On October 9, 1901, several hundred statesmen, bankers, and robber barons journeyed by yacht, chartered steamer, and private train to Warwick, Rhode Island, to attend the elaborately choreographed wedding of Abby Aldrich (see Fig. 1), the daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich (1841-1915). to John D. Rockefeller Jr. ("Junior"; 1874-1960), son of the wealthiest man in the world. Armed guards secured the perimeters of the 250-acre waterfront estate--President William McKinley had just been assassinated--and champagne flowed. Junior's mother, who disapproved of ostentatious displays of wealth, not to mention alcohol, declined to attend at the last minute, complaining of illness. Nelson Aldrich, although not as well known as John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937), was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. In a career that spanned three decades in the Senate (1881-1911), Aldrich helped to create an extensive system of tariffs that protected American industries from foreign competition, at the same time amassing a small fortune in sugar, rubber, banking, and public utility investments. As co-author of the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, Aldrich removed restrictive import duties on fine art, which enabled friends, such as John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), to bring vast private art collections into the country: and ultimately this enriched or led to the establishment of a number of American museums. (1)
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Abby Aldrich and John D. Rockefeller Jr. met in 1894 when he was an undergraduate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Growing up at her father's side in Providence and Washington, D.C., Abby was a gracious hostess, comfortable in diverse social gatherings. Marrying into the Rockefeller family, however, must have been a formidable challenge. Leaving aside the obvious differences in wealth, her husband was a pragmatic and pious young man with a tendency to be withdrawn. She was compassionate and spontaneous--a handsome if not conventionally beautiful woman with hazel eyes and a distinctive aquiline nose. They had six children: Abby Aldrich ("Babs"; 1903-1976), John D. III (1906-1978), Nelson A. (1908-1979), Laurance Spelman (1910-2004), Winthrop (1912-1973), and David (1915-). Although Abby was a pioneering collector of American modern and folk art, her greatest cultural legacy was her role as a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Her experiences as an intrepid collector combined with her close observation of the vast array of Rockefeller philanthropies were undoubtedly the foundation for this undertaking. (2)
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Junior and Abby shared the dubious distinction of having parents characterized as public pariahs--the targets of muckraking journalists such as Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) and Ida M. Tarbell (1857-1944). (3) This common experience probably helped to shape their philanthropy, and it certainly forced them to define themselves independently of their parents. Junior moved beyond the doctrinaire Baptist positions of his parents to make a number of remarkably independent decisions, such as his public reversal on Prohibition in 1932. Abby, unlike her father, was a liberal Republican. Interested in progressive social change, she was an early supporter of woman's suffrage and charities that catered to the welfare of women. Encouraged by Abby, Junior gave money to Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) as early as 1924, for her pioneering work on birth control. Although perhaps temperamentally different, Abby and Junior complemented one another as husband and wife. The responsibility of managing his family's vast philanthropic empire at times overwhelmed Junior, and Abby's sympathetic counsel was, he often acknowledged, his greatest source of strength. In a revealing letter after twenty years of marriage, Abby wrote:
our greatest happiness, which is our perfect companionship, has nothing
to do with money. I often feel that John and I are less conscious than
most people of Mr. Rockefeller's great fortune; we so completely regard
it as a trust to be sacredly administered, the by products of which are
beautiful places to live in, the opportunity to buy beautiful things,
and the great difficulty in making the world take us simply. Being less
humble and less conscientious than John and harboring in my heart a
secret conviction that most worldly success, political, professional or
commercial is of a fleeting and uncertain value, I take life more
lightly. (4)
Written in her characteristic style, the letter reveals a subtle sense of humor and a sympathetic, unpretentious manner. Of interest is her reference to John D. Rockefeller Sr.'s fortune, not Junior's, although by then, Junior had already inherited a substantial portion of it. Her reference, therefore, was to Rockefeller's legacy, not his fortune.
