Biography
Cynthia Saltzman has degrees in art history from Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.B.A. from Stanford. A former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, she is the author of Portrait of Dr. Gachet; The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece. She lives in New York.
Q & A with Cynthia Saltzman
In your last book, you traced the 100-year history of a van Gogh portrait—then the most expensive painting ever sold at auction—as a way of telling the story of the modern art market. How did you make the leap from writing about collecting modern art to collecting Old Masters?
When I finished the van Gogh book, I thought immediately of doing a book about America’s first avant-garde collectors, and I began to research the early years of the Museum of Modern Art. Quickly I decided that the American collectors of Old Masters were every bit as pioneering as the collectors who bought van Gogh and Picasso—they were industrial tycoons and several amazing women. These collectors worked fast and with enormous fortunes. They gave America its first masterpieces and laid the foundations of America’s museums.
Today we have some of the greatest museums in the world—the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery in Washington—to name only three. But we came very late to the game and had to catch up. Europe had already founded its great museums—typically in royal palaces and stocked with collections that had come from royal families, often trophies won in war. But here in the US we started from scratch—usually with an empty building that the collectors had to fill up. Some collectors—like Henry Clay Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner—bought art for themselves and then built houses, which they turned into museums. It always amazed me that although America’s big public museums imitated European models and look “old,” they are in fact new—products of the industrial age and contemporaries of the great railroad stations. I wanted to explain how this happened. And that the American buying of Old Masters was in fact a modern phenomenon. The Gilded Age was, of course, a dazzling and dynamic time—and there are many parallels to our own.
And the story hadn’t really been told, had it?
That’s right. Certainly, museums have recorded who bought what and when, but I wanted to tell the real story of how and why Gilded Age Americans used their fortunes to acquire Old Masters. And I discovered that there were rich archives in the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, the Frick Collection, and the Metropolitan, and also in the galleries—Colnaghi in London and Knoedler in New York—that supplied many of the pictures bought by Americans. These archives hadn’t really been exploited. Just as I began working on the book, Henry Clay Frick’s archives moved from Pittsburgh to New York, so here was a trove of documents about one of the central collectors.
What drew you to the subject of collecting Old Masters?
I love looking at great Old Master pictures—they can be alluring and seductive. They have shaped our image of the past—of five centuries of European history. An ultra-detailed portrait by van Eyck and an image of Venus by Botticelli show radical differences between the north and the south in the 15th century. I wanted to convey the fascination of these paintings—to both those who like art and those who can take it or leave it. I hope to convince people to go and look at these pictures because it is so much fun.
Also, I love thinking about taste, and why taste changes. And also notions of “beauty.” And taste in art does change. Raphael was considered “divine” in the late 19th century, but then Rembrandt began to take over. But today neither of these giants is as popular as Titian or Vermeer. No one is taking a poll on this, but this is my sense.
Part of my fascination with these great canvases is that they are so fragile and yet also so enduring—they have survived for centuries. Also, even today, the identity of many pictures remains uncertain. Famously, scholars have tossed several beloved “Rembrandts” out of the Rembrandt cannon. But, art historians continue to argue about many other Old Masters and this gives them an element of mystery.
And, European pictures form the tradition on which American art stands—it’s no accident that today Old Masters hang front and center at the top of the stairs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We take that for granted. I wanted to explain how and why they got there.
Why did you choose these particular Gilded Age collectors?
I chose five representative and remarkable individuals—each a strong, multifaceted personality. Morgan and Frick were brilliant men of business and they were as rich as the European monarchs who had been the great collectors of the past. They took on art as another field to conquer and they wanted to win. They wanted the best. The subject of Gilded Age collecting is huge, so I wanted to focus on a few collectors and on a few important purchases—where the transaction itself, the negotiations etc.—would reveal things about the buyers and sellers, and the middlemen, and also about the art market and the international scene.
