The Economics of Taste

Gerald Reitlinger

Reitlinger's best known work, his study of the French art market. "Reitlinger's interest in this subject was prompted by what he considered to be the decline of taste in art, which he attributed to a redistribution of wealth and to the inflated price of individual reputation" (ODNB). Educated at Oxford and the Slade School, Reitlinger travelled extensively in the Near East and Asia in the 1920s and 30s, participating in the excavations at Kish and Hira, and appearing in Robert Byron's account of his excursion to Athos, The Station, under the name of Reinecker. During this period he began his remarkable collection of Syrian and Persian pottery of the Timurid, Isnik, and Safavid periods, which he expanded throughout his life, and which now forms a key part of the Ashmolean Ceramic Collection. Reitlinger became famous after the Second World War for his studies of the Holocaust - The Final Solution, and The SS Alibi of a Nation.