Stephen Carlton Clark

Clark was age 13 when his father died. Following six years as a widow, his mother married Bishop Henry Codman Potter (1834–1908), of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, on October 4, 1902.

On February 20, 1909, Clark married Susan Vanderpoel Hun (1889–1967), the daughter of an Albany lawyer and a family friend since childhood. Clark and his bride were honeymooning in Europe when his mother died on March 4, 1909.

Stephen and Susan Clark were the parents of five children:

Elizabeth Clark Labouisse (1909–1945)

Stephen Carlton Clark Jr. (1911–1992)

Peter Gansevoort Clark (1915–1915), died in infancy.

Alfred Corning Clark II (1916–1961)

Robert Vanderpoel Clark (1917–1952).

Clark hired architect Frederick Sterner to design a 5-story Jacobean Revival city house at 46 East 70th Street, Manhattan. The residence was completed in 1912, and was used by Clark and his family until his death in 1960. It has housed The Explorers Club since 1964.

In 1923, Clark and his brother Sterling entered into a famous feud that lasted until their deaths. The terms of their family trust limited its beneficiaries to the four brothers and their natural issue. Sterling had married French actress Francine Clark in 1919, becoming step-father to her daughter Viviane. He sought approval from his brothers to change the terms of the family trust to make Viviane a beneficiary. Stephen, the only one of the brothers who had fathered children, refused to approve the change. In response, Sterling withdrew his quarter of the trust's assets, sold his properties in Cooperstown, and never spoke to Stephen again.

Stephen C. Clark died on September 17, 1960, in New York City. Upon his death, his two surviving children became beneficiaries of the family trust. With the 1964 death of F. Ambrose Clark, the last of the four brothers, Stephen's one surviving child, Stephen Carlton Clark Jr., became the sole beneficiary of the family trust.

Clark established cultural institutions in his home town of Cooperstown. He founded the Baseball Hall of Fame and paid for construction of its building, which opened in 1939. He offered his late brother Edward's country estate to the New York State Historical Association, which moved its headquarters to Cooperstown in 1939. The estate's mansion houses the Fenimore Art Museum, whose collection of American paintings and folk art Clark greatly expanded in the 1940s and 1950s. He founded what is now the Fenimore Farm & Country Village in 1942, which features a large collection of farm tools and equipment housed in Edward's former dairy barn. Its attractions include a village of relocated 19th-century buildings staffed by interpreters in vintage costume, including a blacksmith's forge and a working carousel. The museums are across New York State Route 80 from each other, on land once owned by James Fenimore Cooper.

Clark's brother Edward founded Cooperstown's Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in 1918. Named for a local physician, Edward paid for construction of its 100-bed building. The hospital housed wounded World War I veterans for several years, before opening to the public on June 1, 1922. The largest cash bequest made by Stephen C. Clark in his will was to Bassett Hospital: $6,000,000.

Clark was a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1932 to 1945, and from 1950 to his death in 1960. He served as the Met's vice president from 1941 to 1945. He was a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, and served as chairman of its board of trustees from 1939 to 1946. His chairmanship is remembered primarily for his unpopular 1943 firing of MoMA's founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr. He also served on the board of Roosevelt Hospital, and on numerous corporate boards.

Lawsuits

In May, 2009, a lawsuit was filed against Yale University regarding Vincent van Gogh's The Night Café (1888). Pierre Konowaloff, heir to the estate of his great-grandfather Ivan Morozov, alleged in the suit that the painting had been illegally taken by the Soviet government in 1920. Clark acquired it in 1933, and bequeathed it to Yale in 1960. Konowaloff's suit argued that Yale should have questioned the propriety of Clark's purchase (76 years earlier), and that the court could not deem the university to be the painting's rightful owner. "Stephen C. Clark either had actual knowledge, or reasonably should have known, that Russia had no legal title to the painting when he sought to acquire it in 1933."

Konowaloff filed a similar lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeking the return of Paul Cézanne's 1891 portrait of his wife—which had been a 1960 bequest by Clark. In September, 2011 the U.S. District Court in Manhattan granted the Met's motion to dismiss the suit: "The Court found that Mr. Konowaloff’s claim would require it to question the validity of the Soviet Union’s taking Cézanne’s portrait of his wife as part of its nationalization of private property after the Russian Revolution, which the Court, under longstanding precedent of the 'act of state' doctrine, refused to do. Under that doctrine, the acts of a sovereign government are legitimate, official acts."