Bankers and art
November 12 2012
Picture: BG
In The Believer, the latest biographer of Bernard Berenson, Rachel Cohen, has an interesting piece about the relationship between artists, the market, and collectors. She makes this perceptive point about the Metropolitan Museum in New York:
In studying the value associated with art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’ve spent a lot of time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is, among other things, a vast compendium of the tastes of financiers. From the days when J. P. Morgan was the powerful president of its board to the period in which Robert Lehman donated nearly three thousand works to be housed in a separate wing bearing his name, the museum has been built, stocked, and guided by bankers.
Gallery visitors in, say the Wallace Collection in London or the Louvre in Paris, will notice other collecting influences on the pictures they see, such as aristocracy and royalty. But it's a testament to the Met's ambition, and that of its supporters over the years, that its collections are every bit as good as either of those great European institutions. New York was lucky that when the Met first formed its collection, the world's richest collectors liked primarily to buy Old Masters.
Could you do the same today? Not for Old Masters. In terms of scale, there isn't the supply, and nor the demand. For today's financiers, the keenly hunted multi-million dollar trophies are to be found not in the crumbling castles of Europe or the London dealing rooms of Lord Duveen, but freshly minted from the studios of the artists themselves. Will future generations of New Yorkers be as grateful to Steven Cohen for his love of Hirst, as they are today to Henry Frick for his love of Holbein?
