Saturday, December 31, 2016

The Representation of American Visual Art in the USSR during the Cold War (1950s to the late 1960s)


d-nb.info

The Representation of American Visual Art in the USSR
during the Cold War (1950s to the late 1960s)
by
Kirill Chunikhin
a Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in History and Theory of Arts
Approved Dissertation Committee
_______________________________
Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche
Jacobs University, Bremen
Prof. Dr. Corinna Unger
European University Institute, Florence
Prof. Dr. Roman Grigoryev
The State Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Date of Defense: June 30, 2016
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract ......................................................................................................................v
Acknowledgements................................................................................................. vii
Statutory Declaration (on Authorship of a Dissertation)...........................................ix
List of Figures ............................................................................................................x
List of Attachments.................................................................................................xiv
Introduction ................................................................................................................1
PART I. THE SOVIET APPROACH: MAKING AMERICAN ART ANTIAMERICAN………………………………………………………………………………..11
Chapter 1. Introduction to the Totalitarian Art Discourse: Politics and Aesthetics in
the Soviet Union.......................................................................................................11
Arts under Administrative Control...................................................................11
Arts Under Ideology.........................................................................................14
Soviet Art versus ….........................................................................................17
Chapter 2. Criticizing the Unseen: Denouncing American Modernism ..................21
The Aesthetic War and American Art..............................................................23
Insane Artists....................................................................................................34
Laughing at Modernism ...................................................................................37
Chapter 3. Advocating Realism and the First Non-English History of American
Visual Art .................................................................................................................46
Tracing the History of American Art ...............................................................48
Between “Objective” and “Prejudiced” ...........................................................55
Chapter 4. At Home Among Strangers: The Myth of Rockwell Kent.....................57
1953–1957: Assembling the First Kent's Show ...............................................58
iii
1957 Exhibition and/as Politics........................................................................62
Ignored at Home, Welcomed Abroad ..............................................................66
The Gift ............................................................................................................70
More Than a Great Artist .................................................................................73
The Myth of Rockwell Kent ............................................................................77
Chapter 5. More American Art in the Soviet Union ................................................83
Exhibiting American Art from Soviet Collections: Protesting the 1959
American National Exhibition in Moscow.......................................................83
“In the Name of Peace! In the Name of Friendship!”: Gifting Art to the USSR
..........................................................................................................................85
“A Small Pebble Making Waves”....................................................................92
Anton Refregier: Another “Big Friend of the USSR” .....................................96
Conclusion Part I....................................................................................................105
PART II. THE AMERICAN APPROACH: EXHIBITING ANTI-SOVIET ART ............110
Chapter 6. Politics and Exhibitions in the United States........................................111
American Art Abroad: A Difficult Start ........................................................111
Modernism and Communism.........................................................................114
USIA and Visual Art in the Soviet Union......................................................118
Chapter 7. The American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959 ..........................121
Assembling Art ..............................................................................................124
Freedom, Diversity, and Peoples' Art on Display..........................................127
Reception and Response ................................................................................136
What Was It?..................................................................................................146
Chapter 8. The Exhibition Graphic Arts: USA, 1963–1964...................................150
The Exhibition Design ...................................................................................150
Arranging the Tour.........................................................................................159
iv
Soviet Inspection............................................................................................163
Travelling Around the Soviet Union..............................................................165
Impact.............................................................................................................171
Conclusion Part II...................................................................................................176
Afterword ...............................................................................................................179
Figures....................................................................................................................186
Attachments............................................................................................................220
Bibliography...........................................................................................................222

Friday, December 30, 2016

Message from a pro-Trump American -- of course "fake"


image from

Dear "Dr." John (give me a break and get me a real surgeon, not your fly-by-night flaky phony "Ph.D"),
I don't know much about international relations, whatever that is.
Unlike you, I won't say I know everything about the world.
But I can tell you one thing: We're being overrun by sleazeballs who hate America. 
You name 'em, from Pootin on up-down.

So: "Dr." Brown: Here's this advice:
Our President-elect Donald Trump will out-sleazeball any of the hate-America crooks outside our God-given American shores/walls.
He'll keep our country safe. 
After all, he's made losts (no, not lost) of money, and he has his own jet airplane.
God -- and money -- bless America.
***

JB note:  BTW -- Am being "serious."


