Uncommercial Duveen

One of Manhattan's best addresses has long been 720 Fifth Avenue. There, for 40 years, Duveen Bros., dealers in old masters, have peddled Rembrandts, Raphaels and Gainsboroughs to Mellons, Morgans and Rockefellers. Last week Duveen's had moved into new and smaller quarters on a residential side street. The reason: "The old location was getting a bit too commercial."

Duveen's new headquarters shows other signs of the times. Now the firm's $10 million collection, heretofore seen only by customers with a million-dollar gleam in their eyes, will be on rotating display downstairs, where anyone with bus fare can come in and look it over. Customers who mean business will still be shown upstairs to velvet-hung rooms where they can look more meaningly.

Hearty Joseph Duveen, who died (in 1939) Lord Duveen of Millbank, bullied and cajoled two generations of U.S. multimillionaires into amassing some of the greatest private art collections in history. Today the firm is headed by two mild-mannered former Duveen assistants, President Edward Fowles and Vice President Bertram Boggis. The old "super-customers," as Vice President Boggis calls them, have disappeared. In their place are some "very good customers." Who they are, Fowles and Boggis prefer not to say. "Nobody would deal with you if you were so indiscreet as to tell."

Duveen's sees one big problem ahead: the scarcity of old masters. "You can't keep draining Europe forever," says President Fowles. "Finally you get to the bottom of the barrel." But Duveen's barrel is still well padded. For sale last week : five Rembrandts, four Botticellis, six Bellinis, three Titians, three Gainsboroughs, two Giorgiones, one Fra Angelico, one Castagno and 600 other lesser English, Dutch, French and Italian old lights.

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