Nathan Ancell; Co-Founded Furniture Firm
Nathan S. Ancell, 90, co-founder of Ethan Allen Inc., one of the nation’s largest furniture companies. Ancell entered the furniture business in 1932 as a young lawyer just out of Columbia University. He spent a vacation tending his brother-in-law Theodore Baumritter’s housewares company and never went back to law. The two men bought a factory in Vermont, where Ethan Allen, the leader of the Green Mountain Boys during the Revolutionary War, was a folk hero. To gain an edge in the market, Ancell decided that instead of selling piecemeal, he would sell furniture systems and signed up retailers who would offer the entire Ethan Allen line of colonial furnishings, from bedroom set to dining room table. He later opened more than 300 Ethan Allen stores, all housed in identical Georgian-style buildings. A pioneer in the industry, he sold whole rooms of furniture and flourishes, including drapes, wallpaper, even knockoffs of Picassos, Monets and Van Goghs, which he called Artagraphs, to go along with the rest of his merchandise. “We are selling what you can do with the product, not the product itself,” he told Forbes magazine in 1978. “We offer the middle class a service that only the rich could afford.” His company was sold for $150 million in 1980 to Interco Inc. of St. Louis. In his retirement years, Ancell turned a personal hobby into another, much smaller business: a store in White Plains, N.Y., called World of Interior Design. Created for his daughters, it was opened to sell off 6,000 objets d’art he had collected over 60 years. On Monday at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Constantine Niarchos; Tycoon’s Son
Constantine Niarchos, 37, youngest son of the late Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos. Niarchos was one of four children from Stavros Niarchos’ first marriage to Eugenia Livanos, whom he married twice. Constantine Niarchos lived in London and worked for the family shipping and real estate empire. He was educated at two of Britain’s most elite private schools, Harrow and Gordonstoun, and lived in London’s exclusive Mayfair district. He was expelled from Gordonstoun when he was 15 because of involvement with drugs. In 1987, he was treated for drug and alcohol abuse at the Betty Ford Clinic, and upon his release turned into a fitness fanatic. Last month, he climbed Mt. Everest, descending by helicopter. Society columnist Nigel Dempster of London’s Daily Mail newspaper said he had complained of chest pains before his death. On Tuesday at St. Mary’s Hospital in west London. No cause of death was announced.
Robert Sobel; Author, Business Historian
Robert Sobel, 68, prolific business historian and newspaper columnist who wrote or edited more than 50 books. A professor at New York’s Hofstra University, where he spent 40 years, Sobel specialized in the history of business, aiming his works at a mass market. His topics ranged from the financial markets, as in his 1968 “Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disasters,” to IBM and the economic philosophy of Calvin Coolidge. Sobel relied on vignettes, anecdotes and reminiscences to compile his studies, which some critics found unoriginal and others called brisk and entertaining. The National Review, for instance, said his “Coolidge: An American Enigma,” published in 1998, offered “no new revelations” but still was informative and highly readable. His main talent, wrote Gerald Carson in the New York Times review of “Panic on Wall Street,” was enlivening matters “that might otherwise remain somewhat abstract.” On Wednesday of brain cancer at his home in Long Beach, N.Y.
Henry Trubner; Former L.A. Art Curator
Henry Trubner, 79, a Harvard scholar who was first curator of Oriental art at the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art in Exposition Park. Trubner was born in Munich, Germany, and his father was an art dealer who specialized in Asian works. Trubner came to Los Angeles in 1947 to curate what a museum publication recently described as “a small and rather random accumulation of Japanese prints, Chinese decorative arts and Asian textiles.” According to the museum, Trubner presented a number of fine pieces in groundbreaking exhibitions and was able to persuade local collectors to buy those pieces and donate them to the museum. Trubner left the museum in 1958 to become curator of Far Eastern art at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. The Exposition Park facility was the forerunner to what is now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which opened at its present Wilshire Boulevard location in 1965. In the late 1960s, Trubner moved back to the West Coast as chief curator of Asian art at the Seattle Art Museum. He went on to become associate director of the museum in 1975, retiring in 1987. In Seattle on April 15.
Larry Williams; Director of Videos, TV Shows
Larry Williams, 48, a photographer and director of commercials, music videos and feature television programs. Williams began his photographic career in London and New York. His work appeared in magazines, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine and the London Sunday Times magazine. He went on to direct music videos for artists such as Paul Simon, Keith Richards and Iggy Pop. In recent years, Williams and his wife, Leslie Libman, who was also his working partner, directed television episodes of “Homicide: Life on the Streets” on NBC and the prison drama “Oz” on HBO. Their first full-length movie followed, “Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing” for HBO. On Monday in Los Angeles of a heart attack.
