Taste maker to the Gilded Age

Duveen: A Life in Art
By Meryle Secrest
Knopf, 517 pp., illustrated, $35

Joseph Duveen is undoubtedly the most famous dealer in the fascinating history of fine arts salesmanship -- or, depending upon one's ethical criteria, perhaps the most notorious. Ambitious and arrogant, conniving and ruthless, he resorted to bribery and an extensive network of spies to keep tabs on people of great wealth in order to monitor their moods and needs, especially when it came to what we might call ''home decoration for the high life." He had a keen eye for quality paintings, tapestries, sculpture, porcelain, rugs, and certain period furniture, especially 18th-century French. In a very real sense, he performed a Martha Stewart-like function for the nouveau riche of his time ( he lived from 1869 to 1939) because he ended up telling a gaggle of multimillionaires how to decorate their homes. With impeccable taste well matched to his authoritarian style, he usually received their gratitude as well as pots of money.

If he was a rogue, he was a likable one endowed with good humor, a ceaseless flow of well-informed and witty conversation, and obsequious flattery. An astonishing array of dim and difficult personality types, ranging from Britain's George V to Andrew Mellon, moved from mistrusting Duveen to feeling genuine affection for him. This supremely confident connoisseur cultivated such people by lavishing attention upon them.

Meryle Secrest, the author of ''Duveen," is an independent writer born in Britain but now a longtime US resident. Duveen himself was British-born but eventually spent half the year at his Manhattan ''emporium" since so many of his clients were American.

Although Secrest cannot help admiring his cunning, she is also quite candid about the character of a man knighted in 1919 and elevated to the peerage in 1933. Duveen's ''assessment of a given situation," she writes, ''seldom overestimated the duplicitous possibilities in that world of feints, counterthrusts, false clues, intrigues, and betrayal. In the high-stakes game of art dealing one of his natural assets was his ability to bedazzle." So Secrest conveys cautious kudos for his ultimate achievement in placing great works in astonishing collections that eventually became bequests to many of the finest art museums in this country.

He brokered an extraordinary number of Rembrandts during his career, buying and selling ''Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" no fewer than three times. He obtained Gainsborough's famous ''Blue Boy" (1770) for Henry Huntington in 1921 for $728,800. (Bernard Berenson had tried unsuccessfully to buy it for Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1896, but the price at that time, $150,000, seemed excessive to Mrs. Jack.) He specialized in buying works with particular clients in mind, though he also did much to shape their tastes by persuading (indeed educating) them about the greatness of particular artists, periods, or art objects -- whatever he happened to be handling at the moment.

And what clients! So much of what he sold to Mellon, Samuel H. Kress, and the Widener family of Philadelphia ended up as the core of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Much of Henry Clay Frick's great museum collection in New York passed through Duveen's showrooms. Other customers who spent lavishly at the dealer's urging included the wily Calouste Gulbenkian, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Marjorie Merriweather Post, Benjamin Altman, and Jules Bache. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is filled with Old Master ''items" that Duveen ''enabled" clients to collect.

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. Sometimes the transitions from one paragraph to the next are baffling, and the dense chronology of the 1920s and '30s gets destabilized in rewinds, stops, and restarts. Keeping straight some of the minor players in Duveen's network is not always easy. There are some basic historical errors, and a few of the author's apparent Anglicisms are inexplicable, such as the frequent use of ''amendations" for latter-day improvements or alterations made in a painting to suit anticipated changes in taste.

Given those glitches and the book's somewhat abrupt ending with death rather than any effort to sum up the subject's significance, why should the general reader choose ''Duveen"? There are multiple reasons: learning how the hungry American market for Old Masters developed and dramatically escalated; the incredible unreliability of attributions of Italian Renaissance works to particular painters; the fascinating and complex need/hate collaboration between Duveen and Berenson, his contractual adviser on Italian art; the significant role of superb memory in an age when illustrated art books were not common and so many masterpieces were privately owned and rarely seen; the fiercely competitive rivalries between the major international dealers; and the ways in which visual education could be transmitted in limited doses even when connoisseurship could not.

Anyone intrigued by the psychological craft of sly ingratiation will find a rich yield here.

Michael Kammen teaches American cultural history at Cornell. His recent book is ''A Time to Every Purpose: The Four Seasons in American Culture."