When Eugene Thaw first tried to give a drawing to the Pierpont Morgan Library he was told, ‘We don’t take gifts from dealers’. Although understandably crestfallen, his regard for the highmindedness of this great New York institution only intensified. Founded by the legendary collector and ‘robber baron’ J.P.Morgan, the library is a stupendous treasure-trove of rare books, manuscripts and works on paper from across the centuries. Thaw persevered in his attempt at generosity, eventually managing to donate an entire collection of over 250 drawings, as well as the cash, some years ago, for the purchase of an adjacent building. He is now a trustee, one of very few dealers on the board of a major collecting institution. ‘I have steered things their way and saved them on occasion from the foibles of the art market’. There is no conflict of interest, because when he collects it is with the Morgan in mind.

Eugene Thaw, who will be seventy next year, was until his retirement one of the leading dealers in old master pictures. His clients included many of the major North American collections, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (to which he has also bequeathed works), the Frick, the Art Institute of Chicago, and such mega-collectors as Norton Simon and Andrew Mellon. But as wealth and opportunity have allowed, he also amassed his own stunning collection of drawings.

He has no trouble admitting to the fact that he prefers drawings that are complete aesthetic experiences in themselves, very full and involved compositions. He even jests that he is a ‘paintings collector manqué’. ‘There are two kinds of drawing: the sketch for something, and the drawing for its own sake. Lots of connoisseurs are much more concerned with the art of idenfification, with ‘who dunnit’, doing detective work and making the right connections. That doesn’t interest me so much as the aesthetic impact of the sheet.’ With characteristic modesty, though, he adds that, ‘Being human, I react more strongly if I know who the artist is. I can’t claim to be so brilliant an eye that I respond just as strongly as if I knew the work were but by Durer.’

Thaw muses on how attitudes towards dealers have changed so demonstrably during his time in the trade. ‘You were one step above a push-cart peddler. Now every young debutante that comes out of college wants to work in a gallery. In my youth the professions for a polite and venturesome young man were Wall Street and advertising – both rather demoted these days. Art dealing has come a long way. Most art dealers who are any good are real scholars and know their field thoroughly.’ Thaw himself is the epitome of the dealer-scholar. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and numerous publications including the Jackson Pollock catalogue raisonne, of which he is co-author. ‘With some dealers, their eye is equivalent to the best academic scholars, or better, because they actually learn from the objects.’

How does he feel about the infamous Mr Morgan with whose legacy his own is now entwined? ‘Of course I have mixed feelings about him as a human being, and don’t know that he would have accepted me as a friend. He was a tyrant, but he was a great collector. But you know, the robber barons like Morgan actually gave their fortunes back to society in the collections they bequeathed. Today’s billionaires are only worried about their ratings with Forbes. With all our moral superiority, Morgan belonged to a better episode in the history of wealth.’ Mr Thaw and his wife Clare have done their bit for philanthropy this end of the century, however. Besides their gift to the Morgan, they have donated a major collection of Native American art as a museum at Cooperstown, in upstate New York, and in Santa Fe, where they now live, they sponsor the restoration of historic adobe churches.

Since parting with his drawings bequest, keeping just a few around him ‘to decorate the apartment’, Eugene Thaw has started collecting in new areas, such as nineteenth-century plein-air oil sketches. With the mixture of bemusement and pride of a true collector, he notes how, thanks to a current exhibition of Corot’s followers at the Brooklyn Museum, many of these forgotten figures are fashionable again.

Mantegna

‘I’m especially proud of this Mantegna because of the difficulty for any collector to get a capital sheet of this early period’, says Eugene Thaw. There is little representation of Italian renaissance or even baroque drawing in his collection because he would have been hard-put to match the superlative holdings of the Morgan in this area. But when this presented itself, he couldn’t resist, and ‘luckily happened to have the funds at the time’. Like many Mantegna drawings, this had previously been attributed to Bellini, but relatively recently the matching of a related work to a Mantegna print led to reattribution of a whole group of drawings. ‘But anyway, I wouldn’t have minded if it was by Bellini’, he remarks with good humour. ‘I don’t collect for the value of drawings. I never resell – that was my whole career as a dealer, which gave me the money to collect these things. I’ve had the thrill of my eye being vindicated by selling again’.

