History

Unidentified Artist
Pennsylvania Farmstead with Many Fences
American, early 19th century Pen and watercolor on paper 45.7 x 60.6 cm The M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Watercolors and Drawings Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Alex traces his roots many generations back to origins in the Central Europe. He inherited an appreciation of the finer things in life from his ancestors. The Karoliks were landlords and wine traders, who were supplying the exquisite Shabo wines to aristocrats and the wealthy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romanian Kingdom.

Royal family members of the von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, who were the Romanian Kings and ruled Romania during the 19th and 20th centuries, were also seen visiting the wine cellars in the famous Shabo vicinity for generations.

Alexander’s grandmother, Eugenia Karolik (1904-1995) was a talented fashion designer, running her own fashion atelier with dozens of employees, a rarity at that time. She was designing only to the highest echelons of society of the earlier part of the 20th century. Eugenia was the only outsider (by Soviet standards) who personally designed clothes to Mrs. Leonid Brezhnev, the wife of the Premier of the Soviet Union.

It runs in the family..

Alex traces his roots many generations back to origins in the Central Europe. He inherited an appreciation of the finer things in life from his ancestors. The Karoliks were landlords and wine traders, who were supplying the exquisite Shabo wines to aristocrats and the wealthy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romanian Kingdom.

Royal family members of the von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty, who were the Romanian Kings and ruled Romania during the 19th and 20th centuries, were also seen visiting the wine cellars in the famous Shabo vicinity for generations.

Alexander’s grandmother, Eugenia Karolik (1904-1995) was a talented fashion designer, running her own fashion atelier with dozens of employees, a rarity at that time. She was designing only to the highest echelons of society of the earlier part of the 20th century. Eugenia was the only outsider (by Soviet standards) who personally designed clothes to Mrs. Leonid Brezhnev, the wife of the Premier of the Soviet Union.

Alexander’s granduncle, Maxim Karolik (1893–1963) came to the United States in the early 1920s and became a champion of American art and a great benefactor of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1927 he married Martha Codman (1858–1948), who was descended from several prominent New Englanders and was herself a distinguished collector of eighteenth-century American art. In the Boston Museum’s own words, as stated on their website: “Together they assembled three huge collections for the Museum of Fine Arts that transformed the institution’s holdings and rewrote the history of American art”.