The spelling of neighbor - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."



image from

Question from a non (SORRY, MEANT NUN) -American Facebook "friend":
How can a country that spells "neighbor" non-phonetically be united?

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Moscow-based author/professor Mark Teeter on Kotkin's "Stalin"



THOUGHTS UPON FINISHING STEPHEN KOTKIN’S “STALIN. Vol. 1 Paradoxes of Power,1878-1928” (2014) A Cliff’s Notes Review, 2 Yrs Late
--> The jacket blurbs are basically right. This *is* “biography on an epic scale” and “a monumental achievement.” There are nits to pick, of course (and I’ll pick a few down the line), but it really is a remarkable vol., the scope and depth of which I can’t recall analogs for. That SK was able to maintain as even-handed and dispassionate a narrative as this one is when describing the cast of reprehensible characters you’ve come to know and loathe over the decades – led, of course, by a mass-murdering sociopath just coming into his own ‘tel quel’ as the tome ends (1928) – is in itself a major accomplishment.
Even briefer-ly put: If Gaddis waxed a bit hyperbolic w/ the “Only Tolstoy might have matched it” line, you see what he meant – and anybody short of the late Benedikt Sarnov (“Сталин и писатели”/”Stalin and the Writers,” 4 vols.) would have a hard time arguing w/ it.
https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-I-Paradoxes-Powe…/…/0143127861
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Mark H. Teeter This is a fair enough mini-surmise of the vol. (or your sense of it, rather), and the casually colloquial style you use fits well w/ many passages of the volume itself ("Stalin had a penis and he used it"). But you cite too many *other* blurbs, even for a mini-Cliff's Notes; and "briefer-ly" is unforgivable. I also had to take off a grade for each year late: B+
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Mark H. Teeter SK has harder words than you might expect for a no. of players (incl. Milyukov, Kerensky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Trotsky), but he comes down just abt right, I think, on the seemingly historically-teflon (to many here, anyway) V. Molotov, who was indeed a "...See More

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Wednesday, December 28, 2016

The Age of Post­-Truth Politics


Wiliam Davies, "The Age of Post-­Truth Politics," New York Times [original article contains links]

image from

Facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies. Whenever democracy
seems to be going awry, when voters are manipulated or politicians are ducking
questions, we turn to facts for salvation.

But they seem to be losing their ability to support consensus. PolitiFact has
found that about 70 percent of Donald Trump’s “factual” statements actually fall into
the categories of “mostly false,” “false” and “pants on fire” untruth.

For the Brexit referendum, Leave argued that European Union membership
costs Britain 350 million pounds a week, but failed to account for the money
received in return.

The sense is widespread: We have entered an age of post-­truth politics.

As politics becomes more adversarial and dominated by television
performances, the status of facts in public debate rises too high. We place
expectations on statistics and expert testimony that strains them to breaking point.
Rather than sit coolly outside the fray of political argument, facts are now one of the
main rhetorical weapons within it.

How can we still be speaking of “facts” when they no longer provide us with a reality
that we all agree on? The problem is that the experts and agencies involved in
producing facts have multiplied, and many are now for hire. If you really want to
find an expert willing to endorse a fact, and have sufficient money or political clout
behind you, you probably can.

The combination of populist movements with social media is often held
responsible for post­-truth politics. Individuals have growing opportunities to shape
their media consumption around their own opinions and prejudices, and populist
leaders are ready to encourage them.

But to focus on recent, more egregious abuses of facts is to overlook the ways in
which the authority of facts has been in decline for quite some time. Newspapers
might provide resistance to the excesses of populist demagogy, but not to the
broader crisis of facts.

The problem is the oversupply of facts in the 21st century: There are too many
sources, too many methods, with varying levels of credibility, depending on who
funded a given study and how the eye­-catching number was selected.

According to the cultural historian Mary Poovey, the tendency to represent
society in terms of facts first arose in late medieval times with the birth of
accounting. What was new about merchant bookkeeping, Dr. Poovey argued, was
that it presented a type of truth that could apparently stand alone, without requiring
any interpretation or faith on the part of the person reading it.

In the centuries that followed, accounting was joined by statistics, economics,
surveys and a range of other numerical methods. But even as these methods
expanded, they tended to be the preserve of small, tight-­knit institutions, academic
societies and professional associations who could uphold standards. National
statistical associations, for example, soon provided the know­-how for official
statistics offices, affiliated with and funded by governments.