In 1910 Abby and Junior hired the architect William Welles Bosworth (1869-1966) to design a seven-story town house on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, completed in 1913. At the same time, they were renovating and building houses in Pocantico Hills, New York, and Seal Harbor, Maine. Decorating and furnishing these houses required thoughtful, carefully orchestrated purchases and may have been the initial impetus to begin collecting art. In 1908 Junior began buying famille verte Chinese porcelain from the dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939). (5) They also purchased Persian and Asian antiquities and major European works such as the medieval Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, (6) the ethereal portrait bust of Beatrice of Aragon [1457-1508] by Francesco Laurana (c. 1430-c. 1502), and the pensive but animated Bust of a Young Woman by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488). (7) In the early 1920s Abby began to purchase eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints using the income from her Aldrich inheritance. In 1925 her husband augmented her personal art budget by $25,000, a sum that grew exponentially each year. From a separate art budget, they collected classical art and furnishings. He remained convinced that antique art had the greater merit, but after some deliberation, she became interested in contemporary American art, reflecting later:
Constantly ... the thought came to me what do these things mean to the
present and how will they affect the art and artists of today? Do they
mean very much to our children and are they the sort of things they
would be interested to keep and to live with? Gradually there developed
in my mind the thought that probably the coming generation would neither
be able to buy the sort of things that we had, nor would they be
particularly interested to do so. So my thought turned to the art of the
present, and those who were developing it. (8)
Sociologists, psychologists, and critics have written numerous articles and books on the subject of collecting and patronage. Although it appears there is no single motivating factor, there are several recurring themes: pride of discovery, sometimes referred to as "the chase"; satisfaction of ownership ("the capture"); and the most illusive trait--educational or emotional enrichment, whether real or aspiring. The first generation of collectors of modern art were patrons who cultivated relationships with artists who guided them to look at other new artists. What is perhaps surprising is how many of this first generation of collectors of modern art were women. Born in the Victorian age, female patrons were beneficiaries of fortunes made during the Industrial Revolution. Rapid social and aesthetic changes combined with lofty idealism were the progressive issues of the day, and modern art addressed many of the same concerns. Collectors of modern art flaunted the canons of conventional taste, incurring ridicule and criticism and, although some of them were known to one another, many collected in isolation. A number of women gave their collections to museums, or founded new ones, thus fulfilling the Victorian ethos that encouraged one to give back to society. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller belonged firmly in this tradition and her courage to collect contemporary art within the context of a conservative and highly visible family was all the more remarkable.
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Abby's first modern commission was in 1924--a set of murals by Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928) for the Rockefeller-funded International House in New York City. Later that year she traveled to Germany with Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880-1958), a scholar of both classical and modern art who had friendships with several German expressionist artists. (9) On this trip, Abby purchased her first works by the European modernists Erich Heckel (1883-1970) and Georg Kolbe (1877-1947). In Paris she visited the gallery of Dikran Kelekian (1868-1951), known for both modern art and antiquities, where she bought Persian miniatures. Valentiner became a mentor and adviser to both Abby and Junior and an important bridge between the antique and the modern.
In 1925 she bought four watercolors by Davies from his exhibition at the Feragil Galleries in New York. Through the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery and the Kraushaar Galleries in New York, Abby began to buy paintings, watercolors, and drawings by a number of contemporary American artists including Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth (see Pl. VII and the cover), Gifford Beal, and Maurice Prendergast, as well as a number of European modernists: Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissaro, Andre Derain. Paul Cezanne, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. At Davies's suggestion, Abby and her son Nelson went to the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village in December 1927 where she met the owner, Edith Gregor Halpert (1900-1970). (10) After he returned to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, Nelson wrote:
Dear Ma: You don't know how much I enjoyed our two trips to Mr. Davies
and to the Down Town Galleries. I feel as if I had been introduced to a
new world of beauty, and for the first time I think I have really been
able to appreciate and understand pictures, even though only a little
bit.... I feel that was the outstanding event of my vacation.