Rembrandt

‘This is one of my earliest Rembrandts. It has such a sense of colour, he is able to use the medium to bring out such liveliness and light. It comes from a set of four sketches he made watching a parade; it’s a band of black musicians. It just says everything about his graphic powers, that he is able to put down so much in such a small sheet.’ ‘Rembrandt is an artist who is being rethought and torn apart by attribution these days. Seymour Slive has said that if there is one more conference, Rembrandt will cease to exist as an artist. Some of my pieces have not survived the various rounds of reattribution’, he concedes, although the four selected for the Academy exhibition are still reckoned to be by the master himself. ‘Actually, if they are great drawings by the best pupil, it doesn’t bother me. Anyway, if they are good enough to be in the Morgan Library, the next generation may put them back [in the oeuvre]!’

Goya

‘This is the peasant who loses everything. She is a universal, even an archetypal figure of suffering’. Thaw sees the grace and fortitude of the peasant who can say ‘Leave it all to Providence’ reflected in the tenderness yet monumentality with which Goya has drawn her, ‘the wonderful silhoutte of the figure against the page, the fullness of emotional content. It could be lifesize, and yet it is only ten inches high’. He doesn’t accept that there is any irony in the title. ‘Goya sympathized with these people. He was a figure of the enlightenment, a humane man like Goethe or Beethoven, but he also has a dark side. This really comes out in some of my other Goyas, in his sharp satire of the Majas, or in the cutting depiction of a monk being fleeced by card-sharks, but here the sentiment is different. He really sympathised with members of the lower orders. This woman is the victim of wars and revolutions.’

Cézanne

Eugene Thaw bought back this late watercolour, one of the set of around a dozen of this unusual size, from his client, Norton Simon. Simon was a collector who believed in hanging everything he owned, Thaw explains, but was worried that such a fresh and delicate watercolour on such a large, clean white sheet would suffered exposed to the California sun. ‘I managed to trade it out of him’. For many years this still-life took pride of place over the Thaw mantlepiece in their Park Avenue apartment. ‘This is one of the miracles of an artist’s hand. Cézanne who started as such an inept performer with a brush and pencil became the subtlest and most magical artist, almost oriental in brilliance of touch. It is so refined, its what the mind’s eye would see. Trying to refine a motif, he draws out of it a kind of abstraction; its a picture created by a mind rather than just a recording eye. This watercolour is just a miracle.’

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At the end of the Civil War, there were very few significant paintings in America. By the start of the Great War, however, thanks to a surprisingly small group of men and women, the extensive collections we possess today had started to be formed. Cynthia Saltzman, a marvelously writerly writer, has studied the literature, read in the archives, and talked to the specialists. Her very unacademic narrative tells how Henry Gurdon Marquand, J. Pierpoint Morgan, the Havemeyers, Henry Clark Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner, in collaboration with Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry and various dealers, purchased art wisely and very ambitiously. Thanks to them, the Met, the Frick, and Gardner’s museum acquired important old master pictures.  Henry James describes how impoverished English and Italian aristocrats salvaged their finances by selling art to newly rich Americans.   Saltzman retells that story. She is marvelously tactful with the practical financial details, which made possible the transmigration of European art. For Frick, she writes,

Art collecting, like all other aspects of his life, involved careful calculation. In accumulating pictures, he could translate the vast capital he had amassed into something magnificent, concrete and fixed, which gave him pleasure, gained him recognition, and over which he could exert complete control (p. 159).

Without moralizing, she tells this story in aesthetically satisfying prose.