In the 20th century, an industry for facts emerged. Market-­research companies
began to conduct surveys in the 1920s and extended into opinion polling in the
1930s. Think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute were established during
and after World War II to apply statistics and economics to the design of new
government policies, typically in the service of one political agenda or another. The
idea of “evidence­-based policy,” popular among liberal politicians in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, saw economics being heavily leaned on to justify government
programs, in an allegedly post­-ideological age.

Of course the term “fact” isn’t reserved exclusively for numbers. But it does
imply a type of knowledge that can be reliably parceled out in public, without
constant need for verification or interpretation.

Yet there is one much more radical contributor to our post­-truth politics that
could ultimately be as transformative of our society as accounting proved to be 500
years ago.

We are in the middle of a transition from a society of facts to a society of data.[JB emphasis]
During this interim, confusion abounds surrounding the exact status of knowledge
and numbers in public life, exacerbating the sense that truth itself is being
abandoned.

The place to start in understanding this transition is with the spread of “smart”
technologies into everyday life, sometimes called the “internet of things.” Thanks to
the presence of smartphones and smart-cards in our pockets, the dramatic uptake of
social media, the rise of e­-commerce as a means of purchasing goods and services,
and the spread of sensory devices across public spaces, we leave a vast quantity of
data in our wake as we go about our daily activities.

Like statistics or other traditional facts, this data is quantitative in nature.
What’s new is both its unprecedented volume (the “big” in big data) and also the fact
that it is being constantly collected by default, rather than by deliberate expert
design. Numbers are being generated much faster than we have any specific use for.
But they can nevertheless be mined to get a sense of how people are behaving and
what they are thinking.

The promise of facts is to settle arguments between warring perspectives and
simplify the issues at stake. For instance, politicians might disagree over the right
economic policy, but if they can agree that “the economy has grown by 2 percent”
and “unemployment is 5 percent,” then there is at least a shared stable reality that
they can argue over.

The promise of data, by contrast, is to sense shifts in public sentiment. By
analyzing Twitter using algorithms, for example, it is possible to get virtually real­-
time updates on how a given politician is perceived. This is what’s known as
“sentiment analysis.”

There are precedents for this, such as the “worm” that monitors live audience
reaction during a televised presidential debate, rising and falling in response to each
moment of a candidate’s rhetoric. Financial markets represent the sentiments of
traders as they fluctuate throughout the day. Stock markets never produce a fact as
to what Cisco is worth in the way that an accountant can; they provide a window into
how thousands of people around the world are feeling about Cisco, from one minute
to the next.

Journalists and politicians can no more ignore a constant audit of collective
mood than C.E.O.s can ignore the fluctuations in their companies’ share prices. If
the British government had spent more time trying to track public sentiment toward
the European Union and less time repeating the facts of how the British economy
benefited from membership in the union, it might have fought the Brexit
referendum campaign differently and more successfully.

Dominic Cummings, one of the leading pro­-Brexit campaigners, mocked what
he called outdated polling techniques. He also asked one pollster to add a question
on “enthusiasm,” and, employing scientists to mine very large, up-­to-­the-­minute
data sets, to gauge voter mood and to react accordingly with ads and voter­-turnout
volunteers.

It is possible to live in a world of data but no facts. Think of how we employ
weather forecasts: We understand that it is not a fact that it will be 75 degrees on
Thursday, and that figure will fluctuate all the time. Weather forecasting works in a
similar way to sentiment analysis, bringing data from a wide range of sensory
devices, and converting this into a constantly evolving narrative about the near
future.

However, this produces some chilling possibilities for politics. Once numbers
are viewed more as indicators of current sentiment, rather than as statements about
reality, how are we to achieve any consensus on the nature of social, economic and
environmental problems, never mind agree on the solutions?

Conspiracy theories prosper under such conditions. And while we will have far
greater means of knowing how many people believe those theories, we will have far
fewer means of persuading them to abandon them.

William Davies is an associate professor in political economy at Goldsmiths, University
of London, and the author of “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big
Business Sold Us Well­-Being.”


The Gospel of Positivity - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."


