William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in America in the first half of the twentieth century, and his media conglomerate is still one of the largest privately held corporations today. His life as a newspaper tycoon and politician was satirized in Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane, and his home in San Simeon, California, is one of the most visited museums in the country. Expanding upon well-known accounts of his influence in media and business, Hearst the Collector explores another facet of his extraordinary life, his art collection.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Hearst amassed hundreds of paintings and sculptures and the largest private collections of tapestries, antiquities, silver, and arms and armor of his time. They furnished no fewer than six palatial residences. Hearst the Collector takes the reader inside each one with rarely seen historical photographs of the interiors that illustrate the many works of art now dispersed among great museums throughout the world, including the Musee du Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Great Britain's Royal Armouries, and the Rijksmuseum.
Hearst the Collector is a story on a staggering scale that arrives just in time for a peak in speculation about a very different market--contemporary art--and in the attention paid to other remarkable collectors like J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick.
FOREWORD
Michael Govan
PREFACE
Hoyt Fields
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 HOW IT BEGAN
Chapter 2 THE BIGGEST APARTMENT IN THE WORLD
Chapter 3 THE ENCHANTED HILL
Chapter 4 THE BEACH HOUSE
Chapter 2 SMNT DONAT'S
Chapter 6 SANDS POINT
Chapter 7 WYNTOON
Chapter 8 CRISIS
Chapter 9 RENAISSANCE
CATALOGUE OF THE EXHIBITION
Architectural Commissions
Arms and Armor
Tapestries and Other Textiles
Decorative Arts
Antiquities
Postclassical Sculptures
Manuscripts and Paintings
Selected Bibliography
Selected Locations of Dispersed Works of Art
Illustration Credits
Index