A Life in Art / An Artful Life, Part 2

Bernard Berenson A Life in the Picture Trade

by Rachel Cohen

FIGURE 1. Bernard Berenson at 21

When we left Bernard Berenson, it was 1887. (Figure 1) He was a recent graduate of Harvard University embarking upon a voyage to Europe. The university travel grant he had hoped to receive hadn’t materialized. But private patrons, among them Isabella Stewart Gardner, who, with Berenson’s assistance, would eventually own one of the finest collections of Italian Renaissance art in the United States, paid for his trip. This trip to Europe, followed by only 12 years his first trip across the Atlantic. That voyage had been in the opposite direction, when he and his family emigrated from Lithuania to Boston. In a little more than a decade, Berenson had already traveled quite a distance - from impoverished immigrant to accomplished alumnus of America’s premier university.

He had planned to stay in Europe for one year, but that one year eventually stretched into seven. Early on, he visited England where he fell under the spell of Walter Pater, the original “art for art’s sake” guy whose writings on Italian Renaissance art simultaneously celebrated the individual artist-genius and the right of individuals (such as himself, such as Berenson) to respond idiosyncratically to those works of art. As an aside, that is why doctoral programs in the humanities exist, that is why tenure is to mostly based on publishing articles and books. Because if there was only one way to understand works of literature, of art, of historical events, then one description/discussion would be sufficient. But different generations, different groups (marxist, feminist, queer, etc.) interpret the past through a lens that is particular to themselves, to their time, to their place and to their way of interpreting the past, understanding the present. So, there is no single interpretation of historical events, of Shakespeare’s sonnets, of Michelangelo’s sculptures.

Berenson visited Paris and Northern Europe before traveling to Italy. It was in Italy that he found his groove, at the age of 24, two years into his seven year wanderjahren. Berenson met Giovanni Morelli in Rome and became an adherent of Morelli’s technique of determining who painted what. Berenson decided that rather than become a writer, as he had planned, he would become a connoisseur of Italian Medieval and Renaissance Painting. The task confronting him must have seemed both daunting and delightful. A cheese connoisseur has to eat a lot of cheese, a wine connoisseur has to drink a lot of wine. A painting connoisseur has to see a lot of paintings. And so Berenson embarked upon what was to be the journey of his career, of his life. He visited museums, of course (the Uffizi opened as a museum in 1865,the year of Berenson’s birth) but mostly he visited churches and palazzi, where so many of the paintings resided, at least until he and his clients got to them.

One reviewer has suggested that Rachel Cohen’s biography is organized around the women in Berenson’s life. And it is true that women take center stage here. He had so many female friends and lovers and so many of them overlapped, I mean in his life, not, I don’t think, well, I don’t really know, in his bed, that it seems just the right organizational scheme. These women were talented and interesting and enhanced Berenson’s life quite as much as he enhanced theirs. Berenson may have been, at one point in his youth, attracted to men, but with so many other aspects of his life to hide (or try to hide): race, religion, roots; trying to hide an aberrant (at the time) sexual orientation would have been just too stressful, don’t you think ? Berenson knew Oscar Wilde and the cautionary tale that was, eventually, Wilde’s life, would have confirmed Berenson’s view that sexual attraction to or love for another man would have been too dangerous a choice. Berenson didn't stop trying to change who he was, though. He converted to Catholicism, which he said seemed like the right thing to do in Italy. And after the First World War, he dropped the ‘h’ in his first name, going from Bernhard to Bernard, making it less German and more French, again because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Figure 2. Senda Berenson

The first woman who had an impact on the adult Berenson was his sister Senda, three years his junior. (Figure 2) And her trajectory confirms that Berenson’s family was an exceptional one. When Berenson stayed longer than the anticipated year in Europe, Senda sent him small sums of money as she could, even returning to her parent’s home so she could continue to fund her brother’s travels. Senda was a frail young woman and physical pain forced her to forego formal education. She eventually took her health in hand through physical education training. With neither high school nor college degrees, she joined the faculty of Smith College as a physical education teacher. Further, she introduced the new game of basketball to women’s sports. Celebrated as the ‘Mother of Women’s Basketball,’ she wrote the Basketball Guide for Women and in 1985, was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Do you remember playing basketball in high school, I do. Girls didn’t play full court basketball like our brothers and boyfriends did. No, we played something called basket and ball, staying in and then rotating among three positions, shooter, passer and blocker, remember? Cooperation in women’s sports was Senda’s goal for her young female charges. Cooperation not competition.

