Rachel Cohen

Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, chose Bernard Berenson as a staff pick, calling it "an engrossing capsule biography... a sympathetic portrait of a self-seeking but passionate lover of art."


Here is the full citation:

Like many gifted people, connoisseurs are often bad at explaining what they do. At the turn of the last century, Bernard Berenson was the most influential and successful connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. With a superhuman visual memory, an old-fashioned belief in beauty for its own sake, and rapacious personal charm, this son of working-class Jewish immigrants climbed to the top of robber-baron society. Yet Berenson considered himself a failure as an art theorist, and he went out of his way to sully his hands with shady business deals, blurring the line between worldly success and self-abasement. This is the story Rachel Cohen tells in her engrossing capsule biography Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, a sympathetic portrait of a self-seeking but passionate lover of art. —Lorin Stein


http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/17/staff-picks-connoisseurs-contact-cats/