A Life in Art / An Artful Life, Part 1
Bernard Berenson A Life in the Picture Trade, by Rachel Cohen
In 1780, John Adams was in Philadelphia, his wife was in Massachusetts. In one of his many letters, he wrote the following, “I must study politics and war, that our sons may …study…commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, …architecture (and) statuary…..” And how do the musings of the second president of the United States relate to the subject of the book under review? Let’s see.
Bernard Berenson A Life in the Picture Trade, by Rachel Cohen, is, as the title suggests, a book about a man who made pictures, paintings, his life. Wait, don’t go. This book is filled with so many nuggets of nuanced observation that I know you will find the lucky twists and unfortunate turns of Berenson’s life as interesting as I did. The author’s success lies not only in her ability to bring to life a life but to bring to life the mores and morals of the times and places in which Berenson flourished and floundered.
So, Bernard Berenson. Have you ever heard of or visited the Villa I Tatti, Harvard’s Center for Renaissance Studies tucked into the hillside above Settignano, 10 minutes from Fiesole, 15 minutes from Florence. The villa, its artwork, its library and its gardens were bequeathed to Harvard University by Bernard Berenson. Based upon John Adams calculations, Berenson must have been the grandson of a politician and the son of a businessman. Obviously, he must have been born into money. How else to explain the villa, the art, the books? Yet the answer to all of the above is no, no and no. And therein lies the tale that Rachel Cohen tells so masterfully in this biography.
To begin, like so many people who emigrated from Eastern Europe to America, Bernard Berenson’s name was not Bernard Berenson ‘in the old country’. Bernhard Valvronjenski was born in 1865, in Lithuania, in Butrymaney, in the Pale of Settlement (which always makes me think of Evita Peron’s ‘back of beyond’), to one family amongst many, indeed one amongst five million Jews who were permitted to reside there but who barely survived there. With no freedom of movement and no permission to grow crops, hunger was a constant companion, starvation a constant fear. In the years right after Bernhard was born, a commission appointed by the governor-general of Vilna, the largest and nearest town, declared that the Jews were a “contemptible and abominable nation”. Those sentiments were shared rather broadly. Berenson’s grandmother, whom he adored, who cared for him like her own because her daughter, his mother, was still a child herself when Bernhard was born, died when Bernhard was 4, perhaps of starvation. A few years later, the family’s house burned down - accident, maybe, arson, likely. Not being amongst the optimists, those Jews who thought that the situation would improve, the Valronjsenski family decided it was time to try their luck in America. Bernhard’s father went first, a third class ticket on a steamer bound for Boston. Cousins of his were already there. The next year, Bernhard, his mother and two younger siblings, followed him.
It saddened me to read about Bernhard’s father, an intellectual who enthusiastically embraced secular Judaism. He hadn’t worked in Lithuania, perhaps because he had not been trained to do anything, perhaps because there was no work a Jew was permitted to do. For a learned man with no business acumen (and he had none), there was no path forward in Boston, either. Rachel Cohen tells us he was a peddler who worked for his cousin who owned a scrap metal and tinware shop. At the end of every day, we are told, he would bring the scrap metal he had collected to his cousin’s shop. It sounds like back breaking and soul numbing work. And it sounds identical to Kirk Douglas’s (Issur Danielovitch) father’s job. According to Douglas, “My father, who had been a horse trader in Russia, got himself a horse and a small wagon, and became a ragman, buying old rags, pieces of metal, and junk for pennies, nickels, and dimes … Even … in the poorest section of town… the ragman was on the lowest rung on the ladder. And I was the ragman's son.” Bernhard Berenson was the Tin Man’s son, which had nothing to do with the Wizard of Oz, I am sure of that. Apparently his father was given to rages - who can blame him.
Bernhard Berenson came into his own in Boston with attendance at Harvard, his crowning glory. It must be said of course that neither Boston nor Harvard welcomed Jews. And the German Jews who had already established themselves in Boston did not greet their Eastern European and Russian brethren with any enthusiasm. And yet Berenson prevailed. Beginning at the Boston Public Library where his voracious appetite for books, all kinds of books on all sorts of subjects began and then Harvard, where his tuition was paid for by Edward Warren, the first of several wealthy Americans who made possible what otherwise would have been beyond his reach.
Berenson wanted to fit in, of course he did. His father’s family had changed its name in such a bid. Berenson went still further, he changed his religion. But passing over is tricky and never really complete. Assimilation is a journey; it is a goal never reached. Being baptized in the name of Christ did not make him a Christian. He did not shed his old skin, he was not reborn. By the age of 20, the piling on of what he tried to hide from others but somehow never really could, was an integral part of him, as it was, as it is. for so many still.
His intellect at Harvard was often acknowledged but not always appreciated. He took art history courses taught by Charles Elliot Norton, Harvard’s first professor of art history. Those courses changed Berenson’s life but that wasn’t Norton’s intention. Art history, Norton contended, (and he was not alone) was not a discipline for the “pushing immigrant classes”. Norton told a colleague that Berenson ‘ha(d) more ambition than ability,’ a comment repeated. A comment that haunted Berenson for the rest of his life.