Figure 3. Mary & Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti

One summer Senda visited Berenson in Italy but it did not go well because her brother was involved with a married woman. That woman, Mary Costelloe who was also from Boston, met Berenson in London where she was living with her husband, a banker, and their two daughters. (Figure 3) Mary, an unconventional woman before Berenson entered her life, threw convention further to the wind when she abandoned her husband and children to study art and make a life with Berenson. His achievements were to a very large extent, their achievements and he never hesitated to give her credit. Hers was the more organized mind and her lists kept track of what they had seen where and what his/their thoughts had been about what they had seen. She was an art historian, as the phrase goes, ‘in her own right'. She was slated to be listed as the co-author of his first book on Venetian artists (1894) but her mother, a feminist, dissuaded her, worried that her daughter’s reputation would be sullied. Bernard and Mary had become lovers in 1890. She moved to Italy to be with him 1892, but until her husband’s death 7 years later, they had separate lodgings to avoid scandal.

Figure 4. Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy

In 1900, the Berensons moved to the Villa I Tatti, in the hills above Settignano. (Figure 4) Initially they rented the villa but when the owner, a local English expatriate, died, they bought it from his heir. Their lives in Italy read a lot like the bohemian lives of the Bloomsbury group and many members of that group wandered in and out of I Tatti over the years. It is reassuring to know that Mary was as unfaithful to their marriage vows as Bernard was. I will tell you about two lovers that Rachel Cohen mentions, one of them Mary’s, the other, Bernard’s. Snarky and indiscreet are the two adjectives that comes most readily to mind. Here is Mary’s story. After they bought I Tatti, Mary hired two young English architects to renovate, repair and expand it. One of the young men Mary hired was Geoffrey Scott with whom Mary was in love. The Bloomsbury biographer and critic Lytton Strachey explained the relationship this way to a friend, that although Mary “was frantically in love with (Scott). He remains a confirmed sodomite, and she covers him with fur coats, editions of rare books, and even bank notes and all of which he accepts without a word and without an erection.” That my friends is snarky, of Strachey to write of Cohen to quote and of me to repeat, hashtag sorry not sorry.

Figure 5. Isabelle Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent, 1888

Two other women, significant to Berenson, were not sexual partners. One was Isabelle Stewart Gardner who appeared early and then often in Berenson’s life. (Figure 5) She was one of his first benefactors and was among his first clients. Indeed, she built her collection of Italian Renaissance art with his guidance. Sometimes he would find paintings for her collection himself and negotiate with the painting’s owners, more often he negotiated with a dealer. In both instances, he would retain for himself a percentage of the sale price. This was how Berenson was able to live independently in Italy, to make a life for himself and begin to send money home to his family in America.

Figure 6. Bernard Berenson & Edith Wharton

Berenson’s other significant friendship with a woman not his lover was with Edith Wharton. (Figure 6) They became friends in 1909 and remained so until her death nearly 30 years later. They visited each other often, traveled together frequently, and when apart, they wrote constantly. Her affection for Berenson notwithstanding, anti-Semitic comments popped up with some frequency in her correspondence as did unflattering descriptions of Jews in her books.

