Bernard Berenson
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BERNARD BERENSON Formation and Heritage VILLA I TATTI SERIES, 31 BERNARD BERENSON Formation and Heritage JOSEPH CONNORS AND LOUIS A. WALDMAN VILLA I TATTI VILLA I TATTI SERIES, 31 THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR ITALIAN RENAISSANCE STUDIES © Villa I Tai, e Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies | itai.harvard.edu All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. -- Bernard Berenson: formation and heritage.First [edition]. pages cm.(Villa I Tai ; ) “e core of the present volume consists of the papers presented at the conference ‘Bernard Berenson at Fiy,’ held at I Tai from to October .” Includes bibliographical references and index. ---- (rst) . Berenson, Bernard, –. Art criticsUnited States. I. Connors, Joseph. .dc [B] Book and cover design: Melissa Tandysh Book production: Dumbarton Oaks Publications Cover illustration: William Rothenstein, Bernard Berenson, . Frontispiece: James Kerr-Lawson, Bernard Berenson, ca. Both images are from the Berenson Collection, Villa I Tai e Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. (Photo: Paolo De Rocco, Centrica srl, Firenze, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.) Contents One Introduction Two Bernard Berenson and Jean Paul Richter e Giambono’s Provenance Three Art, Commerce, and Scholarship e Friendship between Oo Gutekunst of Colnaghi and Bernard Berenson Four Palaces Eternal and Serene e Vision of Altamura and Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court Five Bernard Berenson and “Tactile Values” in Florence Six Bernard Berenson’s Florence, Seven Bernard Berenson and Aby Warburg Absolute Opposites Eight Bernard Berenson and Islamic Culture “ought and Temperament” Nine Bernard Berenson and Asian Art Ten Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark A Personal View - Eleven Bernard Berenson and Arthur Kingsley Porter Pilgrimage Roads to I Tai Twelve Bernard Berenson and Paul Sachs Teaching Connoisseurship Thirteen “e Cookery of Art” Bernard Berenson and Daniel Varney ompson Jr. vi Contents Fourteen e Antiquarian Carlo Alberto Foresti of Carpi, a Correspondent of Bernard Berenson Unknown Documents for the History of a Dispersed Collection Fifteen Bernard Berenson and Archer Huntington Sixteen Bernard Berenson and Count Umberto Morra “Do Not Forget Me” Seventeen Bernard Berenson and Katherine Dunham Black American Dance Bibliography Contributors Index vii Contents seventeen Bernard Berenson and Katherine Dunham Black American Dance Joseph Connors , an obituary appeared in the New York Times for Katherine Dun- Oham, who had died at the age of . It had high praise for her achievement in the world of dance: “By creating popular and glamorous revues based on African and Caribbean folklore, Miss Dunham acquainted audiences, both on Broadway and around the world, with the historical roots of black dance.” e article went on to speak of her achievement in founding, in the s, America’s rst self-supporting black modern-dance troupe, At the Morris Library Special Collections, I oer sincere thanks to Pam Hackbart-Dean, Lea (Broaddus) Agne, and Aaron Lisec, as well as to I Tai Fellow Holly Hurlburt, for facilitating my long-distance research in every way. At the Biblioteca Berenson, where seventy-three of Katherine Dunham’s leers are deposited, I oer my warm thanks to Giovanni Pagliarulo, Sanne Wellen, and Ilaria Della Monica. For the outline of Dunham’s life and career, I am indebted to the ne biography by Joyce Aschenbrenner, Katherine Dunham: Dancing a Life (), and the comprehensive collection of materials in Vèvè A. Clark and Sara E. Johnson’s Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham (), which is a much-enlarged second edition of Kaiso! Katherine Dunham: An Anthology of Writings (Clark and Wilkerson ). e web page “Selections from the Katherine Dunham Collection at the Library of Congress” (hp://lcweb.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/dunham/dunham -home.html) contains photographs and a selection of videos of Haitian dance lmed by her as well as her own performances. e timeline on the site does not always agree with Aschenbrenner’s authoritative biography. Like all contributors to this book, I am greatly indebted to Ernest Samuels’s Bernard Berenson: e Making of a Connoisseur () and Bernard Berenson: e Making of a Legend (). See Anderson and Dunning ; for another obituary, see Sommer . 