A life of Otto H. Kahn, 1867-1934: Finance, art and questions of modernity

A leitmotif in many scenes of modernity, Otto H. Kahn (1867-1934) was a cosmopolitan financier and patron. German-born, affluent, and a naturalized British subject until 1917 (when he became an American), Kahn arrived in New York as a twenty-six-year-old. Shortly afterwards he joined Kuhn, Loeb and Co., a private bank of dynastic traditions, European influence, and German-Jewish origins. This firm was nearly as dominant as J.P. Morgan and Co. during the early twentieth century. Americans were ambivalent toward Wall Street, and Kahn's financial career alone represents that and one response by a leader in investment banking. Through his career one can follow the ways of international finance in the new century, the Great War, and the Great Depression.;More a citizen of the world than of any one nation, Kahn's life elucidates a Euro-centered cosmopolitanism from the Belle Epoque to the Great Depression. By connecting Kahn's ethno-religious experiences with those in finance and art, this biography encourages us to weigh questions of modernity in the distinct, but in Kahn's life related, domains of artistic collaboration and financial intermediation. It also raises questions related to image. For Otto Kahn was neither the dry, ledger man nor the devilish, rogue that critics expected of a Wall Streeter. He carefully fashioned his public self: he made himself known as an amicable sophisticate, respected, and directly instrumental in making New York a world-center of culture along with finance. He supported the Metropolitan Opera, imported the Ballets Russes to America, and helped young talent, including the poet Hart Crane, the Provincetown Players, and The Little Review. From Gustav Mahler to Sergei Eisenstein, Otto Kahn was the man who could "fix up a contract to go to America," or, as he did for Paul Robeson, establish American talent in Europe. His mansions were playgrounds for High Bohemia, his patronage prompted comparisons to Maecenas and the Medici, and his name inspired images of the Kublai Kahn for Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane, and Ezra Pound.;A person at once so self-conscious and prominent in both finance and art provides particular insights into how we fashion public images. However, Kahn also reveals the transitions and faults of transatlantic cosmopolitanism, and its collapse after World War I.