Berenson applied for a Harvard traveling fellowship his senior year, endorsed enthusiastically by all his professors, save one, Norton. Without Norton’s support, Berenson did not win the fellowship.That was a disappointment money could fix and money was found. A group of benefactors, among them, Isabella Stewart Gardner, funded Berenson’s year of European study. It was a pattern Berenson was to maintain, when institutional prejudice kept him from gaining university or museum posts, patronage paved the way. There is nothing wrong with patronage, of course. Patronage was how the Renaissance artists whose work and lives Berenson would become expert in, had flourished. Michelangelo, as we know, spent his growing up years in the Medici household, surrounded by classical art and classically trained humanists. Mantegna received a stipend from the Duke of Mantua and like Leonardo in Milan and later in France, was called upon to paint frescoes as well as create table decorations for weddings and Easters. The idea of artists painting what pleased them and what they hoped would please a wealthy buyer, did not appear until the 17th century and initially in Northern Europe. Until then, artists were dependent upon the Church and wealthy private patrons for commissions. Patronage enabled Berenson to survive, too.
Berenson's European travels were extensive. His one year abroad became a seven year wanderjahre. Do you know that term? It dates from the middle ages and it refers to the years of travel that craftsmen took after their apprenticeships. Painters, sculptors and architects traveled after their apprenticeships, too. Styles and techniques were diffused from one region to another that way - think single point perspective traveling north and oil painting techniques traveling south. (Better to think of those than how Covid-19 spread around the world). Berenson had already spent time in England before he left for the Continent. He had already visited Belgium, Germany and Austria before he arrived in Venice in the fall of 1888.
He wrote to Mary Costelloe, the woman who would become his wife, “When I …. had my first look at the Campanile and S. Marco I thought they would fall on me, I have read since that blind people suddenly restored to sight feel just so about their first glimpses of the world”.
Berenson’s reaction to Venice was not unlike Benjamin West’s reaction to Rome. West, as you probably know, was the first American born artist to achieve European acclaim. Like Berenson, West’s European voyage (in 1760) had been underwritten by local benefactors. (as an aside, Alexander Hamilton’s 1772 voyage TO American, from the West Indies, was underwritten by benefactors) Like Berenson, West was overwhelmed by the beauty of an Italian city. West wrote (in the 3rd person), “(F)rom the cities of America, where he saw no.. .painting(s)…to the City of Rome the seat of art and taste, had so forcible an impression on his feeling that he was under the necessity of leaving …"
What the 18th century artist and 19th century aesthete suffered were the symptoms of ‘Stendahl’s Syndrome,’ a ‘psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, and confusion when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly when viewing art’. Stendhal described it this way, “ I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence.… Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty.… I had palpitations of the heart.… Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling”.
Unless one tumbles into the street and is run over by a moto, or a Fiat or a bus, the disorder is fatiguing but not fatal and one can gradually begin looking at the gorgeousness that is Italy without fear of losing consciousness. After Venice, Berenson traveled to Florence, where he spent the winter and spring (1888/89) as he would nearly every year for the next 61.
Berenson left Boston anticipating a literary career. But all that changed when he got to Italy. It was the study of paintings that seduced him then and became the centerpiece of his long and productive life and career. It wasn’t really the intellectual underpinning of Italian art that attracted Berenson when he got to Italy. It was connoisseurship. And it is easy to understand why. The art history classes Charles Elliot Norton taught at Harvard were without images, without photos. When Berenson got to Italy, paintings were everywhere, churches were filled with them, palazzi were, too. And when Berenson arrived in Italy, two Italian art historians, Giovanni Morelli and Giovanni Cavalcaselle were just then formulating a systematic means by which to establish an artist’s oeuvre, that is, to determine who painted what. Which paintings could, for example, be attributed to Botticelli, which works were probably by a pupil, which by a follower and which by a forger. Morelli contended that every artist has a particular way, a signature way, of painting unimportant details. And it is those details which are consistent within an artist’s work. So, for example, while a forger would painstakingly work to master the signature of the artist whose work he was copying, when it came to painting something like the folds of an earlobe, he would paint it in his own way. That would be the evidence to use to distinguish a Botticelli from a ‘looks a lot like a Botticelli’. One art historian writing of Morelli’s methods, has compared them to those used by a detective. Think Sherlock Holmes who could gather evidence from observing seemingly insignificant details - the mud on somebody’s boots or the tobacco stain on somebody’s index finger.
Berenson brought with him to Florence a letter of introduction to Paul Richter, a connoisseur who used Morelli’s methods to study paintings by Leonardo. Richter was also a dealer, receiving a percentage of the price of a painting from whomever owned it when he found a buyer for it. This was Berenson's ‘aha’ moment. With his encyclopedic visual memory and his capacity to see, to really see, Berenson had found in connoisseurship, the possibility of a career. Part 2 next week.
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