James Stourton
In the Frame
Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade
By Rachel Cohen
Yale University Press 328pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
‘Berenson has more ambition than ability,’ Charles Eliot Norton told a Harvard colleague. The verdict haunted Bernard Berenson, who admitted, ‘Norton never changed his mind.’ Indeed Berenson poured petrol on his own pyre: ‘I never regarded myself as anything other than a failure.’ Born in 1865 and brought up among intellectual giants – George Santayana, William James and later his brother-in-law Bertrand Russell – Berenson always set himself impossible standards. What exactly were these exalted ambitions that caused the most celebrated connoisseur in the world, living in fabled splendour and surrounded by adoring women, to consider his life a failure? They were never strictly defined. Was he a modern-day Goethe without the science? Ruskin without the social conscience? Pater without the need of a university salary? Rachel Cohen has written an admirable short life trying to answer some of these questions.
The only misleading part of her book is the subtitle, ‘A Life in the Picture Trade’, which suggests another examination into whether Berenson inflated attributions for gain. As he himself noted towards the end of his life, ‘I have become a myth, or rather two myths, a kindly flattering one
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Even as Roth settled into the role of grumbling grand old man, he remained more than ever the entitled child, in permanent need of soothing, powerless to resist a tempting treat or keep a tantrum at bay.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-great-american-novelist
There's still time to take advantage of our spring offer.
Give a friend a year's subscription to Literary Review for only £33.50.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/spring21/
Where now for active asset-management in the wake of the Woodford Equity Income collapse? My review of @davidricketts's When the Fund Stops and @OwenWalker0's Built On A Lie in @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/stock-horror-2