A Tale of Two Clarks and the Museums They Made

Stephen tended to business and all things Cooperstown. Sterling sashayed and bought Renoirs, but did he try to overthrow the government in his copious spare time? 

I haven’t gone amnesiac about the psychos running the Smithsonian. They’re on the block for next week. I started this two-parter, though, and like to finish my projects. Earlier this week I wrote about news from the Clark Art Institute in bucolic Williamstown in northwestern Massachusetts. Founded in 1955 by Singer Sewing Machine heir Sterling Clark (1877–1956) and his French-actress wife Francine, it’s much loved for its Renoirs, Sargents, Homers, English silver, and French porcelain. It just debuted a gift of more than 300 Old Masters, many portraits. The Clark is always a pleasure to visit but especially now.

About a hundred miles west is Cooperstown, on Lake Otsego in central New York, home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum, and Fenimore Farm, a museum of farm life. What does the Clark have to do with Cooperstown? The Clark fortune comes from the Singer Manufacturing Company and the sewing machine, a life changer. Cooperstown is the Clark family seat, and the Clark family is more than Sterling. Stephen Clark (1882–1960), Sterling’s estranged brother, ruled the roost in Cooperstown. The museums there are his doing. They quarreled in the early 1920s over, guess what, money and Francine, never to speak again. Sterling believed that Stephen was an icy, snooty plutocrat. Stephen and the Cooperstown Clarks tagged Sterling as a Nazi kook. Both brothers were distinguished art collectors and lived parallel lives.

Today, I’ll focus on aspects of the Fenimore and the Clark family story — big money, high art, and oddballs. I’ll save the fascinating and dense Baseball Hall of Fame and the Fenimore’s fabulous Native American collection for next week. The museums are still Clark-led, now by Stephen’s granddaughter Jane, and — let’s say it now — so is all of Cooperstown. Stephen’s side of the family has been extraordinarily generous. The good life there is the Clark family’s doing, mostly minus Sterling. He left as the black sheep, though he was always fond of the place.

Every museum has a snooze of a season now and then, and this is the Fenimore’s. Too bad since I hadn’t been there for years. This cycle, the Fenimore’s small but prime collection of Hudson River School art is in storage while its galleries are in restauro. The collection’s pinnacle is William Sidney Mount’s Eel Spearing at Setauket, graceful and geometric. It’s perfection as American scenes of everyday life go.

Also in storage, along with Eel Spearing, are things that reference, more or less, the world James Fenimore Cooper knew and the mythic world of Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s father was the town’s founder, and Fenimore lived much of his life there. Eastman Johnson’s Blacksmith Shop and John Quidor’s Leatherstocking Meets the Law are in the collection as well. Tossing the net further is Ralph Earl’s portrait of Abigail Adams. She’s always topical but especially now given her 1776 letter to husband John asking him to “remember the ladies” in allotting power in the soon-to-be-declared new country.

On view were American paintings from the 1870s into the 1930s that the Fenimore acquired in the last year or so. They’re part of an initiative to broaden its collection beyond subjects like antebellum farmers, artisans, and upstate nabobs and mountain landscapes. The new things are nice, nothing to frighten the chickens, and they’re committing serious money. An 1896 Childe Hassam portrait of his wife with lilac bushes sparkles. I can imagine the fragrance. Ernest Lawson, one of my favorites, painted the museum’s new view of New York subway construction around 1909. It’s gnarly and chromatically intense.

Everything can’t be on view all the time, but the Fenimore filled multiple galleries with In Nature’s Studio, a sprawler of a treasures show from the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania. Nothing’s junk, and I’ve never been to Reading, so now a visit to its art and science museum isn’t essential. The show is still too big, suffering as it does from a surfeit of landscapes very much like the views we see outside the Fenimore’s doors. It’s a march to get through it.

As a guideline in selecting exhibitions, I’ll suggest that people living in, say, the rolling hills of central New York aren’t overcome with emotion when they see leafy landscapes in museums. A view of a smoldering volcano, Cotopaxi, a marquee Frederic Church from 1862, is another story. It’s in the show, and it’s great. Odd to say, tucked in a corner, is George Bellows’s The Launching, from 1913, a rousing scene of fishermen hard at work on Monhegan Island in Maine. Living in the mountains in Vermont, I revel in seascapes. Why maroon this one?

Taking up too much space as well is an exhibition of Linda McCartney’s photographs. Before she married Paul McCartney, she was a very good celebrity-magazine photographer but no Cecil Beaton. Afterward, she photographed family and friends for a look I’d call artsy. I would have ditched this exhibition altogether as a big name but too light. Michael Eastman’s photographs of Havana interiors, shown in a space next to McCartney’s work, blow it out of the water. Nixing the McCartney and downsizing the Reading exhibition by half would have left room for the Fenimore Museum’s own art, not only its scenes of everyday life, portraits, and art evoking Cooper’s books but more of its princely collection of folk art.

Stephen Clark bought American folk art starting in the 1930s into the ’40s, just when critics and scholars were calling it Modernism’s granddaddy for its planar, graphic, and minimalist style. Rural patrons in the day preferred a straightforward look — leave the flash and sparkle for city slickers, please. The Fenimore has a comfortable vibe owing in part to its country location, but its folk art makes a difference. And it’s located in what was once a home. Stephen’s and Sterling’s brother, Edward, lived there. The Fenimore’s folk art sculpture is both tough and freaky. I once borrowed Head of a Boy, from 1847, for an exhibition. It’s by the little-known Erie County sculptor Asa Ames. It’s brilliant, but I wouldn’t want to be alone with it.

