CHARLES BERGMAN

BERGMAN--Charles C.,

lost his long and valiant struggle with multiple illnesses on February 25. He was eighty-four. A proud graduate of Harvard's Class of 1954, Charlie served as an Overseer of the University Art Museums. After reorganizing Project HOPE under President Kennedy, Charlie became Vice President of the Inter-American Foundation for the Arts, a Rockefeller initiative and the first private cultural exchange program between the United States and Latin America. Charlie, who had a long-standing interest in public health, became Executive Vice President and Treasurer of the Academy of Religion and Mental Health and served as a special advisor to the President's Committee on Mental Retardation under Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Charlie found his true life's work in 1984 when he was asked to organize the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He became its first Executive Director and eventually Chairman and CEO. To date, the Foundation has awarded grants of upwards of $71 million to more than 4,400 artists in seventy-seven countries. Charlie also served as Chairman of the Park Avenue Sculpture Committee and of the Leadership Council of the New York Foundation for the Arts. He sat on the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown; The Eakins Press Foundation; The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers; the Philanthropy Committee of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; and the Harpo Foundation, Los Angeles, among others. A Presidential Fellow of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, Charlie also served on the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission of New York City and on the New York State Council on the Arts. He received numerous honors and awards in recognition of his service, most recently the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Award for Outstanding Patronage of the Arts in 2017. More than any award, however, Charlie's abiding wish was to be remembered as "the best friend anyone ever had," and he got that wish many times over. He will be mourned and greatly missed by his spouse, Stuart Levy; his cousins Jeanne Theodore and Carol and Rachel Kaminsky; and the many people who were touched by his kindness, generosity, intellect, and humor. A memorial celebration will be held around May 1, which would have been his eighty- fifth birthday.