I didn’t simply want to write a group portrait, but to tell the story as it evolved, to show how American taste became more sophisticated, and how the market began with the pioneers—Henry Gurdon Marquand and Isabella Stewart Gardner, and then how others jumped in and the market boomed before the First World War. Then, thanks to the upheaval and devastation in Europe, which forced people to sell, America, and Henry Clay Frick, in particular, bought some fabulous pictures.
How did you do your research? What was your approach?
First, I looked at the paintings. But to understand the process of collecting, and to get the real story, I knew I had to use primary sources—letters between dealers and collectors and letters from one dealer to another, as well as gallery stock books and accounts. Here I could find the details of the transactions— what the collectors have to go through to find a picture, and then to buy and sell it. This behind-the-scenes story helps uncover the complex motivations that drove the buying. Collectors are much-mythologized figures, who usually take all the credit for amassing their brilliant collections. But I argue that these brilliant collections are not the work of single individuals but of teams—a collector, working with dealers and advisers and experts. Gardner worked with Bernard Berenson, but he in turn relied on the dealer Otto Gutekunst. I wanted to show that the process of turning oneself into a great collector is a complicated one, and depends not only on taste, but also on money and circumstances, and personalities. This backstage story is not one that the collectors wanted revealed.
There were many basic questions about Gilded Age collecting that I wanted to answer. Why did Henry Gurdon Marquand, one of the Metropolitan’s trustees, decide that the museum needed major Old Masters and then go out and buy them? Why did he choose the pictures he did? By reading his letters to artists and dealers, I discovered that he had been involved in the New York art world since he was a young man. I found out that he himself had gone to an English country house named Corsham Court to look for pictures. I had great fun going to this house—and seeing the rooms where the paintings—now in the Metropolitan had once hung. I’m not sure that any writer researching these collectors had done this before.
I had at least as many questions about Isabella Gardner, the Havemeyers, Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick, and about the way these collectors competed with one another. For instance, how did the ruthless Pittsburgh industrialist, coke tycoon and Chairman of Carnegie Steel, turn himself into a major Old Master collector? He is always credited with having impeccable taste, but was it really that simple? I suspected not. What role if any did his bitter break with Andrew Carnegie play in his drive to collect? I decided to look at Frick’s collecting in the wider context of his life. I discovered that Frick had bought his very first major Old Master, a Rembrandt, at a turning point in his life as a businessman—just after he had lost the chance to buy out Carnegie Steel. He had gone to visit Carnegie in Scotland to persuade him to extend an option Frick had on the company, and Carnegie had refused. Shortly after this humiliating defeat, Frick was in London and made the decision to buy a Rembrandt, a painting that put him on the map as a collector and also allowed him to trump his professional defeat with a different sort of triumph.
You clearly enjoy looking at Old Master painting, but you also seem to find the historical archives where you did your research very exciting.
I do. I had a wonderful time in those archives—particularly the gallery archives with their old leather-bound books, with the leather flaking off—books that contain carbon copies of the dealers’ letters. The pages are faded and incredibly fragile. I went to London several times and would spend entire days at a dining room table on the top floor of Colnaghi going through letters. And in these letters, you hear the voices of the dealers speaking frankly to each other—private conversations about the collectors that they never imagined anyone else would hear.
In the archives, I discovered two of the heroes of the book—Charles Carstairs and Otto Gutekunst—forgotten but fascinating characters who are largely responsible for many of the masterpieces that first arrived in here in America. They were honest and they had a straightforward and amusing perspective on art. At one point in 1911, Carstairs shows one of the most brilliant Vermeers to Frick and then to Benjamin Altman and neither of them wanted to buy it—one thinks it’s too expensive, the other is annoyed that he didn’t hear about it sooner. And Carstairs writes that he’s sick of these spoiled millionaires. Peter Widener ended up buying the Vermeer and it is today one of the National Gallery’s most prized pictures.
