The Clarks of Cooperstown: Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great and Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Feud
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.12 (782 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0307263479 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 448 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-07-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Excellent biography SusieQ It would be facile to describe Alfred, Sterling, or Stephen Clark just as "wealthy deadbeats". Look at all they accomplished! Directly or indirectly, members of this family are responsible for establishing three art museums (The Clark in Williamstown, MA; The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, and The Cloisters), as well as contributing valuable donations of art to so many others; establishing the Baseball Hall of Fame; building the historic Dakota apartment building in NYC, a hospital in Cooperstown, and so much more.Unlike some of the other reviewers, I appreciated Mr. Weber's thoughtful and detailed descriptions of the impor. So many books, so little time said Disappointing account of a fascinating family.. The writer had a ready -made fascinating subject in the Clark family, but somehow he managed to make the book boring! I did not have any real sense of the characters humanity. In fact much of what he wrote was contradictatory.His viewpoint seemed to change from chapter to chapter.It was also repetitive. Did we need several descriptions of Sterling Clark's shopping habits?The brothers were unsympathetically portrayed. Maybe they really were as nasty as they sounded! I would have liked to know how their early lives helped shape their later personalities, also more about their family relationships.The book was quite well ill. "Not the book for me" according to TD2000. It's an interesting premise -- a collective history focusing on the heirs of the Singer Company fortune. However, the author gets too involved in presenting inconsequential minutiae that I decided I could find better ways to spend my time and I stopped reading the book about halfway through.
Nicholas Fox Weber, author of the acclaimed Patron Saints (“Exhilarating avant-garde entertainment”—Sam Hunter, The New York Times Book Review) and Balthus (“The authoritative account of his life and work”—Michael Ravitch, Newsday), gives us now the idiosyncratic lives of Sterling and Stephen Clark—two of America’s greatest art collectors, heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune, and for decades enemies of each other. Alfred was a man with a passion for art and charity, which he passed on to his four sons, in particular Sterling and Stephen Clark.Sterling, the second-oldest, buccaneering and controversial, loved impressionism, created his own museum in Williamstown, Massachusetts—and shocked his family by marrying an actress from the Comédie Française. Together the Sterling Clarks collected thousands of paintings and bred racehorses.In a highly public case, Sterling sued his three brothers over issues of inheritance, and then never spoke to them again.He was one of the central figures linked to a bizarre and little-known attempted coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. And, by the turn of the twentieth century, was the major stockholder of the Singer Manufacturing Company.We follow Edward’s rise as a real estate wizard making headlines in 1880 when he commissioned Manhattan’s first luxu
He also built a museum in Williamstown, Mass., to house his extraordinary collection of Courbets, Renoirs and others. Weber's delightfully written study includes much insightful psychological speculation about these larger-than-life men. . Sterling was a brash bon vivant who married a French actress and took part in an abortive movement to depose President Franklin D. From Publishers Weekly Curator and writer Weber (Balthus) tells the fascinating story of an art-obsessed family—especially Sterling and Stephen Clark, whose affinity with artists, says Weber, went beyond the usual collector's. His son Alfred used his inheritance to support the sculptor George Grey Barnard and the piano prodigy Josef Hofmann. Roosevelt, whose policies he believed were destroying America's capitalist economy. Stephen, a founder of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., was reserved and dour, yet adventurous as an art co