Aso O Tavitian

Tavitian died in 2020 at age 80, it was announced in November 2024 that he, through his foundation, had left the the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. 331 artworks estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars — plus $45 million to build a new wing to house it all He was a Bulgarian-born Armenian (the name Aso, which he preferred, was short for Assadour) who grew up poor and fled Communism with his family in 1959, moving to Beirut. His partner, Isabella Meisinger, who was with him through his primary collecting years. Tavitian immigrated to the United States in 1961, when he was around 21, and drove a taxi while studying at Columbia University where he received a master’s degree in nuclear engineering and worked on a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, but he did not complete his dissertation. In 1969, he was a co-founder of what became the software sorting company Syncsort, later becoming its chief executive and a majority shareholder. His wife, Arlene, had died in 2002 — and in 2004 he met Meisinger on a trip to the Hamptons, where she was working in an antiques shop. Tavitian loved the Clark, which is only about 35 miles from Stockbridge. He joined its board of trustees in 2006. Tavitian was involved with other institutions, too, serving on the board of the Frick Collection for 12 years. When Covid hit in March 2020, the couple decamped to the Berkshires, and Tavitian died of septic shock in the hospital there, though his cancer was far along, too.