Also these art archives force you to be a detective. There are all sorts of things to discover and figure out. For instance, at the top of many letters at Knoedler gallery—here in New York—the dealers wrote the name of a steamship, and I wasn’t the first to think that the letters had been written on these transatlantic ships, but quickly I realized that the names of the ships at the top of the letters were the ships on which the dealers planned to send the mail. They talked about rushing the letters down to the docks. Even though the art trade was small and old fashioned, private and personal, at the end of the 19th century it began to operate at the pace of the industrial age. The dealers wrote back and forth, their letters reminding me of emails, because the correspondence was so constant. They were always taking the temperature not only of the art market and the money markets, but also of their clients. Because if you didn’t sell it to Frick, you had better sell it to Morgan. There were very few buyers at this high level, and they talked to each other.
When did you first become interested in writing about art?
I have always loved art and at college I majored in art history and was the art critic on the Harvard Crimson. I liked trying to translate the experience of visual art into words. At Harvard, the art history classes take place in the Fogg Art Museum and I spent much of my time in the Fogg and became very attached to it—it has a wonderful central courtyard and is very peaceful. Interestingly, the very first paper I had to write for the basic course in art history was on Botticelli’s Death of Lucretia and I remember trekking over from Cambridge to the Gardner museum to see it—this happens to be the first painting Isabella Stewart Gardner buys from Bernard Berenson and I put it at the opening of the chapter about her in the book.
But my obsession with art goes back a long way—I grew up in Manhattan, not far from the Metropolitan and New York’s other museums. I remember as a child being taken to Central Park every afternoon and seeing the very strangely shaped Guggenheim under construction. I went to college planning to be an architect. Then, the summer after freshman year, my father went on a business trip to Paris and Rome and invited me to accompany him. My parents were getting divorced and I was very unhappy about that, but this trip was a good thing that grew out of something I felt was a disaster. During the day, he had business meetings and I had the fun of fending for myself—and in those two cities the first thing one does is look at the buildings and go to the museums.
I went to graduate school in art history but also to business school—the plan then was to work for a museum. But I got a job at Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, and I really wanted to write—to write about art for a general audience. I was lucky to have both a background in art history and in business. At the Journal I wrote about the art market and went to a lot of auctions and began to see how the art market worked, to understand that behind every auction price is a story—often a very interesting one, about personalities and circumstances. A high price may be the result of many bidders fighting it out, or of only two, and one of them may not really want to own the work of art they are bidding for, but instead is heavily invested in making certain that it makes a high price simply to keep up the market for that art. Works of art are both aesthetic objects and commodities, and I like writing about both aspects and the links between them. And from the start, I felt that too often art was discussed in reverential tones or written about as if one art-world insider were speaking to another. I have always wanted to break through that and address a wider audience.
Writing about the art market made me want to find out more about the history of collecting itself—and I realized that only parts of that history have been written. When I go around a museum I can’t help but look at the wall labels—the labels that say who gave a particular picture. Almost always there is a story.
You emphasize the dealers in this book—What did you find interesting about them?
The dealers are interesting because in fact they were the ones who went out and tracked down the pictures—they had to have the taste, make the initial choice and often put down their money and buy these Old Masters at a time when there was very little scholarship to tell them what they were buying. They were, in fact, often more active or at least as active in the process of art collecting as the collectors. And yet, the collectors get almost all the credit. Now, Joseph Duveen, who came into the Old Master market around 1907 and then went on to dominate it, became a famous, notorious dealer, but he followed the pattern set by Otto Gutekunst at Colnaghi in London and Charles Carstairs at Knoedler in New York. These dealers are not famous but should be. These dealers were art experts. This expertise gave them and more importantly gave scholars and connoisseurs like Berenson the power to set the value of works of art—power they could wield over tycoons. If Berenson declared that the Botticelli on which you had just spent $250,000—a fortune in those days—was not a Botticelli at all, the picture became worthless and you looked like a fool.
Thanks to archives at Colnaghi and Knoedler, I could see that buying and selling masterpieces was a high-risk business. What I liked about listening to the dealers from the words of their letters was their honesty and their lack of pretension when they talked about art. It is refreshing.
What were some of the discoveries you made—secrets you found in the archives?
I made many discoveries—about each of the masterpieces on which I focus in the book and about the collectors. I found that in many cases the assumptions about the way the pictures were purchased were at best incomplete.
