NFTs and Lord Joseph Duveen
The Unique Economics of Fine Art
A Brief History of Lord Joseph Duveen
Lord Joseph Duveen, one of thirteen children, was a British art dealer, considered one of the most influential art dealers of all time. He was the art deal in the early 1900s, helping the likes of J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Mellon, titans of the industrial era, amass their collections. He split his time between New York City, London, and Paris, making the five-day transatlantic journey by ship every year. He married once at the age of 30 and was with her until his death at age 69.
Socially Engineered Scarcity
Fine art wouldn’t be so sought after if everyone could have it. Duveen knew this, and was vigilant in constraining what art was considered worthy of purchase.
While dining in a client’s house, Duveen was shocked to see hanging on the wall, among the Duveens, a beautiful Monet (1840-1926). He professed an overwhelming love for it. The client’s interest piqued by the sudden role reversal, asked what Duveen what his love would come to in dollars. Duveen paid a Duveen price (read: the highest) for it. He took it home and it was never heard of again. When people asked where it was, he was evasive. The former owner joked that he sold it at an unconscionable profit. To a close friend, Duveen admitted that he had bought it to sequester it in his basement. “I didn’t want that fellow to get used to buying modern pictures. There are too many of them.”
Duveen was never eager to sell anything painted after 1800, because the fertility of the nineteenth-century painters would have sadly upset the Duveen economy of scarcity.
Buying Fine Art is a Privilege
Not just anyone could buy any piece of art Duveen was holding. A prerequisite to buying art from Duveen was that you had already had some art.
“I can’t possibly sell a Rembrandt to a man who owns no other pictures. The Rembrandt would be lonely”. - Duveen
This was a nice way of saying “you are a nobody in the world of Fine Art. The value of this remarkable painting will go down if a nobody owns it. And my paintings never go down in value”.
“The fact is you couldn’t buy anything from Duveen! Everything was either in reserve for somebody else or he had promised it to his wife or for some reason he wasn’t ready to sell it yet.” - Mrs. Hearst
The Social Circle, Status, and Hidden Benefits of Fine Art
Duveen not only obtained unobtainable paintings for his clients but also arranged weddings and got them steamship reservations and invitations to the right places when they were difficult to get. In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, one of his clients was marooned in London, unable to book passage home. Duveen was able to get him accommodations on a ship sailing in two weeks.
To reduce the monotony of the two weeks, he arranged for the client to visit Althorp House (13,000 acres) in Northampton (which happened to be housing an excessive number of ancestral portraits the owner was looking to part ways with).
Art and Architects
Having a place to put the art is as important as the art itself. And where do you put fine art? On your wall. The more walls you have, the more art you need to fill them.
Many of Duveen’s clients would consult him when they were planning on building a second or third home. Duveen would refer them to his favorite architects, and then work with those architects to build homes that necessitated lots of fine art. Duveen would indicate to the architect what precious objects he had in mind for the house and the architect would device places to put them. Orchestrating collector-piece-room fit, if you will.
Provenance: history of previous ownership
While the American millionaires of the Duveen Era could not become lords and ladies, they could buy the family portraits and other works of art that had belonged for centuries to lords and ladies, and this strengthened their feeling of identification and equality with British nobility and with the great rulers and merchant princes of the Renaissance. Many of Duveen’s pictures were previously owned by kings. J. P. Morgan, upon his death, by the sheer weight of his name, was able to create a valuable provenance of his own, too.
The biggest collectors began only going after anything that had a “book” to it. Duveen would have his librarian prepare a free brochure giving the history of its ownership, listing the places where it had been exhibited, noting its relation to its artist’s career, and so on.
Just as art itself is not guided by the laws of logic, the economics are not either. Creating art and buying art are both emotional acts. Many things in the art world may change this century, but this will never change.
This is the second piece in a series I’m writing on our collective move to a fully digital world. My next piece will be on Shoes & Handbags: Fine Art for the Masses
If you wanna jam on this stuff, tweet/DM me @brennerspear
Most of these anecdote come from Duveen by S.N. Behrman, a biography of Duveen and a great window into the world of Fine Art in the early 1900s.