Like most gossip, Colin Simpson’s Artful Partners is at first blush fascinating. Like most gossip, however, it does not stand scrutiny well. It presents its information in a manner which precludes verification of its accuracy. In the final analysis, its sole meaningful accomplishment may be to earn momentary talk-show notoriety for Mr. Simpson.

One would have thought the dead Berensonian horse had been beaten beyond resurrection. And indeed so it might have been, had not circumstances given Mr. Simpson, a journalist with a record of remasticating well-chewed material (the Lusitania sinking; Lady Hamilton; Lawrence of Arabia; and the like), a crack at the files of Duveen Brothers (on embargoed deposit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in the course of ghosting the late Edward Fowles’s Memories of Duveen Brothers (Times Books, 1976). In the course of several visits to the Duveen archives, Simpson seems to have come across a number of letters and memoranda of a type which an opportunistic journalist would immediately recognize as grist for the scandal mill. Hence this book, which arrives swaddled in misleading hyperbole—for instance, “The Berenson Scandals” in Connoisseur (October, 1986). Indeed, the very fact of the Connoisseur interview is cause for more regret than anything in Simpson’s book, since it is another sad example of Thomas Hoving’s continued indulgence in his taste for sensation—a yearning which has compromised, if not utterly crippled, one of the most extraordinary art-historical talents of our generation.

The implication is that Simpson has uncovered something