The Pendulum of Taste

by JOHN CARTER

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THE edition of Baedeker’s Italy which served admirably to guide my wife’s and my own exploratory footsteps on our first visit to Rome, ten years ago, was dated 1909. Artistic comment in Baedeker has always been both sparing and reserved; but while selection more subtly conveys his judgment of what the tourist should admire, such comment as there is represents, one supposes, the orthodox taste of the day. We rapidly learned to make a beeline for any building described as “florid" or “extravagant,” “defaced by a pretentious facade of later date,” or having “a grotesque spiral tower,”or the like, with the reasonable certainty of finding a handsome bit of baroque by Borromini or Maderna or even Bernini. But if the difference in the eye of the beholder between those who were weaned on Ruskin and those who swear by Geoffrey Scott and The Architecture of Humanism, is by now taken for granted, the pendulum is already beginning to swing back. Leaving aside Le Corbusier and Gropius and other such striplings, I imagine that any undergraduate with intellectual aspirations today thinks it smarter (with Professor Henry-Russell Hitchcock and John Betjeman) to admire St. Pancras than St. Paul’s.

The swing of this particular pendulum could be paralleled in most of the other departments of connoisseurship. Caravaggio and Tiepolo, Greco and Goya, now sit on the pedestals reserved by our fathers for staider masters, Otello is preferred to Il Trovafore. Donne and Hopkins, Leopardi and T. S. Eliot, wear the laurels denied to laureates. Yet when the question is not what a man reads or looks admiringly at, but what he spends money on as a collector, other factors enter in to complicate the parabola: national and regional movements of taste, refinements of technique, modifications in acquisitive policies, and also those economic influences wielded by the unsentimental hand of the tax collector or the currency controllers. And after all, in the fine arts it is the acquisitions of today which influence the public taste of tomorrow.

It. is a curious reflection that whereas French taste is normally of an ironclad insularity — a French bibliophile disdains any but French morocco binding, and édition originate does not mean “first edition,”but the first authorized edition published in France — yet many of the pioneer appreciators, and buyers, of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists were not French collectors but Germans and Russians, followed by Americans. Today, and indeed for a decade or two, the average millionaire (to use an old-fashioned word) who buys pictures buys Cézanne and later painters, not “old masters" and English eighteenth-century portraits as his father and grandfather would have.

Prices for these modern masters are no more fantastic, perhaps, than those paid in the artists’ lifetime for Leightons, Landseers, and AlmaTademas, but they are still fantastic. And what is more, they are truly international. Whereas a fine Rembrandt or Gainsborough would fetch more in London today than in New York, and a fine Vermeer more in New York than in Geneva, a fine Renoir would probably sell equally high in Paris, New York, or London—and would very likely fetch up in Brazil anyway.

The influence of the tax collector is unevenly distributed. In France the traditional disinclination to pay taxes at all provides a motive, over and above any distrust of the franc, for putting one’s money into objects. In England you can get a waiver of death-duties on certain categories of precious things if the Treasury accepts them as being of national importance (duty is payable retrospectively if they are subsequently sold to anyone not a public institution).

In the United States, the richer you are the more of the appraised cost of giving a First Folio to your alma mater can be written off against your income tax; and this civilized approximation to allowing you to pay your taxes according to your own taste also gives you the feeling that a man can after all serve both God and Mammon. Yet the very wide and annually increasing use of this facility is having a profound effect (possibly not visualized by the Internal Revenue) on t he whole texture of American

— indeed, of international — connoisseurship. Pictures that go into public galleries, antiques that go into museums, books that go into inst it utional libraries, with very rare exceptions never come out again; and as one of the most famous of American bibliophiles said half a century ago, “If the great libraries of the past had not been sold, where would I have found my books?” Institutional absorption makes heavy erosions every year into the topsoil from which private collectors draw their sustenance; and among the many fears which beset the world of connoisseurship, the fear that the private collector will be starved out if this goes on is not the idlest.

The fact that American institutional intake probably exceeds that of the rest of the world put together perhaps gives the United States a special responsibility in this respect. But only the chauvinists abroad take a narrow view of the tremendous effort made by Americans during the last hundred years to make up for so many centuries of European head start.

The success of that effort has had two quite separate effects — one in Europe (and Asia and Africa), the other in the United States itself. To take the latter first: thanks to the energy and expenditure of the American successors to those English milords of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who brought the treasures of the Continent back from their grand tours, the United States has for some time been able to look any other country square in the eye in most fields of connoisseurship, and down its nose in several. Results — a slight relaxation of pressure, and a much sharpened realization of the value, beauty, importance, and interest of domestic products of the past. Connecticut Chippendale is today quite as eagerly sought after as real Chippendale; and for every bibliophile who collects first editions of English poetry there are five addicted to Western Americana, while Edgar Allan Poe is more expensive, page for page, than Dante Alighieri — even if Ryder does not yet come as high as Monet. This powerful movement of taste seems, if a foreigner may say so, wholly admirable and long overdue.

The other effect I mentioned is Europe’s attempt to lock the stable door before the last of the horses have got away. Most of the countries of the Continent have for decades placed bans of one kind or another on the export of works of art, et cetera, deemed to be of national importance — a phrase susceptible of many interpretations by even the best-intentioned and most reasonable judges (who have not always been on the bench). Britain followed suit, with a thoroughly huggermugger procedure from 1940 to 1952, now superseded by a carefully considered and, on the whole, liberal set of regulations, the initial wrinkles in which one hopes will be ironed out in time. No doubt there has been a certain amount of smuggling; there are plenty of ill-substantiated stories of reframed Botticellis being painted over with jolly family groups, and of French dealers getting bits of old carving certified as unexportable treasures in order to double the export price. But despite loopholes and errors of official judgment, the net effect of all this has been to reduce to a trickle the westward passage of fine art objects of really world-shaking importance to the exporting country.

