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Old Masters, New World
Cynthia Saltzman
其他書名
America's Raid on Europe's Great Pictures, 1880-World War I
出版Viking, 2008
主題Art / History / General
ISBN06700183179780670018314
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=f8FQzgAL_aUC&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋The Gilded Age race to bring Europe’s most valuable art to America

In 1870 a group of wealthy and culturally ambitious New Yorkers founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a Manhattan brownstone with a lackluster collection and not a single major work of art. Americans came late to the game of art collecting and raced to catch up. Soon, America’s new industrial tycoons began to compete for Europe’s extraordinary Old Master pictures, laying claim to works by Vermeer, Titian, Rembrandt, and others, and causing a major migration of art across the Atlantic.

Cynthia Saltzman recounts the fierce competition to acquire some of the greatest paintings in the world and the boom in the market. At the center of this enterprise were the steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick, the banker J. Pierpont Morgan, the sugar king Harry Havemeyer and his wife Louisine, as well as the Boston aesthete Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the Metropolitan’s president, Henry Marquand. Old Masters, New Worldis the story of beauty, aesthetics, and taste; money, trade, and power. It is a backstage look at the part played in American collecting by experts like Bernard Berenson and dealers like Colnaghi, Knoedler, and Duveen—who raced around Europe to negotiate purchases and sales of the rarest and most costly masterpieces.