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. He tells the story, as well, of the two generations that preceded theirs, giving us an intimate portrait of one of the least known of America’s richest families. He begins with Edward Clark—the brothers’ grandfather, who amassed the Clark fortune in the late-nineteenth century—a man with nerves of steel; a Sunday school teacher who became the business partner of the wild inventor and genius Isaac Merritt Singer. 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 luxury apartment building. The house was called “Clark’s Folly”; today it’s known as the Dakota. We see Clark’s son—Alfred—enigmatic and famously reclusive; at thirty-eight he inherited $50 million and became one of the country’s richest men. An image of propriety—good husband, father of four—in Europe, he led a secret homosexual life. 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. We are told what really happened and why—and who in American politics was implicated but never prosecuted. Sterling’s brother—Stephen—self-effacing and responsible—became chairman and president of the Museum of Modern Art and gave that institution its first painting, Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad. Thirteen years later, in an act that provoked intense controversy, Stephen dismissed the Museum’s visionary founding director, Alfred Barr, who for more than a decade had single-handedly established the collection and exhibition programs that determined how the art of the twentieth century was regarded. Stephen gave or bequeathed to museums many of the paintings that today are still their greatest attractions. With authority, insight, and a flair for evoking time and place, Weber examines the depths of the brothers’ passions, the vehemence of their lifelong feud, the great art they acquired, and the profound and lasting impact they had on artistic vision in America.

The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before. He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye. In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display. Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases. Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.

This lively work of cultural history tells the stories of five young art patrons who, in the last 1920s and 1930s, were instrumental in bringing modern painting, sculpture, and dance to America. A combination of wealth, Harvard education privilege, and family connections enabled Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, Agnes Mongan, James Thrall Soby, and A. Everett (Chick) Austin, Jr., to introduce the work of Picasso, Balanchine, Calder, and other important artists to the United States.

In what may be the first explicitly comparative study of the effects of globalization on metropolitan and rural communities, In Gotham's Shadow examines how three central New York communities struggled over the last half century to survive in a global economy that seems to have forgotten them. Utica, formerly a city of one hundred thousand, experienced the same trends of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and urban renewal as nearly every American city, with the same mixed results. In Cooperstown and Hartwick, two small villages forty miles south of Utica, the same trends were at work, though with different outcomes. Hartwick may be seen as an example of how small towns have lost their core, while Cooperstown may be seen as an example of how a small town can survive by transforming itself into a tourist destination. Thomas provides extensive historical background mixed with newspaper excerpts and lively interviews that add a human dimension to the transformations these communities have experienced.

This social history describes the lives of the rich and trendy who have lived at the Dakota, a New York apartment house daringly erected in 1884, too far up and on the wrong side of town. The book covers tenants such as the Gustav Schirmers, Boris Karloff, Judy Holliday and Lauren Bacall.

"Brothers Sterling and Stephen Clark--heirs to the Singer sewing machine fortune--were among the twentieth century's most influential art collectors. This volume examines their magnificent collections, their personal lives and public profiles, and their significant roles in the history of American museums. While the brothers shared a love for great art, they collected in different ways. Sterling was a private collector; his French Impressionist masterpieces, including thirty-eight Renoirs, and works by such American artists as Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Frederic Remington, and Mary Cassatt now form the distinguished collection of the Clark. Stephen, a businessman and museum trustee, acquired modern works by such masters as Georges Seurat, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh, often with specific museum collections in mind--including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery."--Publisher's website.

A rich, wide-ranging meditation on the iPhone as direct descendant of the 1930s Bauhaus, one of the twentieth century's most influential schools of art and design (summed up in Mies van der Rohe's dictum, "less is more") whose principle aim was to connect art and industry. From one of the leading authorities on the Bauhaus and modernism. Nicholas Fox Weber, in this deft, entertaining, and brilliant rumination on art and technology, writes of the iPhone as the essence of the Bauhaus principles of form following function--of honesty of design and materials that reflect the true nature of objects and buildings, favoring linear and geometrical forms; adhering to line, shape, and colors; synthesizing art to modern times; the fusion in design of art and technology. Weber, an authority and celebrant of twentieth-century modernism, ranging from the paintings of Balthus to the architecture of Le Corbusier, was a close associate of Anni and Josef Albers, the last living giants of the Bauhaus, and absorbed firsthand its truest beliefs. The Alberses emphasized their passion for "good design over bad art." Anni, a groundbreaking textile artist and printmaker, and Josef, a painter and color theorist and influential art teacher, stuck to "what was taught at the Bauhaus: the right use of materials, good technique, a purpose that serves all." Weber writes that the Bauhaus was not a style but an attitude: clear design and visual acuity as the embodiment of morality and honesty. And in iBauhaus, Weber explores how the iPhone, with its effective design and its versatility, honors these deepest beliefs, as well as the values that the Bauhaus sought to give to the world.

A quarter of a million people braved miserable conditions at Epsom Downs on June 2, 1954, to see the 175th running of the prestigious Derby Stakes. Queen Elizabeth II and Sir Winston Churchill were in attendance, along with thousands of Britons who were all convinced of the unfailing superiority of English bloodstock and eager to see a British colt take the victory. They were shocked when a Kentucky-born chestnut named Never Say Die galloped to a two-length triumph at odds of 33–1, winning Britain's greatest race and beginning an important shift in the world of Thoroughbred racing. Never Say Die traces the history of this extraordinary colt, beginning with his foaling in Lexington, Kentucky, as well as the stories of the influential individuals brought together by the horse and his victory—from the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune to the Aga Khan. Most fascinating is the tale of Mona Best of Liverpool, England, whose well-placed bet on the long-shot Derby contender allowed her to open the Casbah Coffee Club. There, her son met musicians John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, later joining their band. Featuring a foreword by the original drummer for the Beatles, Pete Best, this remarkable book reveals how an underdog's surprise victory played a part in the formation of the most successful and influential rock band in history and made the Bluegrass region of Kentucky the center of the international Thoroughbred industry.

Follies in America examines historicized garden buildings, known as "follies," from the nation's founding through the American centennial celebration in 1876. In a period of increasing nationalism, follies—such as temples, summerhouses, towers, and ruins—brought a range of European architectural styles to the United States. By imprinting the land with symbols of European culture, landscape gardeners brought their idea of civilization to the American wilderness. Kerry Dean Carso's interdisciplinary approach in Follies in America examines both buildings and their counterparts in literature and art, demonstrating that follies provide a window into major themes in nineteenth-century American culture, including tensions between Jeffersonian agrarianism and urban life, the ascendancy of middle-class tourism, and gentility and social class aspirations.

Nearly every year since 1939, baseball's most outstanding players, umpires, pioneers and executives have been enshrined at Cooperstown in a public ceremony attracting thousands of fans from across (and sometimes beyond) the United States. Whether conferred by the Baseball Writers Association of America, the Veterans Committee, or in the case of 17 Negro League greats in 2006, an ad hoc committee of historians, Hall of Fame membership is the game's highest honor. This book covers the origins and history of the Hall of Fame museum and its election process, provides general information on each year's class and induction ceremony, and includes concise biographical and career discussion for every Hall of Famer, as well as commentary on his (Effa Manley is the lone female) path to election, and highlights of his speech.