None of the newly very rich American collectors had training in art history, though the Havemeyers were close friends with Mary Cassatt. And so it is natural to ask: Why did they purchase posh European art? Perhaps they wanted to emulate the English gentry, whose financially beleaguered collections were up for grabs. Certainly they were highly competitive with their peers, although of course not all of the nouveau rich became art-lovers. (Saltzman is particularly good on the relationship between Frick and his domineering partner, Andrew Carnegie, who chose, however, not to collect old master art, but gave his fortune to building libraries and other cultural institutions.) And yet, for all of her documentation, mysteries remain. Why did the Havermeyers buy then very unfashionable Spanish art? Why did Frick purchase only portraits and landscapes, never nudes?  We intellectuals can understand Fry and Berenson, but it is harder to comprehend  these business people, who I grant were sophisticated visitors to European galleries. It is nice to know that when Frick received The Polish Rider, “in one of the very few instances he ever recorded his feelings about a work of art, he summarized them in a single word: “ENCHANTED” (p. 222).

Frick, Saltzman suggests, created his museum “to create an alternative image to the dark figure who coolly masterminded labor’s defeat” (p. 162). He sought, she speculates, to “control his public legacy. He knew that a fabulous collection of art had the power to atone for sins, and to change the public’s perception of who he was” (p. 196). If that was his goal, then he didn’t succeed. In  1892 his hired Pinkertons murdered striking Pittsburgh workers. When, just a few years ago now, Frick’s long-lived daughter finally died, letters in the local paper, the Post Gazette revealed that her father’s actions had not been forgotten.  Frick was rebuked by a committee from the House of Representations for being “too stern, brusque and somewhat autocratic” (p. 157). But these, not virtues in a public figure, are the ruling qualities of a great collector.  A nicer man would probably not have created such a magnificent museum. I love the Frick, for I love imagining that Mr. Frick has allowed me to look at his private possessions.  And yet, I am always slightly uneasy. How am I, a mere professor, be wandering in his house? A generation ago a cranky English leftist published a book called, if I remember correctly, Art, Enemy of the People. Though I don’t share his politics, every time I enter I am aware of the moral ambiguity of this situation. Great visual art and money have always been intimately linked. No wonder so many of our leading art historians are Marxists.

Cynthia Saltzman Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures.  New York: Viking Penguin, 2008. 352 pages, ISBN 9780670018314

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Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City
212-535-7710
September 18, 2007-January 6, 2008

In conjunction with his newly released two-volume catalogue on the subject, Met curator Walter Liedtke has literally unshuffled the Met’s Dutch collection.   The Age of Rembrandt chronicles the trail of paintings and money given to the Met by several key benefactors. The rooms are organized by collector in sequence, and as the narrative of the groundbreaking purchase of 1871 and subsequent major donations unfolds, the varied strata of seventeenth century Dutch painting are revealed. The Dutch golden age was a cacophony of genres and styles, and the inspired installation by Liedtke and the deep holdings of the Met give each room the feel of an authentic picture collection.

The first room highlights a painting from each major donor.  We are faced by three stylistically different Rembrandt portraits from 1632-33 and three grand landscapes by Ruysdael, Hobbema and Cuyp.  Remarkably, the young Rembrandt could paint Bellona, a mythological portrait that weaves Rubens’ international style with mannered intonations, and then turn on a dime and conjure up Man in an Oriental Costume with an alchemically dazzling display of romantic light and color – a masterpiece of historical portraiture.   In the third portrait, the 26- year-old Rembrandt assumes his place alongside Velazquez, Titian and Van Dyck in Portrait of a Young Woman with a Fan. We are simply floored.

Adjacent to the portraits, Hobbema’s enchanting landscape is insular and distant, while Ruisdale reaches out and pulls the viewer into the countryside via his signature path.  Four rooms into the show, another landscape grouping by Ruisdale, Hobbema and Cuyp appear, and our memory is delightfully jogged back to the first grouping.  Such repetitions continue throughout the exhibition, a refreshing change from the usual, often staid groupings that tend to isolate artists and leave the viewer without a perspective of the larger painting culture.