And Abby replied:
It would be a great joy to me if you did find that you had a real love
for and interest in beautiful things.... To me it is one of the great
resources of my life, altho I know very little. I feel as Mr. Davies
does, that it enriches the spiritual life and makes one more sane and
sympathetic, more observant and understanding, as well as being good for
one's nerves. (11)
With Davies's imprimatur, Halpert's role in Abby's activities quickly expanded--in 1928 Abby spent $22,000 at the Downtown Gallery out of an art budget totaling $68,000. (12) Halpert's gallery was devoted to exhibiting and promoting the work of contemporary American artists. She added American folk art, or "American Antecedents," to the gallery roster as both a marketing device and as an attempt to help to define an American heritage for the modernists. An ambitious and energetic businesswoman, Halpert championed American artists and found an enthusiastic and increasingly committed patron in Abby. Halpert introduced her to the work of a number of contemporary artists and encouraged her to purchase their work. In retrospect, Halpert's role as cicerone of Abby's patronage--with ambitious programs including municipal exhibitions, publications, and artist's stipends--was perhaps more important than her guidance as a dealer. Other than folk art, the items that Abby bought from the Downtown Gallery were not always her most discerning purchases. The news of Mrs. Rockefeller's interests and activities spread quickly, probably through Halpert, and many subsequent collectors followed her lead. Halpert encouraged Abby's involvement in founding the Museum of Modern Art and hoped to play a continuing role in its formation.
In 1929 Donald Deskey designed a suite of art deco rooms and furnishings for Abby Rockefeller on the top floor of the house on West Fifty-fourth Street. Called the Topside Gallery, it allowed Abby to display and organize changing exhibitions of her growing collection, integrating modern and folk art. Visitors took the elevator to the seventh floor, bypassing the private domain of the rest of her family. (13) In April 1929 Abby held a memorial exhibition for Davies in the Topside Gallery. She wrote to Nelson:
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I am going to have a lunch on Thursday, to which I have invited about 17
art critics, who will see the Davies pictures that I have gotten
together in my gallery.... My mind is also full of ideas for a new
museum of Modern Art for New York, I have great hopes for it. (14)
What had started as a private and personal collection had begun to take on a public role with an attendant change in self-awareness, both in terms of direction and focus. Abby had moved from the realm of the private collector to a larger vision of a museum of modern art. This is a remarkable transition, considering that her husband did not share her enthusiasm for modern art. Her old friend, the collector Lillie P. Bliss (1864-1931), (15) was certainly an influence. A patron and lender to the Armory Show of 1913, Bliss was a patron of Davies, owned major works by Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Georges Seurat, and Paul Gauguin, and had long advocated a museum of modern art. Abby's role as a major underwriter of the activities of the National Woman's Trade Union League, organized by the Dreier sisters of Brooklyn, brought her into contact with another sister, Katherine Sophie Dreier (1877-1952), an early proselytizer for modern art who founded the Societe Anonyme in 1920 to exhibit and promote the avant garde. Mary Quinn Sullivan (Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan; 1877-1939), (16) later one of Abby's cofounders at the Museum of Modern Art, lived with the Dreier family during this period. In 1922 Kelekian (17) decided to sell his collection of modern art in New York, establishing an American market for Cezanne and a number of other European modernists. Valentiner bought Matisse's The Window (1916) for the Detroit Institute of Arts from this sale, the first painting by Matisse to enter a public collection in the United States.