The Gospel of Positivity

Faith in self and faith in God became so intermixed in Norman Vincent Peale’s philosophy as to be almost the same thing. Barton Swaim reviews “Surge of Piety” by Christopher Lane

image from article

Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal

Excerpt:
The real story of Norman Vincent Peale, to my mind, isn’t his ongoing influence but the lack of it. He rose to prominence at a time when American culture had unified as never before, when it seemed possible to rally the whole nation around a shared reverence for “God” and “religion,” however defined. Hence Eisenhower’s remark: “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply-felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

The Birth of Pax Americana



The Birth of Pax Americana

Contra conventional wisdom, occupations can change political cultures. But it may be that it can’t be done without deeply coercive measures. Nicholas M. Gallagher reviews “The Good Occupation” by Susan L. Carruthers.

Peace is hell,” Harry Truman told the Gridiron Club in December 1945, riffing off William Tecumseh Sherman. Only three months after V-J Day, Truman was under fire from all sides. Progressives thought the U.S. was needlessly antagonizing the Soviet Union by keeping vast standing armies in Europe and Asia—perhaps, they suspected, with an eye toward empire. Remnants of the old isolationist right also felt the country had no business maintaining a mighty presence abroad. Liberal internationalists embraced a transformative vision for a post-war order under the aegis of the United Nations, but there weren’t enough of them to govern. The president’s biggest headache came from average Americans who had fought their way across France and the Pacific but were severely divided over whether to stay and wage peace.
Today the occupations of Germany and Japan are remembered as triumphs. But as Susan L. Carruthers argues in her well-researched new book, “The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace,” the reality was much more complicated—and darker—than that legend. Her book vividly illustrates the tumultuous period between 1945 and 1948, when Americans raised as isolationists suddenly found themselves in control of large swathes of the world and were ill-prepared to handle the mission at hand.
Planning for occupation started as early as May 1942 at the Army’s School of Military Government at the University of Virginia and at various civilian agencies. But when the rubber met the road, the results were haphazard. Basic supplies were frequently lacking: One naval officer occupying Okinawa kept white sticks topped with stars behind his desk, marked “magic wand for creating trucks,” “magic wand for creating supplies,” and so on. The more fundamental problem was that soldiers who days or weeks before had been locked in deadly combat were suddenly asked to democratize and rehabilitate, while also punishing—but not brutalizing—their former enemies. Oh, and fix the water supply, rebuild the housing stock and stave off disease. 
ENLARGE
PHOTO: WSJ

THE GOOD OCCUPATION

By Susan L. Carruthers
Harvard, 386 pages, $29.95
The chaos of postwar Europe and Japan and the boredom of guard duty offered ample opportunities for mischief, chief among them looting and black-marketeering (enlisted men could get $150 for a cartoon of cigarettes). Then there was the sex: The military’s failed attempts to enforce a no-fraternization policy gave way to barracks situations that presaged the 1960s. By April 1946 Uncle Sam started shipping over wives and families; it was bad for discipline and public opinion for letters home to read, “All Germany is just one big Whore House.”
Truman, under pressure from Congress and the public, was bringing troops home as fast as he could: By the end of 1945 over six million soldiers and sailors had been discharged. But that wasn’t quick enough for the military wives who cornered Gen. Eisenhower on Capitol Hill in January 1946, volleying questions about soaring divorce rates and demanding their husbands back. By the spring, thousands of soldiers, sailors and Marines poured into the streets of Manila, Frankfurt, Paris, and elsewhere, waving signs, “Service yes, but serfdom never.” They were fed up with service that lacked glory or opportunities for advancement in civilian life.
Ms. Carruthers is at her strongest when it comes to capturing the viewpoint of the ordinary soldier, who had been told that the quickest way home was through Tokyo, but then found that for a while, Tokyo would be home. Her archival research into the diaries and letters of the occupiers—from Cpl. Clarence Davis, a GI occupying Würzburg, Germany to Gen. Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army in Japan—lays bare the rapidly shifting attitudes that members of the Greatest Generation held toward the occupied, the military and America’s new place in the world. “Our aimless piddling in the mud is becoming disgusting to me as well as to many others,” Bob Titus wrote from Okinawa, where he was building hospitals. “Our reason for being here apparently ceased to exist when [Japan] surrendered.”
At times, Ms. Carruthers, who is a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark, uses academic, P.C. language in ways that are jarring. What was “micro-,” exactly, about the aggressions suffered by black troops in a Jim Crow-era military? Likewise, discussions of sexist language seem anachronistic and frivolous given that her subject is the aftermath of the most destructive war in human history.
I also wish she had grasped the nettle more firmly on a central question: Were the unpleasant aspects of the occupation in some way instrumental to its success? The use of food as a weapon at a time when starvation loomed, the mass relocation of populations, and the unsystematic looting that clearly demonstrated who was conqueror and who was conquered—these were all notable parts of our successful efforts to remake foreign political cultures with American military might. And unspoken but ever-present was the threat that American withdrawal would lead to Russian domination; Stalin’s recent conquest of Eastern Germany had been marked by widespread rape and summary execution. It would seem that, contra conventional wisdom on the left, occupation can change political cultures. But it may be that it can’t be done without deeply coercive measures that would ordinarily shock the conscience. This is a conclusion that Ms. Carruthers does not make, but on that is very difficult not to draw from her evidence.
This brings up the elephant in the room: Iraq. The author acknowledges America’s recent experience with occupation only once, sensibly letting the comparison speak for itself. In Iraq, the Bush administration wanted an occupation in order to achieve a liberal democracy—but couldn’t credibly threaten the coercive measures necessary to achieve it. Meantime, the left argued for walking away, which the Obama administration ultimately did. Suffice it to say, under these circumstances, the results were very different than they were after World War II.
Our politics would benefit greatly from refamiliarizing ourselves with the real story of the post-World War II occupations—not only the justice of their cause but also the sacrifice they truly required.
Mr. Gallagher is a contributing writer at the American Interest.

