Joseph Duveen

“Genius has the fewest moving parts. Joseph Duveen becomes fabulously wealthy, builds an incredible life and business off of that simple idea. His business had very few moving parts. It's like, hey, I'm going to buy all this hard to find art in Europe. And I'm …”

“Duveen received daily reports from his galleries. So he's got galleries in New York and London and Paris telling them are telling him what customers had come in, what pictures they had looked at and for how long and what they said about those pictures.”

“The entire collection of a 120 Italian of the old masters belonging to this very wealthy European, or noble European. This entire collection will be brought to New York. The purchase price was three million dollars in 1927 dollars”

“By getting Andrew Mellon to donate his collection to it, the National Gallery was the perfect front for Duveen. In one gesture, his clients avoided taxes, cleared wall space for new purchases, and reduced the numbers of paintings on the market, maintaining the…”

“You don't need many customers. If the few customers that you have are the richest people in the world, right? He built his entire business around eight to 10 people.”

“You are trading the infinite, which is money, right? With the finite, which is, there's only one of these in the world.”

“Larry Gagosian, who starts his career, you know, 40 years after Joseph Devine dies, by his own admission, reads every single biography that he could get his hands on about Joseph Devine, and essentially patterns his career.”

“Had he bought the pictures directly from Goldman, he would have saved millions of dollars. That's insane. He would have saved millions of dollars. But we wouldn't have had the warm feelings of owning a lot of Duveen's.”

“And so to do that, he would routinely pay the highest prices far exceeding what anyone had paid before. And in this bizarre world of capitalism that we're at the very, the highest end, This actually made, the fact that he overpaid made his merchandise more val…”

“Cochran spent five million dollars. So from developing this information network, right, playing that long game, Might've cost him a couple hundred dollars in tips. Three years later, that turns into a five million dollar sale.”

“95 of the 115 paintings in the Mellon collection, right, which gets donated to the public, which I'll talk about why he did this, was also a genius move in a little bit, came to Mellon through Duveen.”

“A dealer offered a room to William Randolph Hearst for 50,000 dollars. Hearst spurned it. Duveen offered it to him later. Duveen offered it to Hearst later for 200,000 dollars, and Hearst bought it with gratitude.”

“And so Andrew Mellon's much older than him, and he summarizes the gift that Duveen's personality was to his business where he told Duveen to his face, the pictures that you sell me always look better when you are here.”

“When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap.”