Book Alert / The Clarks of Cooperstown
The Clarks of Cooperstown -- Their Singer Sewing Machine Fortune, Their Great And Influential Art Collections, Their Forty-Year Fued by Nicholas Fox Weber, Knopf '07, $35, 420 pages, ISBN #0307263479. Index, bibliography, source notes, two groupings of full-color images, dozens of b&w images scattered through text.
Back in the day, one could purchase a painting of quality for the cost of a good racehorse. Alas, with auction prices commonly reaching eight figures, that day is past. More troubling, art increasingly tends to be purchased as an investment or for prestige rather than for the love of art itself. That's a proposition that brothers Sterling and Stephen Clark would readily agree on; they seldom agreed on anything else and for four decades, weren't on speaking terms.
Yet their combined acquisitions and their generous gifts to public and private institutions have enriched American art collections immeasurably. Both deeply sensuous people, they adored the process of making art as well as the finished product. Their passion led the audacious Sterling to build the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA (well worth a summer daytrip) and for staid, dour Stephen to help found Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, while leaving baseball ever in his debt by constructing Cooperstown's Baseball Hall of Fame. Price was no object in any of this, their ancestors had taken care of that.
Their grandfather, Edward Clark, had the good fortune to become the lawyer for and business partner of an impetuous genius, Isaac Merritt Singer, who popularized the sewing machine while fathering 24 children with 5 wives. In his spare time, he built apartment buildings, including New York's Dakota. His son, Alfred, inherited $50 million from his dad and was the image of rectitude as a loyal husband and father of four on this side of the Atlantic while living a homosexual life style when in Europe. Apparently $50 million wasn't enough, for Sterling felt the need to sue his three brothers over the inheritance.
Weber, a cultural historian and author of a dozen books, writes engagingly and recounts anecdotes well-known and lesser-known, including the arch-conservative Sterling's alleged 1934 plot to overturn FDR and install a fascist dictatorship, inspired by Mussolini's putsch in Italy. Their passion for art was so great that one regrets that Stephen and Sterling weren't able to share it, yet their personalities and temperament alone would probably have made that impossible. Weber is unsparing about members of the current generation who have squandered their patrimony as well as praiseworthy of such people as Cooperstown's Jane Forbes Clark, who has become a dedicated and purposeful philanthropist.
