The Last Romantic: the Story of More Than a Half
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y $6.00 Zhe Cast Komantle The Story of More Than a Half- Century in the World of Art by Martin Birnbaum Introduction by Upton Sinclair "You are the last romantic," said Ameri- can artist Georgia O'Keefe to Martin Birn- baum, and truly he is the most brilliant survivor of a now vanished art world. It was a world in which Lord Duveen shone, and in which great collections of Old Mas- ters and 19th-century Masters were formed. roperty of Now Martin Birnbaum tells the romantic story of his career in New York art gal- in Rebay Foundation leries and of his travels around the world in search of art masterpieces. The book is rich with anecdotes from the great art period of 1910-1935; there is a great parade of artists, collectors, and dealers—the most spectacular of the period: Augustus John, the fiery William Rothen- stein, the temperamental Elie Nadelman, Paul Manship, Ricketts, Leon Bakst, col- lectors like Frick, Grenville Lindall Win- throp and the Tafts of Cincinnati, and fabulous characters like Lord Duveen. Muriel Draper, Dr. Barnes, Bernard Ber- enson, Leo Stein, Henry McBride, and the great composers Richard Strauss and Anton Dvorak— Martin Birnbaum knew them all and gives us fascinating glimpses. Among others portrayed are Norman Douglas, whom Birnbaum knew at Capri, Jacovleff, ( Continued on hack flap ) Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from Metropolitan New York Library Council - METRO http://archive.org/details/lastromanOObirn The Last Romantic Books by MARTIN BIRNBAUM Angkor and the Mandarin Road. 1952. Jacovleff and Other Artists. 1946. Vanishing Eden: Wanderings in the Tropics. 1942. John Singer Sargent: A Conversation Pdzce. 1941. Beardsley et Wdlde: Deux Essais. Paris. 1939. Arthur Rackham: A List of Books Compdled by Frederick Coykendall with an Introduction by Martin Birnbaum. 1922. Oscar Wdlde: Fragments and Memordzs. London. 1920. Introductions: Painters, Sculptors and Graphic Artists. 1919. Prince Ulric's Minstrel: A Short Story. Privately Printed. 1916. Martin Birnbaum Photographed at the age of 80 by Russell Kuhner Zhe Cast Komantic THE STORY OF MORE THAN A HALF- CENTURY IN THE WORLD OF ART ^/Hfi/i^n ^t/in^tzuMt INTRODUCTION BY UPTON SINCLAIR THE HILLA VON REBAY FOUNDATION Tt IdiMtNIKUSllHS DRIVE CR£1£NS FARMS, (JONXtCTlCUT 06436 TWAYNE PUBLISHERS :: New York 1960 Copyright, © 1960, by Martin Birnbaum Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-14917 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY UNITED PRINTING SERVICES, INC. NEW HAVEN, CONN. To Emily Winthrop Miles whose interest and forbearance helped make my undertaking a pleasure For their helpful suggestions, I acknowledge with gratitude my indebtedness to: Mrs. Alice Lewisohn Crowley Mrs. Stevenson Scott Dean Jay, Esq. The late Carl Henschel, Esq. Carman Messmore Esq. Sir Alec Martin and Welles Bosworth, Esq. M.B. Contents Chapter Page Introduction by Upton Sinclair 9 I. Prelude to an Art Career 13 II. Debut in the World of Art 43 III. Ten Years with Scott and Fowles 75 IV. Building the Winthrop Collection 179 V. Travels and Art Adventures 221 VI. Epilogue 251 Index 253 Illustrations Martin Birnbaum frontispiece Leopold and Mary Birnbaum 129 Mrs. Annie Bertram Webb 130 Mrs. Leonard Weber 130 Norman Douglas 131 Paul Manship 132 Bartlett Arkell 133 Thomas Cochran 133 Sir William Rothenstein 134 Leon Bakst 135 Bernard Berenson 136 John Singer Sargent 137 Maurice Sterne, Alfred Potterton, Martin Birnbaum, Edward Bruce, and Leo Stein 138 Elie Nadelman 139 Lord Joseph Duveen 140 Stevenson Scott 140 Grenville Lindall Winthrop 141 Edmund Dulac 142 Augustus John 143 Herbert Haseltine 144 Cecilia Beaux 145 Gari Melchers 146 Robert Chanler 146 Albert Sterner 147 Despiau 148 Herbert Crowley 149 Aleister Crowley 150 Mrs. Gustave Radeke 151 Martin Birnbaum 152 Introduction Martin Birnbaum is my oldest living friend. He came into this world four months and ten days ahead of me, but when you have passed your eightieth year, that is not a great difference. We were together at the age of twelve, in the old Public School Number Forty, on the East Side of New York. At thirteen, we entered the City College of New York, and were in the same class for six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year, for five years—that adds up to 6,000 hours, and you can learn to know each other very well in that time. When I came out from college I became a writer of "half-dime novels," and Martin became my violin teacher for a matter of three