There’s been a little battle for big money quietly raging over the last year in New York courts. Heiress Huguette Clark died just over 3 years ago in New York’s Beth Israel hospital. Two books have been written about her, Bill Dedman, Paul Clark Newell Jr. and Meryl Gordon.
This last Wednesday at Christie’s New York much of her furniture and art went under the hammer- many without reserve prices- though a Stradivari violin, that her father bought for her in Paris when she was a teenager, failed to reach a reserve through sealed bids.
Not having read either book about her life made the Christie’s viewing even more fascinating. One became a detective lifting up the delicate dangling fringes of lamps or peering into a showcase at a rock crystal squirrel atop a small magnifying class bowl and innocent desk set. The many similar gilt-wood lamps stood like weeping willows quietly active participants in the breeze. Was it a co-incidence that no lamp anywhere showed directly the carved Chinese face of man or bird?
In her best art work Huguette (as in the John Singer Sargent painting Girl Fishing) the light was what drew you in. She was always looking at the world even though she had withdrawn from it. And knew that she could never change it no matter how much money was thrown at it. Irony being that the dazzlingly rich colors of the tapestry chairs were so because they had never seen the light of day from under their dust covers in decades.
Her love of Asian culture was everywhere: serene, searching, contemplative. Little French decorative ‘bling’ was to be seen here: only the work and spirit of artisans. Amongst many other endeavors she supported was French children’s book illustration. A Cricket Singing on Top of a Mushroom did well in the saleroom as did all other illustrations and books.
The more initial research one does on Huguette Clark the more fascinating becomes the mystery. When WW2 began her love and importation of Japanese dolls and dollhouses provoked a visit from the F.B.I. And “her oft-reported fondness for shows such as the The Flintstones was an off-shoot of her painstaking attempts to make her own animations by taking sequences of photos of videotaped frames from television cartoons.”
Do dolls have souls? Huguette obviously believed they did with her amazing collection. And could a great artisan ever make a child’s toy that betrayed a trust?
The saddest ‘rub’ of all in her life, of course, was her distrust of people. And yet she could be incredibly generous to those who shared her ‘world’. Too generous many would say hence the lawsuits.
The Christie’s sale did more than allow one a glimpse of another world. That little window into Huguette Clark was as if Father Christmas was gently parting the curtains revealing how humans aren’t really that different. Some just get a better start in life. Her hospital room had a view of air conditioning ducts; an isolated oasis of the head and the heart.
My petite indulgence of Claiborne Cary:
If He Walked Into My Life Today
