| This past week, the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe profiled Larry Gagosian, the industry-defining art dealer who went from selling cheap posters to brokering the purchase of a single work for a hundred and forty million dollars—twice. Gagosian now lives as large as his clients—perks include a Hamptons mansion and a private jet—but he’s also been dogged by questions about certain sales tactics, shady customers, and his influence on how art is created and valued. In 1951, the magazine published a Profile of one of Gagosian’s role models. Lord Joseph Duveen, a British-born art dealer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, built an empire thanks to one “simple observation,” the writer S. N. Behrman noted: “Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money.” For half a century, Duveen played savvy matchmaker, helping American tycoons buy social cachet, in the form of art collections, from Old World aristocrats whose family fortunes had seen better days. The matchmaking could occasionally be literal: “He even selected brides or bridegrooms for some of his clients,” Behrman reported, as long as the happy couple displayed “a potential receptivity to expensive art.” Reading Behrman’s piece, it’s no wonder that Duveen captured the imagination of not just Gagosian but the director Wes Anderson, whose 2021 film, “The French Dispatch,” featured an art dealer, played by Adrien Brody, drawn from the New Yorker Profile. Duveen, and the writing he inspired, was as colorful as the paintings he sold. | 
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