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Duveen
A Life In Art
by Meryle Secrest
The high-end art market of the 1920s and 1930s is the focus of this biography of art dealer Joseph Duveen, whose Duveen Brothers firm sold Old Masters to the likes of Andrew Mellon and J.P. Morgan.
Knopf, 544 pages
09/21/2004
$35.00
ISBN: 0375410422
Nonfiction
Art, Architecture & Photography
Biographies & Memoirs
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
New York Review Of Books John Brewer
By far the best account of Joseph Duveen's life in a biography that is rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written. Her inquiries into early-twentieth-century collecting whet our appetite for a more general history of the art market in the first half of the twentieth century.
Los Angeles Times Edmund Fawcett
Detailed and fascinating. [19 Sept 2004, p.R7]
Publishers Weekly
Secrest paints an engrossing picture of the art-dealing world, fraught with intrigues, betrayals and lawsuits, to say nothing of fakes, forgeries and misattributions.
Booklist Donna Seaman
Scintillating... Solid history rendered deliciously anecdotal and gossipy, this is serious fun. [August 2004, p.1866]
The New Yorker Peter Schjeldahl
[Duveen's] adventures in trade are picaresque, and Secrest charts them in detail that is fatiguing at times but cumulatively monumental.
Washington Post Anton Gill
There is no doubt that Meryle Secrest has done a monumental amount of research, and while at times the sheer weight of this tends to interrupt the narrative flow and bog the reader down -- one or two chapters are really just lists of deals and the people involved in them -- the overall portrait of the times Duveen lived through is valuable and fascinating.
Library Journal Michael Dashkin
Secrest's rich anecdotes of Duveen's relationships with his clients (nouveaux riches who were, in essence, seeking respectability) seem at times closer to myth than reality, and Secrest makes it clear when telling these entertaining stories that their accuracy may indeed be questionable. [1 Dec 2004, p.115]
Boston Globe Michael Kammen
Although the book is filled with fascinating anecdotes, especially concerning some sensational lawsuits, readers may tire of the litany of obscure English nobles selling off ancestral portraits to Americans in need of social uplift.
The New Republic E.V. Thaw
The postmortems of the firm of Duveen are of interest, although Secrest does not really go into them.
The New York Times Roberta Smith
Toward the middle, the book threatens to become a list of paintings and clients pursued and landed, as well as of the ones that got away. Duveen himself, who wasn't reflective and didn't keep a journal, sometimes seems to go missing in the plethora of minutiae, the constant back and forth of prices and cables, the lengthy encapsulations of trial transcripts.
The New York Times Book Review Michael Peppiatt
While this biography provides a useful background to the way the great American collections were put together, the story becomes formless and rather repetitive after the first few spectacular sales are described. Perhaps that is Pascal's point about the ''chase''; in the end, it seems somewhat mindless.
Kirkus Reviews
Duveen has always been considered a slippery character, and his biographer's tone is breezy and superior, bordering on condescending. (She also occasionally gets in over her head with art history.)
The Economist
Perhaps the book, ultimately, is rather dull. Yet this has less to do with Ms Secrest's abilities, which are considerable, and more to do with the nature of the man and the material at hand. Although he was a great raconteur, Duveen does not appear to have been a very inspiring or interesting man, other than when he was working.
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