In 1924 the collector John Quinn (b. 1870) died, followed by Davies four years later. Quinn had been a chief benefactor and patron of the Armory Show, and his collection was the most important private collection of modern art in this country, perhaps the world. The Quinn memorial exhibition in 1926 and the subsequent auction of his collection were galvanizing events for the cause of modern art in this country. As the critic Forbes Watson (1880-1960) wrote:
Among [the paintings on exhibition] will be a certain number which any
museum, desirous of acquiring contemporary art, would be glad to
purchase. How many of them will go into American museums? Surely a few
of our museums are not reactionary toward contemporary art, and will ...
purchase pictures which Mr. Quinn dared to buy five, ten or even fifteen
years ago.... Mr. Quinn was advised by artists. Who advises our
museums?... [the museums could have] entered the field ten or fifteen
years ago, instead of allowing the few academic artists upon museum
boards, to dissuade them and to play upon the prejudices of the
trustees.... These facts, recognized by all who are familiar with the
average museum's slowness in recognizing contemporary art, have brought
up again the question of America's need for a museum of modern art. (18)
Watson was prescient. There were no museums buying at the sale, but his description of a museum of modern art did not fall entirely on deaf ears. There were many dealers in evidence, and several inchoate collectors who later became founders and trustees of the Museum of Modern Art. Without his article, the idea of such a museum might have had languished for many more years. The sale of Davies's collection in April 1929, although not as substantive as Quinn's, contained important paintings by Cezanne and Seurat and had great symbolic significance to a core group of modernist collectors, including Abby Rockefeller and Lillie Bliss. Abby bought more than twenty items including the provocative and mysterious sculpture by Matisse, La Serpentine (Pl. VIII), (19) two extraordinary drawings by Seurat: Jeune Fille (1884) and Jeune Fille a L'Ombrelle (1884-1885); (20) Juan Gris's beautifully enigmatic Fruit Dish, Glass and Newspaper (1916); (21) Preston Dickinson's Harlem River (before 1928); (22) and Roger de La Fresnaye's Still Life (1913-1914), (23) which brought the highest price of the auction.
The Museum of Modern Art opened in New York on November 7, 1929, nine days after the stock market crash. Rockefeller, Bliss, and Sullivan are often referred to as the founding mothers of the Museum of Modern Art (adding a rather flippant turn to the current acronym MoMA). (24) In May 1929, Abby had invited A. Conger Goodyear (1877-1964) to lunch and asked him to become president of the new enterprise. The former president of the board of trustees of the Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in Buffalo, New York, and the single largest buyer at the Quinn sale, (25) Goodyear enlisted Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) and Frank Crowninshield (1872-1947) to join him as founding trustees. Sachs, the associate director and curator of prints and drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was referred to in those days as a collector of curators. Goodyear asked him to recommend a director, and Sachs suggested Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902-1981), a promising young protege. (26) Barr drew up a plan for a multidepartmental museum incorporating all the modern arts, based on the model of the Bauhaus in Germany. Crowninshield, who was editor of Vanity Fair, packaged the new venture into terms the general public (and potential trustees) could understand, and Abby agreed to be treasurer. When "Crownie," as Goodyear referred to him, petitioned the "ladies" to open the new museum with an exhibition of American art, instead of European, he was roundly rebuffed and took to referring to them afterwards as the "adamantine ladies," a fitting sobriquet.
