The GW Bush of the art world

Check out this obituary that was in today's NY Times. I found it to be hilarious No wonder you don't see any A&P stores any more - this guy was running the show!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/arts/design/20hartford.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=obituaries


Huntington Hartford, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur, arts patron and man of leisure, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He was 97.

His death was announced by his daughter, Juliet Hartford.

Mr. Hartford, a grandson of a principal founder of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, was treated like a prince as a boy, indulged by his mother and a staff of servants and eventually provided with a living of about $1.5 million a year. Not content merely to be rich, he longed to be a writer and, more than that, an arbiter of culture and a master builder — ambitions that eluded him time after time.

A famous example was the Huntington Hartford Museum, also known as the Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Mr. Hartford opened it in 1964 as a showcase for 19th- and 20th-century work that went against the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism, which he detested. The building, designed by Edward Durell Stone, was considered a folly or worse: “a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times.


Check this link for more. His failures continue on and on...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/arts/design/20hartford.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=obituaries

Spoiled kids don't usually kill a million people on a whim. I'll take a dozen Huntington Hartfords over one George W. Bush any day.

--p!

I'm just saying. Imagine if this guy had gotten into politics instead of the arts...

But as for the Times ...

The New York Times has never put that kind of scorn into an (in)human interest piece on Bushy. I should have drawn the distinction.

The culpa is mea.

As for Huntington getting into politics ... his taste wasn't THAT bad!

--p!

He does have scrubs political acumen.

then we'll talk.

I loved the part about him walking off his job because he couldn't figure out where to park his yacht.

Seriously though, it sounds like the guy may have had ADHD, or some other mental issue.

Huntington Hartford, professional gadabout.