Volume 53, Number 15 · October 5, 2006
The Artful Clarks
By John Updike
The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings
Catalog of the exhibition by Michael Conforti, James A. Ganz, Neil Harris, Sarah Lees, Gilbert T. Vincent, and others.
an exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts,June 4–September 4, 2006; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 22–August 19, 2007.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 369 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press)
The two collecting Clark brothers, confusingly, are known as Sterling and Stephen, like a pair of twins, though they were born five years apart and their full names, Robert Sterling Clark and Stephen Carlton Clark, offered nominal alternatives. An exhibition on the brothers and their collections opened this summer in Williamstown and will be shown at the Metropolitan Museum in New York beginning next May. In the intent, proficient portraits by William Orpen which start off the Williamstown show, Sterling, in a high collar and dark suit, looks upright, prim, stern, and stuffy while Stephen, slouching with a cigarette in hand, his seamed face half in shadow, appears somewhat louche and shifty.
Review, 3373 words
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