All the founding trustees of the Museum of Modern Art were collectors, but only Lillie Bliss and Abby Rockefeller could truly be called patrons, purchasing multiple works of art by a single artist, proffering stipends and commissions, and thus helping to cultivate the fabric of an artistic community through their generosity. The other trustees were progressive-minded individuals who felt the need for a venue for modern art but were less concerned with patronage than with creating a forum to exhibit and explicate new and innovative artistic endeavors. Ultimately the museum evolved to serve both functions: elucidating through its exhibitions and catalogues some of the most innovative and difficult art of its time and, in so doing, helping to transform and thus support and cultivate the cultural environment of our country. Bliss died in 1931, and, as the Great Depression deepened, Crowninshield and Sullivan were forced for financial reasons to resign as trustees. Abby emerged as the single most important patron of the museum, but only in part because of her family's generous financial contributions. Her ability to embrace and to enable an ambitious and far-reaching exhibition program at a time when the world was cautious and insecure was remarkable and was undoubtedly influenced by her close observation of the bold and innovative programs of the Rockefeller philanthropies, overseen by her husband. As Barr wrote: "I do believe that Mrs. R was the most valuable of the Museum trustees ... she had the courage to accept and support a program far broader than that which existed in the minds of the founders when it began." (27)
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Goodyear, although an effective and industrious president, was sometimes troubled by Barr's daring exhibitions, purchases, and programs. Barr, in turn, was often impatient with individuals who lacked his intellect. Much like her father on the floor of the Senate, Abby possessed innate political skills and knew when to push and when to concede when trying to form a consensus at museum committee meetings. The maternal instinct to support and protect, a characteristic of many of the great patronesses of history, had its place in Abby's makeup as well. And in turn, the Museum of Modern Art was very protective of her, ensuring that her privacy not be invaded--resulting perhaps in a somewhat less than full acknowledgment of her important early role. She established the first purchase fund for the museum, and the correspondence between her and Barr is peppered with humorous references to their aesthetic disagreements. Once, after providing the money for Picasso's master print Minotauromachy (1935) for the museum, she remarked dryly that the credit label should read, "fund for prints which Mrs. Rockefeller does not like." (28)
One of Abby's criteria for judging quality in a work of art was beauty. For her own collection, she preferred art that had a figurative dimension, never fully embracing cubism or abstract art. Nevertheless, she bought difficult and sometimes disturbing surrealist works such as Salvador Dali's Portrait of Gala (Pl. II), a vexing commentary on the subservient role of his wife, and Pierre Roy's Danger on the Stairs (Pl. III). Family Picture (Pl. VI) by Max Beckmann is a disquieting portrait of his own family--a group of alienated figures, simultaneously bored and sexually charged. Child with Doll by Otto Dix (1891-1969) portrays his rather malevolent-looking daughter clutching a life-sized doll whose raised hand appears to wave at us for assistance. By this time, Barr was acting as Abby's adviser with the hope that some of her purchases would find their way to the museum as gifts. Interestingly, correspondence shows that Barr was astounded and pleased that Abby bought the Dali but suggested she purchase a different painting by Dix. The Beckmann, which had been exhibited in the museum's 1931 Modern German Painting and Sculpture exhibition, was his recommendation.
Abby particularly admired the work of Matisse. In Paris she visited his studio, and when he traveled to New York in December 1930, she and Junior held a dinner for him at their house. Abby's gallery was newly finished, and she installed her collection in anticipation of his visit. Matisse's rhythmic, elongated standing figure La Serpentine, characterized by Barr as the artist's most controversial sculpture, was there, as was Odalisque (1929), (29) which Abby had bought the previous month in Paris. The painting, also known as Young Girl Seated, caused a rift between Abby and her sister and closest confidant, Lucy (1869-1955), who, as Abby wrote to her son David, "thinks there must be something wrong with my character that I bought it." (30) In addition, Abby owned a number of drawings by Matisse. The only record we have of the dinner is from one of the guests. Crowninshield, who wrote in Vanity Fair:
After the coffee, Monsieur Matisse turned to Mr. Rockefeller and began,
half seriously, to plead his cause; to explain that the men who had
created the incredibly beautiful green, yellow, red and black [Kangxi
period] porcelains that were all about us, were really in pursuit of
exactly the same aesthetic goals as those to which Matisse had
personally dedicated himself. He tried, too, to convince him that
Braque, Juan Gris and Picasso ... had merely followed the decorative
designs and emotive experiences of the Persians who had woven what
Matisse called Mr. Rockefeller's "modern" (though 17th century)
Polonaise rugs; that, in short, there was no such thing as modern art,
or ancient art, or art of the middle ages; that the deadest art