Relationships abound.  Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer reinforce the picture plane by building their modernist compositions like so many overlaid computer windows, while Gerard ter Borch accentuates the picture window with a diagonally placed mantelpiece, bed, or table in his interiors.  Not to be outdone, Gerrit Dou uses the “window niche,” a framing device that he pioneered, to mediate our voyeuristic gaze into the private realm of the sitter. And Gabriel Metsu seems to have taken a page from everyone.   There is, as well, something wonderful about the riotous scenes of debauchery by Jan Steen and Franz Hals elbowing their way into our consciousness when the favored Vermeer a few feet away so perfectly mirrors our current obsession with the serenity of house and home.  Luckily for us and the Met, Benjamin Altman purchased three first-rate Hals around 1906 against the orthodoxy of prevailing taste.  Sometimes the art of cool, optical enhancement must yield to the dystopic places of delight – as in the bristly-brushed tavern scene.

It seems we can always pivot in this show and make comparisons.   Margareta Haverman’s Vase of Flowers (1716), an ode to observational perfection, ultimately wilts once we’re reminded of Rembrandt’s transformative power to paint far beyond depiction.  In Rembrandt’s Flora (1654) the subject’s sleeve is also a flower, her bodice a canvas, and her face the antecedent to Picasso’s proto post- modern, neo-classical figures.

A nexus in the exhibition is the chapel-like room built to house Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Crucifixion(1625).  One immediately thinks of Grunwald’s famously grotesque rendition of the subject, but on closer inspection the two flanking figures and their delicately flowing pastel-colored drapery and beatific dispositions seem reminiscent of Pontormo’s Deposition of 1528.  It seems northern Gothic painting continued to inspire for a hundred years.  Exiting the little room one is struck by the contrast between this devotional Crucifixion and two excellent interiors of a stark white-walled protestant church by Emanuel Witte (165?) and by Hendrick van Vliet (1660).

At this point two large, licentious Steens loom from the periphery, and an orgiastic blast of Mannerist form and color explode from Abraham Bloemaert’s Moses Striking the Rock (1596), acquired in 1972.  Suddenly we are reminded that the Dutch artists expanded Italian Mannerism with great flourish. Also present is Joachim Wtewael’s diminutive The Golden Age (1605), an exquisite Mannerist version of an Arcadian figural grouping, acquired under Liedtke in 1993.  It is a sad fact that paintings from this potent, late 16th century/early 17th century school were largely ignored until recently, and the Met holdings in this area suffered as a result. Fortunately Liedtke is filling in this gap. Ironically, the drawing department already has many quality works by Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis van Haarlem, but did not include any in the separate but thematically related exhibition in the drawing and print hall.  Perhaps the inclusion of a mythological subject by one of these artists might have given viewers a less staid impression of the period.

Still, Liedtke’s show does not disappoint.  Toward the end of the main section we are treated to the inaugural viewing of the Markus Bequest of 2005.  Willem Claesz Heda’s meticulously descriptive detail in Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza and Glassware (1635) abuts the expressionistic brushstrokes and golden tonality of Jan van Goyen’s  A Beach with Fishing Boats (1653).  The tension between the optical and the painterly is again at play.

In addition, several paintings, such as Philip Koninck’s Landscape (1649), are revelations in their new locations. With its breathtakingly Rothkoesque scale, divided field and pressurized atmosphere, Koninck’s landscape innovation is a significant leap within the northern Romantic tradition.  But more specifically, Koninck seems a kindred spirit to the Hudson River landscape artists, some of whom also played an important role in the Met’s inception.  Perhaps now that the moneyed class has been given their due, the painters’ role in the making of the Met may one day be featured in the American wing.

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