The Real Life Art Dealer behind Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch” – ARTnews.com

Few dealers have made such a significant contribution to the art market as Jospeh Duveen, who in the first half of the 20th century earned a fortune by selling Old Master works to the ultra-wealthy. “Duveen – who became Lord Duveen of Millbank before he died in 1939, at the age of sixty-nine – noticed that Europe had lots of art, and America had lots of money, and his whole astonishing career was the product of this simple observation, ”wrote SN Behrman in a 1951 New Yorker article titled “The Days of Duveen.” That magazine is among the inspirations for Wes Anderson’s latest film, The French broadcast, which deals with three journalists and their famous stories. As a tribute to New Yorker, Andersons French broadcast contains several discrete segments, each of which comprises a film in a film. The first of these segments is “The Concrete Masterpiece”, in which JKL Berensen (Tilda Swinton), author of French broadcast, introduces us to art dealer Julien Cadazio (Adrien Brody).

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Duveen and Cadazio have very little in common, except that they saw themselves as values. Duveen shaped the tastes of the most legendary American millionaires of the time, selling to Andrew Mellon, JP Morgan, Henry Clay Frick and Benjamin Altman. Duveen practically invented the trick of buying pieces at such astronomical prices that he was able to convince his customers that these works were very valuable. According to New Yorker profile, once when Duveen bought an aristocratic portrait of an English woman with the title, he persuaded her to sell it to him for £ 25,000, as opposed to the £ 18,000 she had originally asked for. He was aware of the exorbitant price he could sell it for, and could not, in good conscience, rob the woman. He also knew that by raising his own offer he could later demand a larger sum for the painting. In fact, he had screwed up the value of his own furniture simply through shrewd maneuvering.

Duveen made millions of dollars by procuring crown jewels from Europe and bringing them across the pond to the United States to sell to the new rich, who were missing their own family heirlooms. If the Duve’s life story now seems somewhat outdated, it’s because we all too easily forget what a controversial figure he was. Between his flair for drama and his intense competitiveness, he got himself into all sorts of trouble. In 1921, a customer made the mistake of showing Duveen a 16th-century Italian painting he was considering buying from another retailer. Duveen took a look at the painting, flared his nostrils and shook his head sadly. “I sniff fresh paint,” he reportedly said. The implication that the work was false resulted in many years of litigation and a settlement that cost Duveen $ 575,000 – the equivalent of $ 14 million today.

Like Duveen, Cadazio is a cunning salesman, willing to pay any price needed to put markets in the corner and assert his own ideas., but Anderson is not necessarily interested in historical accuracy. Where Duveen was charming, Cadazio is aggressive, a bad boy with an edge. It’s hard to imagine anyone like Cadazio painting around with people like Mellon or Frick, or the Americans from the early oil boom.

IN The French broadcast, Cadazio is in jail for tax evasion. While making time, Cadazio encounters a painting created by the fictional Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) during a therapeutic art class. Wild streaks of pink, purple and red form the glowing center of the painting before its edges fade to black. With the title Simon Naked Cell Black J Hobby Room, the work in the film is referred to as the first truly modern masterpiece.

Rosenthaler makes these abstract works, while his foreman – Simone (Léa Seydoux), who is also his lover – poses naked for him. (The artist is in jail for beheading two men, one by accident, the other in self-defense.) Cadazio buys this painting for much more than Rosenthaler asks for it – a page out of Duveen’s playbook – and the dealer brings it to his uncles with a plan.

Cadazio suggests that the family stop selling old masters and start pushing for contemporary art. To convince his uncles of Rosenthaler’s talent, he shows them a picture of a sparrow, which he drew in 45 seconds. Cadazio calls it “perfect”. Rosenthaler could make representative art, but he thinks the abstract work is better. “And I kind of agree with him,” Cadazio says. After rounding the painting around, Cadazio drums a fervor for more of Rosenthaler’s works. After a three-year wait, Cadazio is arranging a screening of Rosenthaler’s new masterpieces for its customers. They do not look in a gallery, but inside the prison where Rosenthaler is imprisoned. In typical Anderson fashion, slapstick comedy emerges.

The core of characters like Duveen or Cadazio is an age-old question: do retailers love art as much as they say, or are they really just in love with the money they make? With Duveen, one could never be sure. In his New Yorker Behrman wrote of Duveen, “Every picture he was to sell, every tapestry, every piece of sculpture was the greatest since the last and until the next.”

With Cadazio, the answer to that question is more unambiguous. When Cadazio enters prison, he immediately assesses that Rosenthaler’s new works are a success. But there is a small problem: Rosenthaler has painted the works directly on the prison wall. Cadazio takes back his compliments and insults the artist, because after all, how can anyone sell a prison wall? What a failure!

But Anderson offers his dealer a kind of redemption: Cadazio learns to love the work he cannot sell. There is an adventurous reward for his change of heart when a famous American collector, Upshur “Maw” Clampette (Lois Smith), agrees to pay to have the work aired from prison and placed in her collection in Kansas. It is unlikely that even any of Duveen’s stature could have made JP Morgan go that far for a stunning work of art.