Stephen Clark ranged widely in his taste in art, as did Sterling, but Stephen skewed edgy and grand while Sterling stuck with painterly and pretty. Not to insult Sterling, since he bought what he called “the best of its kind,” but his art shows very good bon vivant taste and no interest in art history. Stephen bought the newest in Matisse and Hopper, Van Gogh’s Night Café, and Seurat’s Circus Sideshow. He owned splashy Eakins portraits, a mystical Rembrandt, and two gestural Hals husband-and-wife portraits.

Sterling lived — more or less — for love and pleasure while Stephen chaired MoMA’s board and served on the Met’s board, giving millions in his lifetime to New York art causes, among them paying for the Met’s first smoke detectors and air-conditioners. He spread the wealth, dividing his collection as gifts to MoMA, the Met, Yale’s art gallery, the Addison Gallery, where I was director, and the Fenimore. That’s why Stephen is little known. Sterling and Francine collected quietly and weren’t especially philanthropic until they reached old age and had to decide where their art would go. It went to one place, the Clark, named for them. Until the museum opened, few knew what they had or who they were.

Stephen ran Singer, so, in addition to collecting, he was a magnate. He resented Sterling, his older brother, for it. Sterling got to sashay the days and nights away while Stephen dealt with faulty hooks snagging thread, industrial-scale. Singer became a chain selling consumer goods and was the first multinational corporation. Vertically integrated and self-financing, it was a pioneer of the installment plan and sold everywhere except Antarctica, creating one of the earliest industrial mega fortunes. Edward Clark (1811–1882), Stephen’s and Sterling’s grandfather, was Isaac Singer’s lawyer. He cleared the thicket of competing patents for the sewing machine, then a curiosity of a contraption, so Singer’s version became the one.

Singer couldn’t afford to pay Edward, so he gave him three-eighths of the company instead. While Singer’s life was the stuff of tabloids — at least 20 children from multiple and noisy women, for starters — Edward headlined church bulletins for clean living and teaching Sunday school. Before long, he was in charge, since Singer had moved to England to a Victorian country house he called the Wigwam. Believing in diversification and being a visionary, Edward went into real estate next. He was the Upper West Side’s leading land speculator and developer. The Dakota was the jewel in his crown.

Edward died in 1882 in Cooperstown, leaving his son Alfred, father of Sterling and Stephen, a tad shy of a billion in today’s dollars. Alfred died in 1896, a mere 51. He had been a patron of the arts, a modest, predictably Victorian collector, and the father of four sons. Possibly, he also led a double life in Europe as the companion, over many years, of a gay Norwegian opera singer. One of Alfred’s pictures, Gérôme’s Snake Charmer, from 1879, is at the Clark now, purchased by Sterling years after his father died and after it had changed hands a few times. Alfred bought it in 1888 for $19,500 when French Academic art was hot. In 1942, Sterling bought it for $500, yes, $500, a sign of how far the style had fallen in the marketplace. If it’s not a gay picture — Village People gay — I’m a rhinoceros, though this may have escaped Sterling. Today it’s famous, since it was the cover image for Edward Said’s Orientalism.

Alfred’s death left Sterling, Stephen, son Edward, and another son called Brose — for Ambrose — millionaires many, many times over. Son Edward is said to have been dropped on his head as a baby, literally, leaving him not all there. He owned the Dakota in Manhattan, a bequest from his father, but lived as an unmarried eccentric in Cooperstown. His interest was animal husbandry. Brose was an Old Westbury grandee and the iconic Gold Coast equestrian nut, so much so that he’s buried — in Cooperstown — next to his favorite bay thoroughbred gelding, Kellsboro Jack. He collected horse pictures by Stubbs.

The brotherly feud? As late as the 1910s, Sterling and Stephen were close, collected in tandem, and talked about starting an art museum one day in Cooperstown. Stephen married a rich socialite, as was the proper thing to do. Sterling tarried, a dilettante, serving in the Army during the Boxer Rebellion, organizing a harebrained zoological expedition to China, living la vie de fou in Paris, and breeding horses.

He met Francine in Paris in the waning days of the First World War and married her in 1919, and it was indeed a love match. Francine was a respected actress performing with the Comédie Française, but to the Clarks she was outré, extraordinaire. A French actress was one thing. But Francine’s mother had never married her father. Francine herself had a child, a daughter, out of wedlock. Sterling wanted all — Francine, her mother, and her child — treated like family.

The Clarks were chagrined. After all, Alfred’s widow — Sterling’s mother — had remarried, and to the Episcopal bishop of New York. Furious at the cold shoulder his new wife got, Sterling demanded that family trusts be busted so he could control his share free and clear. The grapes of wrath had been gathered and tossed into the wine press, nourishing hard feelings. It was understood by all that the brothers could never be in the same room together for fear fists would fly.

Family references to Uncle Sterling the Nazi stem from rumors that he was among a group of right-wing millionaires horrified by New Deal socialism who conspired in 1934 to raise a rogue army and foment a coup to overthrow FDR, his government, and Congress. Sterling was said to have pledged as much as $15 million to the cause.

Something was definitely in the air. Smedley Butler, a major general in the Marines, insisted that the business plot, as it was called, had recruited him. A congressional hearing dug into it and dropped the hot potato fast. But, having read Sterling Clark’s 30-something volumes of diaries when I was a Clark curator, and even knowing that the volume from 1934 is the only one missing, I detected not a single whiff of civic-mindedness on his part, ever. He was a very conservative Republican, profoundly racist, and more antisemitic than even much of his class. But overthrowing the government? “What a bore,” he’d muse. “And since it’s after 11, make me a French 75,” his lubricant of choice. And drinking it on the barricades would have discommoded the Moët brut.