imaginable was that of the hack painters who now flourish in so many of
our academies of art. But the philanthropist, who had listened very
politely, regretted, quite as politely, and in the most polished French,
that he must still appear adamant. Then, with an engaging burst of
confidence, he added that Mr. Matisse must not altogether despair
because though he [Junior] might still seem to be stone, he suspected
that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion,
would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly. (31)
In April 1932 the Downtown Gallery organized an exhibition of Ben Shahn's controversial Sacco and Vanzetti series, and Abby purchased a tempera (Pl. IX). Later that year, Shahn submitted a mural on the same theme to the exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers held at the Museum of Modern Art. This exhibition embroiled the museum, and by extension the Rockefeller family, in a controversy that had ramifications well beyond what anyone realized at the time. Several of the artists used the occasion to create murals criticizing the wealthy trustees and patrons of the museum, including the Rockefellers. Hugo Gellert (1892-1985) submitted a mural entitled Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together featuring Morgan, Rockefeller Sr., President Herbert Hoover, and Henry Ford (1863-1947) along with Al Capone (1899-1947), "entrenched" to use Goodyear's term, "behind moneybags, operating a machine gun." (32) At first, several of the trustees, including Goodyear, threatened to resign if the murals were shown, as the artists steadfastly refused to change their compositions. The Rockefellers, however, felt that it was better to show the offending murals without comment, hoping that the controversy would subside through neglect. In fact, the critics were universally lukewarm and the crisis passed.
One of the more complicated chapters in Abby's career as a collector involved the artist Diego Rivera (see Pl. V). Abby first bought his work from a 1927 New York exhibition under-written by a grant from the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board. (33) Over the next several years, she bought a number of Rivera's watercolors, drawings, and paintings, culminating in a sketchbook of forty-five watercolors celebrating May Day in 1931. That year; Rivera and his artist wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) came to New York to prepare for his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, (34) and Abby invited them to luncheons with her family. Rivera, in turn, produced beautiful drawings of Abby's daughter, Babs, and her children. The Rockefellers were apparently unaware of Rivera's caricature of Rockefeller Sr. as the archetypal capitalist in his mural Banquette de Wall Street in Mexico City, a drawing for which was reproduced in the New York Times in January 1929. Abby and Junior had been traveling in Egypt at the time and apparently no one brought it to their attention.
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At Abby's suggestion, Rivera was approached to design a mural for the entrance lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center in New York City in the fall of 1932. Before he began painting the following spring, however, Rivera radically changed the approved design to depict the triumph of communism, dominated by a large portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), over capitalism. Abby's role in this episode has long been misunderstood: recuperating from an illness, she was away all winter in Hot Springs, Virginia, and it fell to her son Nelson to negotiate with Rivera. The headline of the New York World Telegram on April 24 read, "Rivera Perpetuates Scenes of Communist Activity for RCA Walls and Rockefeller Foots the Bill." Nelson asked Rivera to replace Lenin with another figure and Rivera reportedly replied through Shahn, his interpreter, that he would prefer his work destroyed entirely than to mutilate the conception. Abby returned to New York on May 7, by which time it was too late for compromise. Two days later; Rivera was ordered off the job and paid the balance of his commission. On Wednesday, May 10, a New York Times headline read: "Rockefellers Ban Lenin in RCA Mural and Dismiss Rivera." Newspaper articles appeared daily, Rivera spoke to large crowds, and artists formed groups to protest censorship. Nelson hoped to remove the Rivera mural and take it to the Museum of Modern Art, where it could be viewed in an impartial setting. (35) But because Rivera had painted in fresco, directly into the plaster, it was impossible to remove, and eight months later, the building's manager, Todd Robertson, had it destroyed.
Although Abby continued to buy art, the Rivera episode marked a turning point. One can only speculate, but her endorsement of living artists had embroiled her in a most embarrassing situation. By 1934 her anonymous gifts and stipends to artists ended, and her patronage became largely institutional. In 1935 she announced to the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art that in order to help build the collection, she intended to donate 181 works from her collection, the first of many large gifts to the museum, culminating in 1940 with a gift of over fifteen hundred prints. Her own purchases of art dropped 15 percent from 1934 to 1935, and, when she bought art, it was now with the museum's collection in mind. Abby's shift from the support of artists to the support of programs at the museum was the result of three factors: the Rivera fiasco, the increased patronage of the federal Works Progress Administration Fine Arts Program, and her growing admiration and support for Barr.
