With its reference to “the picture trade,” the subtitle of Rachel Cohen's biography of Bernard Berenson (1865–1955) serves to remind us that the buying and selling of art is, when stripped of its cultural pretensions, a business like any other business. In foregrounding this, Cohen signals her intent to highlight how Berenson's participation in the trade clashed with his devotion to aestheticism and connoisseurship, creating an emotional bind from which he was never able to escape.
Born in Lithuania and brought to Boston at age ten, the adolescent Berenson fashioned for himself a persona—as an aesthete of exquisite discrimination and sensibility—that removed him from the hard-scrabble world of Jewish immigrants in which he was raised and from which his father, a petty trader, never succeeded in escaping. In time the son achieved fame as a scholar of Italian Renaissance painting with a remarkable flair for authenticating difficult-to-attribute Old Masters. At his beautiful Villa I Tatti outside Florence (which he eventually gifted to Harvard, where he had been an undergraduate), he held court during the first half of the twentieth century, dazzling wealthy collectors, titled Europeans, celebrity socialites, writers, and intellectuals with his erudite conversation.
Finding the wherewithal to finance his life as an aesthete, a connoisseur, and an intimate of the wellborn and the wealthy taxed Berenson from the time he left Boston and settled in Florence. He eventually discovered that he could finance the way of life to which he—a man of learning and taste—aspired by exploiting his extraordinary knowledge of European painting and his ability to recreate in words the experience of standing in front of a painting. He began as an advisor to nouveau riche Gilded Age Americans who were building Old Master collections, but quickly drifted into buying and selling paintings on his own account. He then became an authenticator for Joseph Duveen, an Anglo-Jewish art dealer with galleries in New York, Paris, and London, for whom he worked between 1912 and 1937, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.
On the face of it, Berenson was a great success. The problem was that the trade in pictures was—and still is—a moral minefield or, in Cohen's phrase, “an ethical quagmire” (115). Chicanery, duplicity, and fast-dealing were rife. Forgeries, misattributions, destructive renovations, the avoidance of import taxes, and the smuggling of works to avoid bans on their transfer were everyday matters. In addition, Duveen was an unscrupulous scoundrel. His reputation was sufficiently tainted and the work of making attributions for a dealer sufficiently compromising that Berenson never revealed his relationship with Duveen. Berenson's inability to escape the taint of commerce, in general, and his immersion in a morally murky tributary of it, in particular, weighed heavily on him all his life.
Compounding the problem was the hoary association between buying and selling, on the one hand, and Jewishness, on the other, from which Berenson was eager to disassociate himself. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had become an Episcopalian and later, as a budding connoisseur in Italy, a Roman Catholic. Both were opportunistic conversions, for he did not have a religious bone in his body and never practiced either religion for long. The aristocrats and socialites whom he cultivated included many who were otherwise hostile to Jews. The French-Jewish archaeologist and classicist Salomon Reinach thought Berenson's behavior in their company during the Dreyfus Affair was cowardly and disgraceful. While Berenson did number Jews among his friends and often said that only in the company of Jews like himself could he let his guard down and relax, he nonetheless thought about Jews collectively in stereotypical antisemitic terms, and both in correspondence and conversation he labored to distance himself from them. Typical was his response when Israel Zangwill once invited him to be his guest at the Maccabaeans, a London dining club of Anglo-Jewish professional and literary men. The invitation threw him into a panic. Accepting it, he feared, would signal his identification with Judaism or the Jews. He was so undone by the invitation that he asked his wife to reply to Zangwill, letting him know why he could not attend.
Unlike previous biographers, most notably Meryle Secrest and Ernest Samuels, Cohen places Berenson's lifelong struggle to resolve the tension between Jewishness and aestheticism center stage. One might say that this is only appropriate in that the book appears in Yale University Press's series Jewish Lives. But there is more to this than that. Cohen understands the powerful hold this tension had on Berenson's emotional life in a way that Secrest and Samuels did not. Anyone who reads Berenson's letters and late autobiographical books cannot escape the conclusion that he was obsessed with his origins until the end of his very long life. Despite his formal repudiation of Judaism at baptismal fonts on two continents, he was never able to sideline his feelings about his background. During World War II, when the German occupation of Italy forced him to flee I Tatti and go into hiding, his Jewishness intruded even more insistently into his consciousness. Cohen's treatment of his unresolved problem is insightful and compassionate. It reminds us how difficult it could be for ostensibly deracinated Jews to shed their Jewishness—not least of all because non-Jewish society continued to remind them of it—and how emotionally exhausting the whole business was.
For historians who study how modern Jews pursued social and professional acceptance outside their own community this is a lively and engaging contribution to the literature. The paths that acculturated, ambitious Jews took were varied: bourgeois integrationism, revolutionary socialism, conversion to Christianity, the creation of new universalistic religions, the pursuit of science, and, in Berenson's case, the worship of literature and art. Of these vehicles for radical assimilation, aestheticism was undoubtedly the least common. This in no way detracts, however, from the value of this biography for understanding the vicissitudes of radical assimilation, which were depressingly similar, whatever form it took.