Figure 7. Bella Da Costa Greene and her boss, J.P. Morgan

I will mention two other women in Berenson’s life, both lovers. The first was Belle Da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan’s librarian. (Figure 7) To explain her dark complexion, Bella Greene said she was Portuguese. We know now that was a lie - she wasn’t Portuguese, she was black. Indeed, her father was the first black graduate of Harvard and a prominent lawyer. Her parent's marriage foundered when her mother wanted the family to pass for white, which Bella, her siblings and her mother eventually did, once her parents separated. The love affair between Bella and Berenson was a passionate one and Bernard accompanied Bella on buying expeditions since her boss, J.P. Morgan, gave her complete freedom to purchase whatever books and manuscripts she wished to build his library. Here is the indiscreet part. Cohen speculates that Bella was a virgin when she met Berenson. Bella’s biographer thinks that she became pregnant on one of their buying trips and had an abortion in England. Obviously, Bella couldn’t have had a child, It is difficult enough these days to be a single working mother, it would have been financially and socially impossible then. And what would she have done, how would she have explained it, if the child was born darker than she? Just think back to all the speculation that surrounded the birth of Archie, the son of Prince Harry and Meghan Markel. I don’t think that Bella ever told Berenson that she was black. He was a married man when she met him. A married man who had had many lovers before her. Revenge porn is a thing now, with jilted or spiteful lovers sharing intimate photos of their former partners on the internet. Even without the internet, she would have had too much to lose if she had confided in him.

Figure 8. Nicky Mariano & Bernard Berenson

Finally, there is Nicky Mariano, (Figure 8) the woman who became a member of the Berenson household in 1919 and remained until Bernard’s death in 1959 and indeed beyond, overseeing the transition of the Berenson’s home of nearly 60 years into the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Nicky was invited to I Tatti by Mary to become their librarian. She eventually became the beloved third person in a very tight triad. She traveled with the Berensons and when Mary initially was too tired and eventually too ill to travel, Nicky took her place and traveled alone with Bernard. When the Nazis came calling, she hid with Bernard for more than 18 months at a friend’s home. Mary was too ill to move and too indiscreet to be told where they were. Nicky was exactly the right person at the right time to make order out of what had become the chaos of the Berensons’ life as age and illness tore them apart.

So what exactly did Bernard Berenson do that enabled him to acquire and restore a medieval Tuscan villa for which he amassed an impressive art collection and a significant library. How was he able to travel so extensively and live so lavishly for so many years. We know that Bernard Berenson was a connoisseur. But, where, I hear you asking, is the money in that? Well, beginning with the methodology devised by Giovanni Morelli, he honed his ability to attribute paintings to the artists who painted them. Although Charles Eliot Norton, Berenson’s Harvard professor and nemesis, disparaged Morelli’s technique as the ‘ear and toenail’ school; before microscopes, spectroscopes, x-rays, and the rest, Morelli’s methods offered a start. For a scientific study to be considered valid, other scientists must be able to replicate it. For an attribution to be valid, it has to depend upon more than intuition and sentiment. Morelli’s method brought a sort of scientific approach to the attribution of paintings which had not been the case prior to Morelli and Berenson. Please don’t tell me that many of Berenson’s attributions have subsequently been questioned or changed, I know. That’s what happens when new information comes to light and improved techniques are discovered.

Berenson had an encyclopedic memory and he took or dictated notes to Mary and then to Nicky when he was ‘communing’ with a painting, so he would remember every nuanced detail. He requested photographs of paintings he wasn’t able to visit, a collection which eventually numbered in the thousands. And as rail travel became easier, he was able to see more and more paintings in situ. When Berenson first began authenticating Italian Renaissance painting, they were mostly purchased by English and European collectors. But soon, American collectors got into the game and Berenson was ready for them.

Figure 9. American Robber Baron (pear face reference)

I read a paper once by an art historian about Robber Barons (Figure 9) and their art buying habits. The writer (an art historian) showed (with graphs and charts, not paintings!!) that when these men were taking risks in business, they were making conservative art buying decisions. When they were making conservative business decisions, they took risks with the art they bought. What would constitute ‘safe art’? Well, obviously, art by living artists, which didn’t need to be authenticated. That tactic wasn’t without its pitfalls of course. There were dealers, like the Baltimorean we discussed some months ago, who simply bought the wrong art, art that is now consigned to museum storage or worse.

