Purpose built: Duveen and the commercial art gallery

Abstract

In late 1912, the Duveen Brothers opened their first purpose-built art gallery in New York City at 720 Fifth Avenue. Sited in a residential neighborhood favored by the Gilded Age elite and borrowing its architectural vocabulary from the Beaux-Arts tradition, it signaled the epitome of upper-class domesticity, but the building was also a finely tuned machine for the business of selling art. This article explores how these two distinct modes of operation were managed and integrated, utilizing a virtual reconstruction of the now demolished building developed from the original architectural plans recently discovered in the archives at the Getty Research Institute.