Abstrak

Kembali

Media mogul and art collector William Randolph Hearst was once described by Joseph Duveen as ‘the great accumulator’. Hearst’s holdings were indeed vast, catholic, and surprisingly personal, but it would be incorrect to assume they were largely inferior in quality (an impression encouraged by Orson Welles’s thinly veiled portrait of Hearst in Citizen Kane): he bought art nearly all his life and made his own decisions rather than relying on the advice of dealers. In 1927 Hearst declined to buy the contents of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s Gothic Room from Duveen, but that same year he purchased Beacon Towers, the fantasy French Gothic mansion in Long Island which Alva had commissioned the architectural firm Hunt & Hunt to design in 1917. This essay examines portions of the Gothic art displayed at Hearst’s San Simeon estate, his medieval castle in Wales, and his Bavarian hideaway in Northern California, as well as the story behind two twelfth-century monasteries Hearst purchased in Spain with the goal of creating a West-Coast Cloisters Museum.