thing isn't art? It states precisely what the artist wants to state, doesn't it? Could it possibly be clearer or more accurately shown? Of course, I'm not going to buy it, because collectors, the real ones, anyway, don't buy this sort of thing anymore. But can you put it in a few plain words just why that is so?"
"Because it's not a painting. It's a play. Or a scene from a play, at least. It refers to something you've read about. It reminds you of something. Its effect, so to speak, is through your mind and memory, not your eye. A true painting should be an ocular experience."
"It can't ever tell a story?"
"Well, it can, but that's not the point of it. Not the real point, anyway. The real point is to excite emotions that may have little to do with thinking."
"Like music."
"Very like music."
"But what about all those Italian Renaissance paintings that illustrate stories from the Bible? You're not going to junk Leonardo and Raphael, are you?"
"Far from it. They had to bow to church demands if they were going to sell anything. But it was not the subject matter that was important; it was what they managed to do with it. In a Saint Sebastian you see more than a saint stuck with arrowsâyou see a glorious study of the nude."
The great collector nodded as he turned back to the canvas before him. "But you'll admit this is well painted."
"Certainly. Indeed, it's so well painted that you can see that the models were all contemporaries of the artist arrayed in fancy dress. They're no more Elizabethan courtiers than I am. He has faithfully delineated exactly what he saw before him. It might as well be a color photograph. But it's not art."
Dunlop grunted and rose. "Let me take you to lunch. What's your name, anyway? Who are you?"
And so that chapter of my life began. Erastus Dunlop was an unusual type of American tycoon, though not as unusual as he thought he was. He liked to point out that he had started life on a higher social level than most of his contemporary magnatesâhe had been a successful lawyer from an upper-middle-class Cleveland familyâbut the bulk of his fortune, like that of so many others, had been the fruit of good luck. He and his law partner had quit their practice to drill successfully for oil on a tract of western land deeded to them by a cash-poor client for a fee, and in selling the tract to a giant monopoly and taking stock for the purchase price they had multiplied their original investment many times over. It was also true that, although Dunlop prided himself on having a shrewd collector's eye in amassing the great art now in his Cleveland gallery, he brushed over the early years before he sought professional advice and had filled his mansion with Burne-Jones, Bouguereau, and Boldini.
He was a big, craggy, fierce-eyed man who liked to dominate and impress dealers when they brought their wares to his office, where Dunlop, seated below a Pontormo portrait of a grim-looking condottiere, would glare at them. Yet he could be as quiet as a cat, and as stealthy. He reminded me of an old repertory ham who would play Shylock one night and Hamlet the next. Always acting. What was he hiding? Perhaps the fact that he was fundamentally something of a son of a bitch.
I do not mean to minimize him. Some of those tycoon collectors
did
have sharp eyes for art, or at least they managed to develop them. Nothing teaches a man who is not a fool (and whatever these tycoons were, they were not that) like the discovery that he has just spent a fortune buying a fake. Dunlop in collecting soon learned to rely on professional experts. But never entirely. He made constant use of his own tastes, and one can certainly pick this up in his fondness for the lavish and spectacular in royal portraits, interiors, palaces, and pageants. His inner vision of himself as a collector must have been closer to Lorenzo il Magnifico than to a shareholder of Standard Oil.
Like many able financiers he made up his mind quickly, and it
"Because it's not a painting. It's a play. Or a scene from a play, at least. It refers to something you've read about. It reminds you of something. Its effect, so to speak, is through your mind and memory, not your eye. A true painting should be an ocular experience."
"It can't ever tell a story?"
"Well, it can, but that's not the point of it. Not the real point, anyway. The real point is to excite emotions that may have little to do with thinking."
"Like music."
"Very like music."
"But what about all those Italian Renaissance paintings that illustrate stories from the Bible? You're not going to junk Leonardo and Raphael, are you?"
"Far from it. They had to bow to church demands if they were going to sell anything. But it was not the subject matter that was important; it was what they managed to do with it. In a Saint Sebastian you see more than a saint stuck with arrowsâyou see a glorious study of the nude."
The great collector nodded as he turned back to the canvas before him. "But you'll admit this is well painted."
"Certainly. Indeed, it's so well painted that you can see that the models were all contemporaries of the artist arrayed in fancy dress. They're no more Elizabethan courtiers than I am. He has faithfully delineated exactly what he saw before him. It might as well be a color photograph. But it's not art."
Dunlop grunted and rose. "Let me take you to lunch. What's your name, anyway? Who are you?"
And so that chapter of my life began. Erastus Dunlop was an unusual type of American tycoon, though not as unusual as he thought he was. He liked to point out that he had started life on a higher social level than most of his contemporary magnatesâhe had been a successful lawyer from an upper-middle-class Cleveland familyâbut the bulk of his fortune, like that of so many others, had been the fruit of good luck. He and his law partner had quit their practice to drill successfully for oil on a tract of western land deeded to them by a cash-poor client for a fee, and in selling the tract to a giant monopoly and taking stock for the purchase price they had multiplied their original investment many times over. It was also true that, although Dunlop prided himself on having a shrewd collector's eye in amassing the great art now in his Cleveland gallery, he brushed over the early years before he sought professional advice and had filled his mansion with Burne-Jones, Bouguereau, and Boldini.
He was a big, craggy, fierce-eyed man who liked to dominate and impress dealers when they brought their wares to his office, where Dunlop, seated below a Pontormo portrait of a grim-looking condottiere, would glare at them. Yet he could be as quiet as a cat, and as stealthy. He reminded me of an old repertory ham who would play Shylock one night and Hamlet the next. Always acting. What was he hiding? Perhaps the fact that he was fundamentally something of a son of a bitch.
I do not mean to minimize him. Some of those tycoon collectors
did
have sharp eyes for art, or at least they managed to develop them. Nothing teaches a man who is not a fool (and whatever these tycoons were, they were not that) like the discovery that he has just spent a fortune buying a fake. Dunlop in collecting soon learned to rely on professional experts. But never entirely. He made constant use of his own tastes, and one can certainly pick this up in his fondness for the lavish and spectacular in royal portraits, interiors, palaces, and pageants. His inner vision of himself as a collector must have been closer to Lorenzo il Magnifico than to a shareholder of Standard Oil.
Like many able financiers he made up his mind quickly, and it
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