I discovered things about Isabella Gardner’s relationship with the connoisseur Bernard Berenson. In looking at the purchase of Titian’s Europa, I found that Berenson, who had already written a book on Venetian painting when he proposed it to Gardner, had never seen the picture, which was in an English collection. In fact, Otto Gutekunst, who worked at Colnaghi in London, had found it and told Berenson about it. Berenson pretended he himself had tracked down most of the pictures he proposed to Gardner, when in fact he got them through Gutekunst. In all his letters to Gardner, Berenson never mentions Gutekunst’s name. By looking at lots of transactions, I realized that Gutekunst wasn’t simply a broker, but played at least as important a role as Berenson in selecting pictures for Gardner and shaping Gardner’s collection. The dealer’s brilliance as a connoisseur is proved by the way Berenson relied completely upon his judgment. Gutekunst was an expert in Dutch art, and thanks to him, Gardner, who much preferred Italian painting, bought several magnificent Rembrandts. Sadly two of these great Rembrandts—some of the very first Rembrandts ever to come to the United States—are among the paintings stolen from the Gardner fifteen years ago and still not recovered.
Berenson and Gutekunst were a brilliant team of Old Master buyers. They were the same age, both expatriates and both energetic and charming. Gutekunst is one of the few people who sizes up Berenson for what he is and tells him. Because of Berenson’s dishonesty, their relationship couldn’t last. To compensate Berenson for his advice, Gardner had agreed to pay a 5% commission on everything she bought. It has been known that Colnaghi was also paying commissions to Berenson, commissions hidden from Gardner in the prices she paid. The commission to Colnaghi has been viewed as a necessary cost of doing business, which Gardner should have been willing to pay. But, the purchase of Titian’s Europa revealed that Berenson cheated not only Gardner, but also Gutekunst. He got a high price out of her and then told Gutekunst he had received much less, and pocketed the difference.
But Berenson, for all his corruption, remains a brilliant, intriguing, contradictory figure. He had come from a Jewish family who had emigrated from Lithuania when he was a boy. He became quintessentially American in that he completely invented himself, the first American connoisseur. He made a fortune as a connoisseur and became world famous. It is well known that he tried to hide his ties to the art market and to Duveen, who paid him a high commission for every picture he authenticated and that he felt anguished by this decision to make this secret contract. In the Duveen archives, I found illuminating letters, where Berenson tries to convince even one of the Duveens that he is not a man of business, but a scholar. But, immediately after, maybe even in the same letter, he tells Duveen that in buying a particular picture the dealer is making a stupid business mistake. Berenson, of course, knew the art market better than anyone. Yet, I could see that when Berenson was claiming to Duveen that he was a gentleman and a scholar, he really wanted to convince himself. He longed to be one of the rich and privileged WASPs who were his friends at Harvard. Berenson had been ashamed that his father, an intellectual, was forced to work as a peddler in
I think that Gardner was drawn to Berenson not only because they were both aesthetes who loved Italian art, but also because he was only a few years younger than her son Jackie, who had died when he was about two years old. In fact, Berenson had been born only a month or so after Jackie had died. After she lost this child, she seems to have suffered a miscarriage, and she become very depressed. When I tried to find out more about these early years of the Gardners’ marriage, I discovered the sad fact that they had had not just one son who died, but two. That some two years before Jackie was born, Isabella had had a stillborn baby boy. I learned about this first child from the archives of Mt. Auburn cemetery—where he had been buried along with Jackie. Somehow, the information about this first child had been lost.
What were some of the discoveries you made about Frick and other New York collectors?
One of the most exciting discoveries was about Giovanni Bellini’s ravishing St. Francis in the Desert —one of the most celebrated paintings in the Frick. I found out that when Frick was first offered the picture, he didn’t leap to purchase it. In fact, he had to be persuaded to take the picture and waited until it was cheap. It had been sent over here during the First World War, to get it out of London and its owner had gone bankrupt and was forced to sell. But if you look at the Frick catalog, it tells you nothing about this.
