Empty Mansions

by Bill Dedman

  9. Henry Clay Frick. 1914–. The Frick Collection since 1935.

  10. Edward S. Harkness. 1908–. The Commonwealth Fund since 1952.

  11. W. A. Clark. 1911–1927. Replaced by an apartment building.

  12. James B. Duke. 1912–. New York University Institute of Fine Arts since 1957.

  13. Harry Payne Whitney. 1906–. Cultural Services of the French Embassy since 1952.

  14. Isaac D. Fletcher. 1899–. Ukrainian Institute of America since 1955.

  15. Benjamin N. Duke. 1901–. Owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim since 2010.

  16. William Starr Miller. 1914–. Neue Galerie New York since 2001.

  17. Andrew Carnegie. 1902–. Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1976.

  18. Otto Kahn. 1918–. Convent of the Sacred Heart school since 1934.

  19. Felix Warburg. 1908–.

  20. The Jewish Museum since 1947.

  SOURCES: Great Houses of New York, 1880–1930, Michael C. Kathrens; Gilded Mansions, Wayne Craven. Dates of completion are approximate.

  DOWNSIZING

  FOR THEIR NEW HOME, Anna and Huguette found an apartment five blocks south at 907 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of Seventy-Second Street. This was a super-luxury building, in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, but not showy, turning a refined limestone face to the street.

  Anna’s tastes were not altogether different from her husband’s, but she added a touch of the religious, with a dark, mysterious air. When the massive wooden door to Apartment 12W was opened, the visitor passed into a paneled Jacobean gallery, thirty-seven feet long with herringbone floors. From the eleven-foot ceilings hung an ornate brass lantern with a maiden encircled by branches and leaves of gold. On the long wall to the right was an old red tapestry, about twelve feet square, depicting Crusaders bargaining with a caliph for prisoners. On the left hung stained-glass windows, facing the building’s open courtyard. These colorful panels of red and blue, apparently dating from seventeenth-century Zurich, depicted angels, knights, and coats of arms.

  Though they were downsizing, the Clarks still had a marvelous view. On their twelfth floor—the top floor—a string of nine oversize windows ran the entire length of the building alongside the avenue, allowing them a view of the rapidly changing city skyline. The best view, however, was left to the servants, who had quarters on the roof, as was common in the day.

  Looking down into the park in the foreground, Anna and Huguette could see Japanese cherry trees, the oval sailboat pond called Conservatory Water, and children sledding on Pilgrim Hill, with its statue commemorating the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth Rock. Huguette painted this view straight across the park, a lovely scene showing the French gables of the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West. Her painting is missing the iconic twin towers of the San Remo, which wouldn’t rise until after 1929.

  To the right, far beyond the north end of Central Park, they could see the Hudson River Bridge to New Jersey beginning to be built in 1927, before it was named for George Washington. To the left, looking south down Fifth Avenue, they were able to watch the Empire State Building begin its ascent in 1930.

  Anna wanted nothing but the best, and this apartment had a respectable heritage as the most expensive in the city. Their neighbors included W. C. Durant, a founder of General Motors. The previous tenant of their twelfth-floor apartment, Herbert Lee Pratt, was a name familiar to the Clarks, as Pratt and his father had been partners in Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller. Pratt had paid $30,000 a year to rent the entire twelfth floor, with its twenty-eight rooms, advertised when the building opened in 1916 as “the finest apartment in the world.” The Clarks took only half that space, five thousand square feet. Their rent was $12,000 a year, or about $150,000 in today’s dollars.

  Most people, when downsizing from 121 rooms to only 17, would have to figure out which furnishings to sell off. Anna, however, didn’t own the contents of the Clark mansion. Those belonged to the estate, which was to be divided among the five children. So she went shopping. Her tastes looked back to old Europe, nothing modern. She chose a French bed with a sumptuous green silk damask bedspread, a Queen Anne walnut wing chair covered in needlepoint, a small Jacobean inlaid and carved oak cabinet, a French library table of the Henri II period, a Chippendale mahogany bookcase; the bill of sale from Charles of London runs on for eight pages. In the last two months of 1925, Anna spent $92,210 at Charles, quite a bit more than the $75,000 President Coolidge earned in salary for the year. In today’s dollars, her new furnishings cost about $1.2 million.

