[Rarebooks] FS: 1919 Art Museum Critique / CIA Mole Newspaper Owner Bookplate

[Joslin Hall Rare Books]

TITLE: "Picture Buying”

By Edward Detraz Bettens.
Published in New York by the author in 1919.
Limited to 650 copies.

DISCUSSION: A follow-up to the author’s earlier book, “Painter and
Patron”, in which he had questioned why art museums so often ignored the
opportunity to buy the work of living artists from the artists themselves,
and instead bought the work of established or dead artists from dealers,
usually for much more than the same works could have been purchased for
only a few years before. Bettens, a lawyer whose family had established a
fund for the purchase of paintings from living artists at the Fogg Museum
at Harvard, sent copies of his first book to museum curators and
affiliated professionals around the world, and here reprints many of their
replies. The replies are mostly in agreement with his feelings that
museums are missing an opportunity in passing on the work of living, yet
not-established, artists, many of the writers, including art curators
themselves, noting that in their opinion most art curators do not know
good art from bad until public or critical opinion points the way. An
interesting snapshot inside one facet of the American art world in the
early decades of the 20th century.

DESCRIPTION: Hardcover. 6.5”x10”, 86 pages plus 5 black & white plates.

Bookplate of newspaper publisher James Strohn Copley [1916-1973]. Copley
published the San Diego Union, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and the San
Diego Evening Tribune, and was President of the Inter American Press
Association. He also, according to Carl Bernstein, cooperated closely with
the CIA during the Eisenhower through Nixon administrations. According to
Bernstein, “at least twenty‑three Copley News Service employees
performed work for the CIA. ‘The Agency’s involvement with the Copley
organization is so extensive that it’s almost impossible to sort out,’
said a CIA official who was asked about the relationship late in 1976.
Other Agency officials said then that James S. Copley, the chain’s owner
until his death in 1973, personally made most of the cover arrangements
with the CIA., which had widespread contacts in the US media.” The
University of San Diego has a library named in honor of Copley and his
wife.

CONDITION NOTES: Light wear, library stamp, but otherwise clean and nice,
with a tight binding.

PRICE: $65. -

SOME PICTURES =>

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Fine books of the 16th-20th centuries
on the decorative and fine arts & design

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