years. Since that time we have met when fate made it possible, and have corresponded frequently. Martin became an art expert—one of the best known in that profession; and the stories he told me impressed me so that when I started the Lanny Budd series of novels, I decided to have Lanny follow in Martin's footsteps. From that time on, Martin was my unnamed collaborator, mostly by mail. He read in manuscript all the three million words in those eleven large volumes. He gave me not only the priceless art stories in those books, but he corrected everything about Europe; and is to be thanked for the fact that scores of Europeans from a dozen countries wrote me expressing amazement at my familiarity with their native lands. Such a service is beyond thanks; and when Martin told me re- cently that he was writing his memoirs, as I had urged him to do, I gave him my best advice—which was to get to the art business quickly. "Remember you're writing for Americans, and it's the big money they are interested in. When you are dealing with million- dollar paintings, and have a couple of millionaires fighting over their possession, you have a real story." I tell you in advance that there are some of the richest names in America in Martin's book, and he had the making of one of the greatest of our museum col- lections. His views of art are sound, and his knowledge of artists and their works is infinite. 9 10 Introduction Martin was born near a part of Hungary known as the Puszta, and when he was a child he was saved from death by being put up on a high stove when the home was flooded and hundreds of other people were drowned. Martin was brought to America as a child and raised on the Lower East Side of New York, which is very certainly not a fash- ionable neighborhood. When he was still young he earned a scholarship in the National Conservatory of Music. He had a great teacher, Leopold Lichtenberg, and might have become a violin vir- tuoso, but his father insisted on making him a lawyer. So when he got through college he attended Columbia Law School and became a legal advisor to a title insurance company— about the dullest occupation that could be imagined for a lover of all the arts. He was saved by the fact that an elderly rich lady took him abroad to attend to some legal matters for her. He traveled all over Europe, visited art galleries, and met many artists—and that ended the law business. Coming back to New York, he continued his art studies and took charge of the New York office of the Berlin Photographic Company, which dealt in photo- graphs of all the world's art works; and that is where his art romance really begins in this volume. But first, I am going to finish my short story of him—and steal one of the good stories from his book. I was living in California, and on one of his last visits I took him to dinner at the home of Rob Wagner, editor of Script and Hollywood correspondent of the Saturday Evening Post. Present at the dinner was Charlie Chap- lin, who at the moment had just finished his wonderful satire on Adolf Hitler called The Dictator. When Charlie had a work in progress, or just completed, he was always "full of it," and he told us all about it; and after dinner in the drawing room he enacted one or two of the scenes for us. Martin, of course, was delighted, and told the story in his book. What I have never told Martin, and what will give him a jolly shock, is that both Rob and Charlie made up their minds that he was a German spy! I find it hard to imagine why; I suppose they just couldn't imagine that anybody could really be so suave and elegant, so wordly-wise and serene—it just wasn't natural. We were all spy-conscious in those tormented days, and of course Introduction 11 we sometimes had reason. It turned out that Charlie's own chauf- feur was a Japanese spy; my wife had suspected him when she had observed him peering into our bedroom windows while his master was a guest inside. Rob had received a visit from two police detectives when the neighbors reported his strange habit of hanging a large yellow card board in a tree in front of his hilltop cabin—it was his signal to a Chinese peddler that he wanted to buy some vegetables! So now here is the book—the life story of one of the kindest, gentlest and wisest men I have met during my life's pilgrimage. You may not know many of the artists or the art works that he tells about; I certainly know very few of them. But you will learn what love of art means and what it can do to make inspiring pleasure and to preserve the past alive in the present and im- mortal for the future.