Collectors also purchased old master paintings. And of course, they wanted to be sure that what they were buying was the real deal. If a painting hadn’t been hanging in the same palazzo or church for the previous 400 years, then it needed to be authenticated by experts.

Those Robber Barons, who fancied themselves descendants of the Medici and other Renaissance banking dynasties, were masters of wheeling and dealing in their professional lives but they expected the connoisseur who authenticated the paintings they were considering to be as pure as the driven snow. They expected that the authenticator would have no financial incentive when making his attribution. Berenson was scrupulous about his authentications and refused to succumb to pressure to attribute a painting if he wasn’t at least 100% sure of his attribution. But the fact was that his consultation fees with the Dutch Jewish (Jewish Dutch?) art dealer, Joseph Duveen and the percentage of the sale price he received when a painting he authenticated, was sold, permitted his grand and glorious lifestyle. He tried to keep his contract with Duveen secret because he didn’t want to be accused of exactly what people accused him of - attributing paintings to increase their price and therefore his payout. Berenson’s attempts at secrecy only added to the toxic brew of anti-semitism and whispers about a poor man who got too rich.

Ironically, Berenson tried and failed repeatedly to go legit, to become a university professor or museum curator but institutional prejudice thwarted his efforts. And really, how could he have ever imagined that he could afford to be a professor or a curator? You have to already be rich to accept one of those jobs or be content with genteel poverty if you are not. In the end, Berenson could not escape his Jewish heritage, he was in the ‘trades’ as they say in England, and that’s not a compliment.

Ironically, the first Jewish professor of art history at Harvard was Paul Sachs, whose personal wealth came from his family’s investment firm, Goldman Sachs. He could have worked at Harvard for free. And it was Sachs with whom Berenson organized his gift of I Tatti to Harvard. As Rachel Cohen writes, “It was evidently a matter of peculiar importance to Berenson that Harvard, which had made it possible for him to be a connoisseur and, in some ways, had prevented him from being anything else, should now accept (I Tatti) as a gift,…”

Here are a few things I am thinking about. The fabulously wealthy men who bought Italian Renaissance paintings from art dealers like Duveen, paintings which had been authenticated by connoisseurs like Berenson, eventually donated their collections to American museums like the Met and the National Gallery, or established collections in their gorgeous mansions which are open to the public, like the Isabelle Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Frick in New York. (Figure 10) And while I am delighted that these paintings are available for all of us to enjoy, every so often I ask myself if those industrialists couldn’t have made a little less money by paying their employees a little more money, say, for example, a living wage? These industrialists amassed their fortunes at a time when there was no minimum wage or maximum work week, why couldn’t they have been more reasonable as employers ? These men had not inherited their money, they were nouveau riche, they were arrivistes. They were buying their way to respectability, so why did they begrudge Berenson the same?

Figure 10. Frick Collection, New York City

And if it was anyone’s fault that Italian Renaissance paintings were so expensive, it was their own. The answer to how much a painting is worth, is how much someone is willing to pay for it. As the art critic who wrote about the David Hockney painting that sold for $92 million said, a painting’s value is anywhere between priceless and worthless.

Finally, as Rachel Cohen notes, Bernard Berenson made “foundational contributions to art history, art criticism, and the collecting of art in the United States” and yet his life was constrained by prejudice. Berenson admonished his fellow Jews, quoting Heinrich Heine, “In order to be taken as silver you must be of gold.” (Figure 11) And isn’t this the same lament that all races, religions and genders that aren’t straight, white, male and pedigreed, confront when trying to climb the ladder of success, indeed when trying to survive. This is a great book. You really must read it.

Copyright © 2021 Beverly Held, Ph.D. All rights reserved

Figure 11. Bernard Berenson by Cecil Beaton