Featured Book: Empty Mansions by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.

Sara Trucksess

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune follows the remarkable true story of American art patrons W.A., Anna and Huguette Clark. Written not from the perspective of an art historian but by an investigative journalist and by a cousin of the Clark family, the authors offer a neutral and balanced look into the family’s finances, politics, drama and neuroses while simultaneously highlighting the impact that the Clarks had on modern American art and architecture as we know it today.

A self-made Gilded Age success story, W.A. Clark and his second wife Anna amassed a gold and copper mining fortune on par with the Fricks, the Vanderbilts and the Mellons. W.A. opened the family’s palatial Fifth Avenue home on weekend afternoons to share his beloved art collection with the public and left a portion of the collection to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, establishing a decades long relationship of patronage. W.A. passed his ge…