigans as tycoons haggled over paintings by such giants as Titian and Rembrandt. Saltzman profiles railroad financier Henry Gordon Marquand, a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the first to bring a Vermeer to the States. She unveils the role of connoisseur Bernard Berensons silent partner, Ott Gutekunst, in Berensons legendary partnership with the intrepid collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. Here, too, is grandiose J. Pierpont Morgan and flinty Henry Clay Frick. Art lovers will be thoroughly entertained by these tales of masterpiece fever, which end happily since most of these treasuresnow reside in museums.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)