Our country is bitterly divided. How ’bout a little small talk? - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

 
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality.
A man says to me, “How do you like that car?” I’m standing by a little green Kia. “It’s not mine, it’s a rental,” I say. I’m in the town of Okeechobee, Fla., parked on the main drag in front of Nutmeg’s Cafe. “Where you from?” he says.
“Minnesota.”
“I hear they just got more snow up there.”
“How do you like that car?” is a classic opening of a casual conversation between two men who don’t know each other and it can lead in various directions, if they have the urge to talk.
He’s from Connecticut, I find out, and has lived in nearby Fort Pierce for several years. He thought when he moved to Florida that he’d be spending a lot of time on beaches but he hasn’t been on a beach much at all. He drives a 1947 Packard convertible that he fixed up himself. He moved here because Florida is better for the Packard and also to see to his father, who is 87, and also to get away from a broken romance. He and his dad have breakfast together every Thursday morning. He misses the North, the big winter storms, the bracing chill in the air, but Florida is okay. He is thinking of buying property in Okeechobee. He likes small towns. He recommends I see Fort Pierce and drive the Indian River highway down the coast.
He offers all of this in one brief encounter standing on the sidewalk, and when we say so long, I have no idea what his politics are, if he attends church, what he does for a living, how he feels about climate change, but I do feel warmly about Okeechobee. 
These common social moments aren’t as common as they used to be. For one thing, so many people wear headphones and you’d have to tap them on the shoulder and have something serious to say, like “Your pants are on fire.” An older man avoids striking up a conversation with a younger woman for fear it will be misconstrued, or with younger men because their default response is “Hnnph.” You stand in line at a store counter, people are busy texting, Googling on their phones, checking their inboxes, and you hesitate to say, “Beautiful weather we’re having.” Or “Those are good-looking boots you’re wearing.” Or “How do you like that car?” 
I hitchhiked a lot in my teens and remember the men who gave me a lift and how talkative they were. I was a shy kid, so older people opened up to me. It was a hitchhiker’s job to shut up and listen: That was how you paid for the ride. They complained about their jobs, talked about the war, gave you advice about women and life. But nobody hitchhikes anymore, and thanks to the universality of gizmos, small talk has become rare, and a person comes to feel he’s living in a hostile world, which is not true at all.
When I lived in Denmark, small talk with a stranger was the hardest language to get a handle on — the big declarative textbook sentences don’t work in that context — so much is conveyed by tone, by harrumph and sigh and nonsense sounds, the Danish equivalents of “oy” and “uff da” and “yikes.” Flying back to New York and walking through JFK, I felt immersed in small talk, like a sea lion returning to the herd.
My dad loved Florida. His Minnesota life was constrained by family and church and job, and in Florida he went into business as an itinerant knife-sharpener, working a long route of restaurants, meeting strangers, making small talk, which he dearly loved. He was a Christian fundamentalist, bound by strict doctrine, but on the knife route, he could talk about weather, children, sports, cars, without reference to the Rapture and the Millennium. It was the freedom to be ordinary.
The Indian River highway was a disappointment: a two-lane road along a solid phalanx of mansions behind gates and no place to stop and admire the Atlantic. But the conversation with the guy curious about the green Kia was memorable. Two weeks have passed since, and I haven’t had another encounter like it. They say the country is bitterly divided. Maybe so, but that’s no reason to be rude. My mailman likes to banter, and so do the guys at Lloyd’s Automotive and the cabdrivers. So what’s going on with you? Cat got your tongue? Where’d you get that sweater? What’s that product you put on your hair?