  Where W.A. had thrown open the Clark mansion to photographers and sketch artists from the world’s newspapers and magazines, no photos of their apartments were published while Anna or Huguette were alive. They would have guests over for musical afternoons and small dinners, but access was carefully controlled.

  Anna did add one touch from the Clark mansion: A door was concealed in the paneling of the gallery. A burglar could have spent a good while in Apartment 12W, wandering the parquet floors, meandering through the dining room with its wallpaper of pheasants and flowers, through the living room with Anna’s French harps, and through the study and the breakfast room—without finding any bedrooms. All were hidden behind this door, which led to its own hallway, four bedrooms, four walk-in closets, and two sitting rooms.

  In Anna’s bedroom, the furniture was all in an ornate Louis XV style, oak with gold trim: a rolltop desk, a dressing table with three oval mirrors. The bedside table had photos of a young Huguette in a red dress resting her head on her father’s shoulder and several photos of Andrée looking a bit forlorn. In the bathroom was one bit of modern technology: a scale built into the floor tile, with a dial on the wall showing the person’s weight.

  All of this luxury served only two Clarks, who soon expanded into a second apartment in the building. Anna moved down to an equally sumptuous apartment on the eighth floor.

  The plan was for Anna to live alone and for Huguette to find a husband.

  TADE

  NEARLY EVERY WEEKDAY AFTERNOON in her late teens and twenties when the Clarks were in New York, Huguette walked thirteen blocks down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South, then a block over to the apartments at No. 36, to visit the man she called Cher Maître, or “Dear Master.” It was time for her painting lesson.

  Tadeusz Styka, called Tadé, was the favorite artist of the Clarks. From a well-known Czech-Polish family of painters, Tadé was a boy genius whose precocious talent at drawing was studied in Paris by the French psychologist Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test. After immigrating to the United States in 1921, he was popular among the New York social set of the 1920s and 1930s as a fast-painting portraitist, not only of people but also of family pets. He painted a lot of young women, though burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee threw him out of her dressing room when he expected the teenage stripper to pose nude. He also painted presidents: His Rough Rider portrait of Theodore Roosevelt hangs in the West Wing of the White House, and Harry Truman sat for him, too. Tadé painted at least a dozen portraits of the Clarks and was well paid for it. But his first job for the family was as a painting instructor for young Huguette.

  Although becoming a painter was not a typical goal for one of Miss Spence’s young ladies, Huguette was raised in an artistic household with music lessons and a family home that doubled as a public art gallery. Her father was not the only voracious collector in the family. On a single day when Huguette was twenty-three, she and her mother bought Renoir’s Chrysanthemums, Pissarro’s Landscape, and a small, stunning Degas, Dancer Making Points, showing a ballerina pointing her toe, a gentle figure in bold yellow and orange. That day was November 11, 1929, just two weeks after the Wall Street crash, which began the Great Depression. For most people.

  Women at the time usually painted with pastels. They weren’t thought capable of handling oil paints, which require more skillful preparation of the canvas, mixing of the colors, and layering of the paint. Oils, used by male art
ists, were associated with fine art. Huguette, meticulous in all things, always painted with oils.

  One of her self-portraits shows her at the easel, turning to look over her shoulder as though surprised by a visitor. Her blond, shoulder-length hair is wavy, but not in a fancy do. She is wearing a simple peach-colored painter’s smock, not a debutante’s dress. For once, there is no strand of pearls at her neck. She holds an Impressionist’s palette of intense colors arranged from crimson to yellow to emerald green. The unglamorous smock, the uncertain look, and the large palette all combine as if to say, This is who I am. I am an artist.

  • • •

  Huguette had an early love of Japan, a love she shared with her mother. Much of France had fallen under the spell of Japanese art in the late 1800s—a craze known as Japonisme. Huguette developed that love into a quiet career as an artist. Her paintings, often life-size portraits of Japanese geishas, focus more on the costumes and hairstyles than on the revealed emotional lives of the women: A woman with a dragonfly pin in her hair smokes a cigarette, another holds a fan looking at a castle, and a third delicately cuts flowers. Huguette’s geishas are women trained to keep their emotions hidden.

