Bernard Berenson
A Life in the Picture Trade
Rachel Cohen
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Bernard Berenson
A Life in the Picture Trade
Rachel Cohen
About This Book
From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an illuminating new biography of the connoisseur who changed the art world and the way we see artÂ
When Gilded Age millionaires wanted to buy Italian Renaissance paintings, the expert whose opinion they sought was Bernard Berenson, with his vast erudition, incredible eye, and uncanny skill at attributing paintings. They visited Berenson at his beautiful Villa I Tatti, in the hills outside Florence, and walked with him through the immense private libraryâwhich he would eventually bequeath to Harvardâwithout ever suspecting that he had grown up in a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family that had struggled to survive in Boston on the wages of the fatherâs work as a tin peddler. Berensonâs extraordinary self-transformation, financed by the explosion of the Gilded Age art market and his secret partnership with the great art dealer Joseph Duveen, came with painful costs: he hid his origins and felt that he had betrayed his gifts as an interpreter of paintings. Nevertheless his way of seeing, presented in his books, codified in his attributions, and institutionalized in the many important American collections he helped to build, goes on shaping the American understanding of art today.
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 way his family and companionsâincluding his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, his lover Belle da Costa Greene, and his dear friend Edith Whartonâhelped to form his ideas and his legacy. Rachel Cohen explores Berensonâs inner world and exceptional visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forcesânew capital, the developing art market, persistent anti-Semitism, and the two world warsâthat profoundly affected his life.