363 which had visited more than y countries on six continents. e author dwelled on Dunham’s aection for Haiti and mentioned that she eventually became a priestess of the vodun religion. It cited her choreography for Aïda at the Metropolitan Opera, her work with Georges Balanchine in , her inuence on Alvin Ailey, and her career in lm in the early s. It quoted Dunham on the diversity of response that her work inspired: “Judging from reactions the dancing of my group is called anthropology in New Haven, sex in Boston, and in Romeart!” Her many accolades culminated in an honorary doc- torate from Harvard University in , which she received along with eleven other dis- tinguished personalities of the worlds of science, economics, humanities, and politics. She counted two black presidents among her friends: Dumarsais Estimé of Haiti, who made her a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur et Mérite of that country in , and Léopold Senghor of Senegal, who invited her as an unocial American ambassador to the Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in . She is reported as saying that the three great inuences on her life were Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago at the time of her study there; Erich Fromm, the psychologist and social theorist; and Bernard Berenson. e rst two made sense, but the relationship with Berenson seemed out of charac- ter. He was forty-four years older than Dunham, and they lived continents apart. Race was still a barrier in polite European society, and it was hard to imagine common inter- ests. Indeed, in the extensive literature on Berenson there is lile mention of Katherine Dunham. For details of his private life, one usually turns to Nicky Mariano’s intimate biography. Mariano was curious about the loves of Berenson’s early life and got to know some of them: Gladys Deacon, Lady Sassoon, Belle da Costa Greene, Gabrielle Lacase, Natalie Barney, Countess Hortense Serristori. When new stars rose in the sky she could be consumed with jealousy, but eventually she became comfortable with them and ended up by enjoying his new half-amorous friendships “as a mother enjoys a new toy for her baby.” Nicky compared them to the instruments in an orchestra, though some, she said, were comparable to solo performers: Pellegrina Del Turco, who was shot by the Germans near the end of the Second World War; Clotilde Marghieri, “la Ninfa del Vesuvio,” with whom Berenson corresponded for decades; Addie (Mrs. Oo H.) Kahn; Katie Lewis; Paola Drigo of Venice; Frances Francis, wife of Henry Francis of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Freya Stark, the travel writer; Rosamond Lehmann, the novelist; Katherine Biddle, the poet. Yet Mariano remained silent on Katherine Dunham. Even the scrupulous and highly detailed biography by Ernest Samuels only accords brief mentions of Dunham’s visit to I Tai in the “social season” of and Berenson’s visit to a performance of her dances in Rome. Harvard Magazine, July–August . Other honorands included economist Albert Hirschman, Senator Daniel Moynihan, philosopher Bernard Williams, historian Peter Brown, and former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine. Clark and Johnson , –. For example, in Hagan . Mariano . Samuels , , , . 364 Joseph Connors e published literature thus did not help to dispel the mystery enveloping Dun- ham’s claim that Berenson was a major inuence in her life. In the cloudy sky of my research, however, a rainbow nally appeared, one end resting in Florence, where Dunham’s leers are kept in the Biblioteca Berenson at Villa I Tai, and the other in Car- bondale, Illinois, where Berenson’s leers are kept amid the material Dunham donated to Southern Illinois University. I have been able to read about leers wrien in the decade between and . ey shed light on an epistolary friendship which, in spite of a near rupture at a crucial point, was deeply meaningful to both and continued until the end of Berenson’s life. Katherine Dunham was born in Chicago in to a black father, Albert Dunham, and a mother of white French-Canadian ancestry, Fanny June Dunham. She was raised in the Chicago suburb of Glen Ellyn and, aer dance lessons at school, began to study ballet seriously in . In , she entered the University of Chicago, where her older brother, Albert, was studying philosophy. Chicago was the right university for a young woman with a vibrant personality and interests equally scholarly and artistic. Founded in as a coeducational institution, there was no more open and liberal university in America. Both brother and sister lived in Bronzeville, the black theater and jazz district of Chicago. It was Albert who encouraged Katherine’s ambition to be in the theater. e poet and dancer Mark Turbyll sensed her talent in dance and wanted Dunham to become the rst black American ballerina. Although the dance establishment did not believe that classi- cal ballet was appropriate to the physique and temperament of black dancers, Dunham aended performances by Isadora Duncan and the Ballets Russes, and was taught dance by Ludmilla Speranzeva. She created the short-lived Ballet Nègre in , one of the rst black ballet companies in America, which performed in the Beaux Arts Ball in Chicago, but then was disbanded in . Dunham was highly intelligent and responded well to academic stimulus. e Uni- versity of Chicago exuded intellectual energyRobert Maynard Hutchins, the icono- clastic young president from to , saw the mission of the university as the breaking down of barriers between academic disciplines. He started the department of anthropol- ogy in and aracted to it brilliant, idiosyncratic scholars from Europe and America.