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Opening the Door on New York's Private Clubs - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United"

acontinuouslean.com; via RM on Facebook


“Hey, I wonder what’s behind that door?”
It’s a question that most New Yorker’s ask themselves countless times, almost subconsciously, as they wander through the city each day. These doorways certainly intrigue us, but in the end, we only ever step into maybe one percent of the buildings that we pass by in this city. All those other thresholds are off-limits, leaving us to quietly wonder what lies behind that door. And few of these buildings stoke our imaginations quite like New York’s many private clubs. That word, private, says it all.
New York has a long tradition of clandestine clubs that are designed to keep outsiders at bay. It’s who these clubs do choose to let in, though which distinguishes them from one another. Each different club may appeal more to artists, or authors, or politicians, or city planners, depending on their charters, but they all genuinely share one common characteristic: wealth. Let’s face it, these clubs are not for us (that is unless you happen to be a high-society millionaire whose great-great-great-great-great-grandparents arrived on these shores via the Mayflower) to enter, they are for us to ogle at from the outside. So join us for a look, but don’t touch, guide to NYC’s social clubs, because this is the closest we may ever get to knowing what actually goes on behind these doors.
MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA
Established: 1836
Address: 101 East 69th Street
Famous Members: John Jacob Astor IV, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ulysses S. Grant.
Fact: The Union Club is the oldest club in New York and the third oldest club in America.
Kclubs
The Knickerbocker Club
Established: 1871
Address: 2 East 62nd Street
Famous Members: J.P. Morgan
Fact: The Knickerbocker prides itself on being one of the most private clubs in the world, therefore they have no website and reveal zero information about their members.
ULC
Established: 1863
Address: 38 East 37th Street
Famous Members: Chester A. Arthur, George H. W. Bush, Herbert Hoover, J.D. Rockefeller, Theodore Roosevelt.
Fact: When Theodore Roosevelt first applied to become a member in 1881, he was denied because his mother had been a Confederate sympathizer.
MTKC
Established: 1889
Address: 25 Eighth Avenue, Brooklyn
Famous Members: Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy.
Fact: The Montauk Club currently holds parties on November 11th (11/11) in honor of “National Corduroy Day.”
NAC
Established: 1898
Address: 15 Gramercy Park South
Famous Members: Mark Twain, Martin Scorsese, Ethan Hawke, Robert Redford, Uma Thurman.
Fact: The Club was founded by Charles De Kay, an art critic at The New York Times, as a way of bringing together artists and art-lovers, and membership is still predicated upon an interest in art to this day.
The brook
The Brook
Established: 1903
Address: 111 East 54th Street
Famous Members: Fred Astaire, Michael Bloomberg, John F. Kennedy, John Jacob Astor IV, William K. Vanderbilt II.
Fact: The Brook, like The Knickerbocker, is incredibly private and little is actually known of the club. One famous rumor is that the club was founded by two former members of the Union Club which were expelled after trying to poach an egg on a bald member’s head.
EC
Established: 1904
Address: 46 East 70th Street
Famous Members: Sir Edmund Hillary, Neil Armstrong, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Walter Cronkite.
Fact: The Club is legendary for its member’s “famous firsts” including the 1969 moon landing, the first summit of Everest, and the first trips to both the North and South Poles.