  One of her smallest paintings, only six by nine inches, shows Huguette’s dedication to detail. A young geisha stands barefoot, her eyes averted pensively. She is wearing a floor-length robe with a large golden bow. Her black hair is decorated with a dozen combs, ornaments, and tassels of gold. The subtle lighting brings to life the exquisite textures of silk and gold.

  Huguette’s shelves were stacked with illustrated and scholarly books on Japan, in several languages: The Changing Social Position of Women in Japan, Palaces of Kyoto, Japanese Court Poetry, Japanese Art of the Heian Period. These books resided alongside her wider collection of Homer, Virgil, Plato, Descartes, Lao-tzu, and Oscar Wilde.

  The paintings in her home studio in Apartment 12W show how she immersed herself in Japanese culture, an archaeologist studying the markers of Japanese nobility: traditional calligraphy, the Osuberakashi hairstyle tied in the back with a ribbon, elaborate hair accessories, richly brocaded silk fabrics in red and gold. She didn’t only study these objects in books; she collected them, filling shelves with delicate wooden boxes of kimonos and hairpieces. These details are lifelike in her paintings.

  Huguette was also influenced by the work of illustrators and artists of her native France, from Parisian magazine illustrations to the Monets and Renoirs hanging on her walls. While the Impressionists applied a Japanese aesthetic to European subjects, Huguette’s artwork shows an Impressionist style applied to Japanese subjects.

  Though her art shows years of training, it doesn’t quite match the technical skill of her instructor, Tadé Styka. While some Impressionist art conveys a hurried approach, trying to render the light as they experienced it, Huguette’s landscapes of Japanese castles and bridges look as if they were painted entirely in her apartment from detailed photos, without exposure to real life. And when she painted people, it’s possible that Huguette, as her social contacts declined, used herself as the body model for her paintings of Japanese women.

  Nevertheless, her works show a dedication to excellence and an ability to adapt to newer styles. Her painting of an ornate bowl of pink and yellow tulips, with two still-fresh petals lying on the table, is a bit disjointed, shown from more than one perspective at once, just as Cézanne did in the still life of an earthenware jug hanging on Huguette’s wall. Huguette finished many paintings of this scene, always with two petals fallen.

  She signed many of these paintings in an Asian style with an artist’s chop, or personal stamp. She arranged the letters of her first and last names in two vertical columns inside a rectangle.

  For many of the women she painted, Huguette also chose a name, which she painted in Japanese characters into the corner of the canvas. On into the 1940s and 1950s, she corresponded with Japanese advisers, discussing appropriate names for a modern princess—a “young lady of a good family.” She wanted to know the proper names indicating gentleness, goodness, and grace. Among her favorites were Ume-ko Hime (Princess Plum Blossom) and Fuji-ko Hime (Princess Wisteria). After she learned that the American government in postwar Japan had abolished the peerage and its titles, she went with names such as Yoshi-ko (meaning “graceful and noble”).

  Another of her life-size paintings shows a sober maiko, or apprentice geisha, in a brilliant red, pink, and white kimono, holding a long, silver tobacco pipe that is smoldering. In a round seal next to Huguette’s signature is the name she associated with this woman, Ku-Raku, meaning “sorrow and joy.”

  • • •

  Perhaps as a personal favor to its twenty-two-year-old benefactor, the Corcoran museum in Washington showed seven of her paintings in 1929. “From the day of her birth,” said the catalog for the two-week showing, “Huguette Clark has lived in an artistic atmosphere. She has been surrounded with the many treasures of various Schools and Periods, contained in the notable art collection bequeathed to this Gallery by her father, the late William Andrews Clark. She has had the benefit of extensive European travel; and, added to these advantages, she is endowed with unusual natural talent.”

  The Associated Press later carried a glowing report of the exhibition: “Her paintings received high praise from critics at an exhibition at the Corcoran galleries in Washington last year and now she is planning an exhibition in Paris. She is an accomplished musician.”

