Helen Clay Frick
Bittersweet Heiress
Martha Frick Symington Sanger author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press
Published:10th Dec '07
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In 1919, at the age of thirty-one, Helen Clay Frick inherited $38 million, becoming the richest single woman in America. These riches, however, came at a price. Helen's tumultuous early life was shaped by her father's infamy as a union strikebreaker and the ensuing attempt on his life, her mother's debilitating depression, and the death of her older sister and newborn brother about a year apart. Despite these events, Helen built a luminous legacy through her lifelong commitment to social welfare, the environment, and a supreme devotion to the visual arts. Helen's philanthropy touched the lives of thousands. Her contributions included a vacation home for young female textile workers, two wildlife preserves, one a public wilderness park, a Victorian-era house museum, a pre-Civil War historic Mennonite village, a university fine arts department, two art history libraries, and the purchase of many significant works of art for her private collection, the Frick Collection in New York, the University of Pittsburgh teaching collection, and the Frick Art Museum. Through extensive period research and singular access to Frick family archives and Helen Clay Frick's personal writings, Martha Frick Symington Sanger fashions a multifaceted portrait of a complex, often misunderstood, yet indomitable humanitarian, philanthropist, and cultural force in twentieth-century America.
This exhaustively researched and beautifully written work finally brings Helen Frick out from under the shadow of her father and recognizes her contribution to art collecting, photo archiving, cataloguing, war relief, and women's charities. Sanger adds immeasurably to our knowledge about the private and public lives of elite women in America, philanthropy, family dynamics, and the politicking that takes places behind the closed doors of museum boardrooms." — Dianne Sachko Macleod, author of Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture
"The daughter of one of Pittsburgh's steel magnates, Helen Clay Frick left her own legacy of philanthropy, nationally, in the art world and in the lives of working-class women. This biography is a valuable contribution to women's history, adding especially to the literature on women's philanthropy during the first three quarters of the twentieth century." — Carolyn Carson, University of Pittsburgh
"This brilliant book reveals as never before the extraordinary life of Helen Clay Frick, one of the twentieth century's most powerful, elusive, and sometimes vindictive women. Her great-niece has closely examined private family records, museum archives, and many published accounts of events with her characteristic openness to the truth. She has brought to light an amazing range of fascinating issues and events and explains many of Helen Frick's attitudes that have long perplexed her friends, foes, and the curious." — Donald Miller, former art and architecture critic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
ISBN: 9780822943419
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
392 pages