Kobler, Albert J.

Biography

Albert J. Kobler was born in Austria, and came to New York in 1906 at age twenty. He worked in the textile business for eight years, and then became an advertising solicitor for the New York Globe. In 1917 William Randolph Hearst put him in charge of the American Weekly Magazine, and Kobler became an executive with Hearst's newspaper and publishing organization. Among other positions for Hearst, he was publisher of The Daily Mirror. Kobler was also the developer for a luxury apartment building at 820 Park Avenue in New York, designed by Harry Allan Jacobs and built in 1926. The typical apartment in the building was a 17-room duplex, but Kobler reserved for himself a triplex penthouse in a Gothic revival style that housed an extensive collection of late gothic and Renaissance art and furnishings, predominantly French. He was married to Mignon Sommers in Manhattan on 5 June 1907, and they had two sons, John and Jason. After his death, on 31 December 1936, settlement of federal and state income tax claims significantly reduced the size of his estate.

Bibliography

1929

Kleinberger Galleries, F. Loan Exhibition of Flemish Primitives. Exh. cat. New York, 1929: no. 85.

1937

"200 Attend Services for Albert Kobler." The New York Times (4 January 1937): 29.

1937

"A.J. Kobler Estate is Less Than $5,000." The New York Times (19 May 1937): 23.

1961

Seligman, Germain. Merchants of Art. New York, 1961: 87-88, pl. 28.

1990

Trager, James. Park Avenue: Street of Dreams. New York, 1990.

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