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costing very much more than a million dollars would be unthinkable today for a private dealer. Nevertheless, what it
certainly did do was put my father‘on the map’ for he came to the attention of authorities in an unexpected quarter.

In the eighteenth century, Russia, not America, was the great buyer of European Art. However, by the later nineteen
twenties there was an acute shortage of hard currency in Stalin’s Soviet Russia and with the Five Year Plans taking
precedence over everything United States dollars were needed to buy technology, food and arms – Ford tractors and
Krupp machinery. Russian development had always required western finance and from time to time desperation set in
and the Russians were prepared to sell the‘crown and jewels’.The sale ofAlaska in 1867 for $7,000,000 had set the tone.
So it was that it was decided to deaccession certain works fromThe Hermitage Museum in Petrograd by then renamed
Leningrad even though previous sales at rock bottom prices, such as the sale of 600 contemporary Russian paintings from
the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904 including works by Repin eschewed old masters.The great sale of treasures
started in 1928. For sure private sales had been going on for years and Duveen was among the first to profit and Gulbenkian
andWidener were the ‘end users’. Armand Hammer’s brotherVictor was among the first to hear the news of potential
sales putting together a syndicate of American dealers headed by Duveen but they spoiled their chances of cornering the
market by offering $5,000,000 for a group of 40 paintings! Gulbenkian in particular was quick to profit using his contact
with the Russian trade emissary George Paitakov, but he was mean in his offering and quickly the Soviets realised they
were not getting the best deal available. It was at this time, after some already massive sales, that someone in the hierarchy
remembered the name of a sharp minded art dealer who had once been a left leaning sympathiser in Munich at the
beginning of the decade and who had carved a brilliant career and enviable reputation in contemporary Berlin. My father
was summoned to Russia and asked to advise on the disposal of treasures. The financial crash of 1929 had caused
Gulbenkian’s acquisitive spirit to pause. Seizing the opportunity he told the commissars they were being well and truly
‘had’ by theAmericans and by Gulbenkian in particular and that they were underselling dramatically and he would advise
on value. My father immediately placed his trusted agent, Heinz Mansfeld, in Moscow to liaise with the KPD agency and
Antikvariat for the disposal of art.The rest is history. He telegraphed Colnaghi who were closely involved with Knoedler’s
and formed a triumvirate for the disposal.The result was the largest art deal ever recorded and unlikely ever to be bettered
even by Sotheby’s or Christie’s today, a treasure trove which founded the basis of the National Gallery,Washington5. Yet
Washington had not been my father’s originally intended destination for the art. Gulbenkian had long been a client and
it was to him my father first went. Mr Five Per Cent saw no reason to be more generous than he had been before and
would not meet the price for his ego was such that he considered himself the unique buyer in a depressed market. He
lived to regret it because incredulous when my father and the triumvirate instead offered the works to Mellon, whose
pockets were bottomless, he was so apoplectic that he vowed never to purchase another painting from my father. ` At
first Gus Mayer and my father were quite modest in their plans – they sought to purchase £500,000 worth (then

5. The whole story of Russian art traded for American dollars was first ably told in 1980 by Robert C.Williams in Russian Art and American Money 1900-
1940, Harvard U.P.An earlier article was written by JohnWalker, the former director of the National Gallery,Washington entitled How I didn’t get
Mr. Gulbenkian’s Art. This appeared in Horizon, Summer 1970, vol. XII, no.3. More recently the Russian archives have been accessible and a great deal
of further information has surfaced but the most recent account with copious references, from a Colnaghi perspective, was made by D.Eckserdjian
in chapter 6,‘Colnaghi and the Hermitage Deal’, in Colnaghi –The History, pp. 37-41, ed. J. Howard (2010).

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