[Rarebooks] FS: 1919 - Why Museums Buy Pictures by Dead Artists, w/CIA Connection...

[Joslin Hall Rare Books]

“Picture Buying”

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

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.

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.

Light wear, library stamp, but otherwise clean and nice, with a tight 
binding. $65

Some Pictures =>
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images368/th-36990-cover.jpg>
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images368/th-36990-page1.jpg>
<http://www.joslinhall.com/images368/th-36990-page2.jpg>
<http://www.joslinhall.com/blog/bookplates-copley1.jpg>


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