Begin Here

Take a page from Sir Joseph Duveen, the man who taught America how to collect.

- BY DAVID NETTO

If the case can be made that the greatest collector of modern times was not a collector at all but an art dealer—Sir Joseph Duveen, in later life Lord Duveen of Millbank, proprietor of the Duveen Brothers gallery and robber baron-whisperer of Frick, Mellon, Kress, Widener, Altman, Huntington, Hearst, and many others—the book to make it is Duveen’s eponymous 1952 biography by S.N. Behrman.

With typically impeccable timing Duveen died in 1939, and what began as a series of articles in the New Yorker chronicling his avuncular-to-outrageous behavior remains an essential stop for anyone interested in the history of collecting. (Duveen was responsible for assembling the three collections—Widener, Mellon, and Kress—that comprise the bulk of the National Gallery of Art in Washington.)

What he didn’t have he invented. He invented his clients; he invented the United States as a nation with a cultural patrimony, in Behrman’s words “making it possible for the American people to see a large share of the world’s most beautiful art without having to go abroad.” He invented the technique of selling behind the modern art market: one part shaper of perception and two parts epic pricing. At least one investment bank secretly issues Behrman’s book as required reading for new employees—an essential crash course in the art of selling.