DOC 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Oberon Modern Plays) by George Orwell; Duncan Macmillan; Robert Icke in Arts-Photography

Description

When Gilded Age millionaires wanted to buy Italian Renaissance paintings; the expert whose opinion they sought was Bernard Berenson; with his vast erudition; incredible eye; and uncanny skill at attributing paintings. They visited Berenson at his beautiful Villa I Tatti; in the hills outside Florence; and walked with him through the immense private library—which he would eventually bequeath to Harvard—without ever suspecting that he had grown up in a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family that had struggled to survive in Boston on the wages of the fatherrsquo;s work as a tin peddler. Berensonrsquo;s extraordinary self-transformation; financed by the explosion of the Gilded Age art market and his secret partnership with the great art dealer Joseph Duveen; came with painful costs: he hid his origins and felt that he had betrayed his gifts as an interpreter of paintings. Nevertheless his way of seeing; presented in his books; codified in his attributions; and institutionalized in the many important American collections he helped to build; goes on shaping the American understanding of art today. This finely drawn portrait of Berenson; the first biography devoted to him in a quarter century; draws on new archival materials that bring out the significance of his secret business dealings and the way his family and companions—including his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner; his lover Belle da Costa Greene; and his dear friend Edith Wharton—helped to form his ideas and his legacy. Rachel Cohen explores Berensonrsquo;s inner world and exceptional visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forces—new capital; the developing art market; persistent anti-Semitism; and the two world wars—that profoundly affected his life.