You may want some particular object desperately and have the money to pay for it. But if the owner is in Italy or Spain he may be forbidden to sell, or if he is in Illinois he may see no point in paying capital gains tax on what he can give away at 15 cents on the dollar. If you happened to be an Englishman you would have suffered until quite recently a further and much more serious restriction. You could not pay for a purchase in any department of the fine arts from any foreign country without a license, and no licenses were given for countries (for example, the United States) which were blessed with what British exchange control experts call a hard currency — that is, one which they were short of.

There had, it is true, been earlier relaxations for the purchase of single volumes, sent by post — a concession to dons and engineers needing the tools of their trades, framed by Board of Trade officials blissfully unaware that a romanesque binding bought by a Londoner at the Wilmerding sale in New York in 1951 (a single volume, sent by post) might cost $16,000. But since December, 1954, Englishmen are free to buy a Leonardo in Lichtenstein or Kansas City, a Constance Missal in Zurich or New York, if they can find one — and can pry it loose— and have the purchase price.

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BUT surely, most people would say, the traffic is all one way — westwards? Surely prices are higher in New York than in London, Paris, or Geneva? What objects of art or vertu would a Londoner or a Lyonnais be buying in Boston or Chicago? And they would be wrong.

Fine English portraits, for example — by Reynolds or Romney, Hoppner, Raeburn, or Lawrence — were very fashionable in the United States in the early decades of this century. Soaring prices coaxed hundreds of them off the walls of stately homes and across the Atlantic. But they took a terrible beating in the post-1929 slump; and even those American collectors who are unfashionable enough to want them today feel safer buying them in London, where American owners who want to dispose of them can get, if not 1920’s prices, at least, much better prices than they would locally, for they would be selling in a market where such pictures have never gone wholly out of fashion.

Similarly, French furniture, vigorously collected around 1900 by sophisticated Americans, is now superseded in the taste of their successors; yet superior signed pieces are still bringing huge prices from rich Continental connoisseurs. American collectors used to buy a great deal of fine French, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian silver; not so today, nor much English either, except signed pieces by Paul do Lameric or Hester Bateman. But a new generation of European collectors will give high prices for it in London.

Again, serious collectors of Chinese porcelain in Europe today outnumber their American counterparts by three or four to one — with the obvious effect on prices: witness the success of the sale in London of such collections as that of Arnold Schoenlicht of New York. As for European porcelain, I am told that, since the war, porcelain of certain colors, in particular blue, has for some mysterious reason become almost unsalable in New York, so that fine blue Sèvres or Worcester does much better in London. And tapestry: between 1880 and 1930 many a square mile of it (good, bad, and indifferent) crossed the Atlantic to decorate the mansions of Bellevue Avenue, Oyster Bay, Lake Forest, and The Peninsula. Today’s apartments haven’t the necessary wall space, whereas the European market has proved in recent years both strong and steady. It is the same story with bracket clocks, sporting prints, and a dozen other more specialized departments of connoisseurship.

The pendulum, in fact, is always swinging, but it does not swing uniformly in all places; and while under normal conditions of free (or comparatively free) international trade the various markets are acutely sensitive to each other, European currency restrictions have for fifteen years kept a barrier offshore — a barrier just as effective but twice as frustrating for being made of glass, so that bargains in New York, due to variations of taste and demand, could until recently be seen in London but could not be snapped up.

This prolonged and cumulative disequilibrium, most unhealthy in an essentially international market, has had its effects in the wholesale area as well as on individuals in Britain. Not only were private collectors prevented from any substantial purchases overseas, but the London auction rooms and the innumerable dealers who depend on them were condemned to living entirely off domestic consignments, with potentially serious damage to the city’s traditionally pre-eminent position as an entrepôt of the fine art trades. For while London prices in most categories have maintained a level not only more stable but also actually higher than elsewhere, foreign owners were effectively discouraged from taking advantage of these favorable conditions (and the much lower commission charged by the London auction houses) by being unable to have the proceeds of sale remitted in their own currency. To take two examples from the field I know best, the famous Wilmerding library and the French library formed by Cortlandt Bishop — both of an international character temporarily more in demand in Europe than in the U.S.A.— had to be sold in New York, in 1948 and 1950-51 respectively, because the proceeds were required in dollars; yet a preponderant majority of the finest things in both sales were bought by Continental dealers or on Continental commission. Mahomet had to come to the mountain; and while this may be good theology, it is not good business.

Today, however, American owners are no longer penalized by British regulations in this particular respect. Although most of them do not realize it yet, and Europe has been so strictly cocooned in currency restrictions for so long that distrust of punctual dollar remittances is understandably widespread, they can now sell as well as buy in London if they wish. If they want to know how European collectors manage quite often to outbid the numerous Americans who habitually place commissions in the London auction rooms, they must ask an economist. If they merely want to know whether this is so, they need only look at the records of the past few years.

It would be too much to suggest that the westward course of empire has reversed itself or is ever likely to; but with European connoisseurship in full flood again, a modest reflux is natural as well as healthy. If they ask why, the answer is simple: the pendulum of taste is once more swinging freely.