I discovered that in 1912 an English banker named Arthur Morton Grenfell had bought it. I asked around and no one knew anything about him. But in Burke’s peerage and in an article on the history of London banks, I found that he came from an old family of bankers—one of his cousins was a partner of J. P. Morgan. Grenfell made a lot of money in South Africa and Canada and quickly put together a collection—just like the Americans. But then, just as fast, Grenfell lost his money. And thanks to the dealer correspondence, I found that he walked into Knoedler one day and said he had to sell his entire collection. One would think the price of an absolute masterpiece like the Bellini would never fall, but it did.
Meanwhile, I had tracked down a grandson of Arthur Grenfell’s—who happened to have recently worked in the British consulate in Boston. He introduced me to his aunt—a wonderful woman named Dame Frances Campbell-Preston who had been a lady in waiting to the Queen Mother. She didn’t have a photograph of the Bellini but she had one of another painting that Frick had bought from Grenfell’s collection—Titian’s Man in a Red Cap. The photograph shows this famous Frick painting hanging in someone else’s wood-paneled dining room.
In the archives of the Frick, I also came across a letter written to Frick by Arthur Grenfell when he was fighting in Belgium—immediately after war broke out he had gone to the front. This letter was a very straightforward, heartbreaking description of the trenches in Belgium. He didn’t know that Frick had bought his Bellini. He seemed to want the influential American to get a sense of the horror of the War. Frick wrote him back, but not immediately and the letter was cursory and at best insensitive, and showed Frick simply didn’t understand Grenfell’s experience and it was revealing about Frick’s character.
What did you learn about American taste?
Americans have always loved portraits and landscapes. We began as a Protestant nation and these collectors—particularly the men, the tycoons—shied away from Catholic pictures and religious imagery. Of course, by now we have lots of religious pictures—as art historians took over running the museums, and they compensated because they wanted to tell the whole history of art. But in some European museums it is very noticeable that there are many, many religious paintings. And in the Berlin museum there is a dazzling room of Rembrandt’s so-called “subject pictures,” i.e. paintings with subjects from mythology or the bible. The sort of room you never see in an American museum.
I also learned that the female collectors—Isabella Stewart Gardner and Louisine Havemeyer, who was advised by the artist Mary Cassatt—had more advanced taste than the men. Gardner was one of the first to buy the abstract canvases of Whistler and then in 1896—before most of the tycoons had begun collecting Old Masters, she bought Titian’s ravishing Rape of Europa—an absolute masterpiece, but also a mythological picture and a large nude. Not something that had ever been seen in Boston—or anywhere in the United States, for that matter. Isabella Gardner had definite taste. She knew exactly what she liked and wanted and asked Bernard Berenson to get it for her.
Mary Cassatt was equally certain of her taste, which was also unconventional and modern. Thanks to Cassatt, Louisine Havemeyer was one of the very first Americans to buy a Monet and then she and her husband built one of the great collections of Impressionist painting. Louisine wanted “avant-garde” Old Masters—like El Greco. Perhaps because they were not involved with the museums and were outside the art “establishment,” these women had the freedom to go their own way.
Who is your favorite collector?
My initial response would be Isabella Stewart Gardner. I feel that she hasn’t been given her due. Writers and art historians have tended to condescend to her and dismiss her as egotistical and vain, and to claim that these traits drove her collecting. But I think she was one of the most visionary of America’s collectors.
But I became fascinated with every one of the collectors—Marquand always talked about art being good for American society and he believed it, but at the same time, if you look at photographs of his house which was jammed with paintings and sculpture and furniture, China, mosaics, porcelain—literally countless things, he had clearly fallen madly in love with the visual arts.
And Frick of course was very complicated and no one is more interesting. He had the most powerful and dominating personality, not a warm one, but there were some playful aspects. He had always loved pictures. I wanted to reconcile the brutal tycoon—the King of Coke—and the collector, who has left New York his beautiful museum, which he built in 1914—just as Europe was engulfed in war. I argue that his brilliance as a collector depended upon his brilliance as a businessman.