  Her paintings displayed at the Corcoran were titled Scene from My Window—Night; Scene from My Window—After the Snow Storm; Typical French Doll; Typical Japanese Doll; La Rentrée d’une Soirée (Returning from the Party); Study of Hydrangeas; and Portrait of Myself.

  Huguette apparently never exhibited her paintings again, but she had a few printed as holiday cards. Her friends and relatives could see, if they looked closely, her signature on the artwork. We don’t know how late in life Huguette continued her painting. She may have given away some of her work to staff or friends: The delicate barefoot geisha sold on eBay in 2010 for $104.

  • • •

  Huguette’s most affecting painting, of those we have seen, is a snowy view from her apartment window: The Manhattan skyline, streetlights, and automobile taillights are diffused by the moist air of a blue-gray night. The scene is reminiscent of the urban paintings of Edward Hopper or Georgia O’Keeffe, but with more warmth. The dominant feature is the brown grid of Huguette’s window looking south on Fifth Avenue toward the Empire State Building and the RCA Building. In the foreground, reflected in the window, glows a lamp with a golden base, its white shade supported by a delicate Japanese porcelain figure of a woman in a kimono standing on a golden pedestal. The artist reveals only this part of her private space illuminated by the lamp, nothing more. The woman in the kimono is smiling, her face partly hidden behind a lady’s fan.

  Outside the window, it is cold, dark, noisy, uncertain, offering the energy and engagement of city life. Inside, it is warm, bright, refined, cultured, offering the slow pulse and detachment of solitude.

  This view disappeared in the 1950s. The builder of 907 Fifth Avenue had outfitted these apartments with south-facing windows, looking down Fifth Avenue, but had failed to acquire the air rights above the townhouses to the south. This failure became manifest when the townhouses were torn down and the glazed, white-brick 900 Fifth Avenue was built in 1959—shouldering right up against the windows of the Clark apartments. The effect was that Anna and Huguette’s south-facing windows in the dining and living rooms were bricked up, part of their views snuffed out.

  • • •

  In early days at least, Huguette painted from live models. One of Tadé Styka’s portraits shows her, at perhaps age eighteen to twenty, working intently on a large canvas. She is seated on an upholstered bench in his studio, her legs stretched out to her full five feet six inches. She is dressed in a knee-length pencil skirt and an artist’s collared shirt with a necktie, affecting the “garçon look,” with her hair
in an undulating marcel wave reminiscent of Jean Harlow. At the right of the canvas, almost out of sight, stands a well-toned nude male model, his back to the viewer. Perhaps to save her modesty, the artist shows Huguette’s eyes fixed firmly on her canvas. In her apartments, among her hundreds of paintings, Huguette had other nudes of men and women.

  Another of Tadé’s powerful images of Huguette, as a young woman of about eighteen, shows off her rose-colored cheeks, which match her high-necked blouse, offset by a short strand of pearls. Her blond-auburn hair is parted and falls to her shoulders. Her face looks warm and generous—not a model’s face, but with a Mona Lisa smile and cheerful blue eyes.

  Through the years, there was Clark family speculation that Huguette was in love with her handsome Cher Maître, or that he was in lust with her. Tadé Styka was mentioned occasionally in newspapers as a possible suitor of celebrities and the wealthy. In early 1923, when Huguette was just sixteen and Tadé was thirty-four, he was named as a rival to Charlie Chaplin for the affections of the sultry Polish actress Pola Negri, whom he had painted many times. But she moved on to the film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino, and Tadé wouldn’t marry until the 1940s.

  BILL

  TWENTY-YEAR-OLD HUGUETTE was the most prominent debutante introduced to New York society in December 1926. Her father’s estate had been settled. She was free now to find a husband.

  A newspaper cartoon imagined the life of Huguette, the “spoiled little rich girl.” Breakfast in bed served by a French waitress. Stepping into her limousine, bound for a shopping tour to spend $333 a day. Donning gorgeous evening clothes and setting out for the opera. Attending a debutante dance, where, because of her wealth and beauty, she is the center of attention.

  Huguette poses for a photograph in her debutante days, a time when young ladies were presented to society so they could attract a husband. She graduated from high school at a time when most of the girls at Miss Spence’s planned to get married, but in a few years most in the graduating classes were looking forward to college. (illustration credit6.1)