When Abby died in 1948, Barr wrote to Nelson:
In her position, the outside world took for granted that she could do
almost anything her wealth and power would permit. This being so, few
realize what positive acts of courage her interest in modern art
required. Not only is modern art artistically radical but it is often
assumed to be radical morally and politically and sometimes indeed it
is. But these factors, which might have given, pause to a more
circumspect or conventional spirit did not deter your mother, although
on a few occasions they caused her anxiety, as they did us all.... She
was the heart of the Museum, its center of gravity--and the museum while
it is a great magnet, it is also strongly centrifugal: ideas and people
tend to slip away from its spinning center and be flung off its edge.
The Museum has attracted people who were by turns generous and mean,
enthusiastic and capricious. Your mother (sometimes when the rest of us
had failed) helped people to forget their pettiness and recapture their
vision of the museum's high goal. This she could do not only because of
her position in the world but even more because she had grand vision
herself. (36)
As a collector, Abby Rockefeller's selections often went against the mainstream, even within the emerging canon of modern art, such as the eccentric artist George Overbury "Pop" Hart (1868-1933), whose colorful personality intrigued her, and Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968), the wife of the sculptor William Zorach (1887-1966), from whom she commissioned a narrative tapestry depicting her family. As Dorothy C. Miller (1904-2003), a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, later wrote:
She bought ... because she liked their work, before its merit or faults
had been clearly underscored by time and critical opinion [and] without
waiting for their worth to be proved by rising prices or by the acid
test of the auction room. (37)
Although a number of the works she bought would today be called masterpieces, Abby preferred small-scale drawings, prints, and water colors--works on paper that could be handled and rearranged. She collected masterpieces of the antique with her husband; her own collection by contrast was intimate and personal. The thrill of discovery motivated her: "One of the greatest pleasures I have is in meeting people who know more than I do; which is a very frequent occurrence," (38) she wrote to Nelson at college, encouraging him to study and lamenting that she herself did not have a college education. Abby embraced the serendipitous and peripatetic nature of artistic creativity. Her enthusiasm for contemporary art and the artists of her time was a reflection of her desire to support young people and to discover new ideas. She was also an early and important collector of American folk art (her interest in the genre can be traced to two ancestral folk art portraits of Duty Greene [1793-1864] and his wife, Abby Truman [1792-1865]), and her collection, now at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia, contains many of the icons of American folk art. Relying upon intuition rather than intellect, she managed to assemble a number of different types of art collections, antique and modern simultaneously. However, although she collected in a number of different fields, her patronage of emerging American modernists was without equal, and the museum that she helped to found gave them an eminence beyond their wildest dreams.
I am grateful to the following, who have generously allowed me repeated access to their excellent facilities: the staffs of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Rockefeller Family Archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York; the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.; and the Archives of Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After more than two years of renovation and expansion the Museum of Modern Art will reopen in its new building in Manhattan on November 20.
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(1) As can be expected of a legendary family such as the Rockefellers, there are a large number of published articles and studies. For this reason, I sought out primary source material in order to avoid repeating inaccurate and misleading histories. In these endnotes I have used the following abbreviations: Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. (AAA); Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (AAR); Alfred H. Barr Jr. (AHB); Museum of Modern Art, New York City (MoMA); Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller (NAR); Office of the Messers Rockefeller (OMR); Rockefeller Archive Center; Sleepy Hollow, New York (RAC); Rockefeller Family Archives (RFA).
(2) In 1903 AAR was the only woman present in a meeting at their house when the charter of the Rockefellers' original major philanthropy, the General Education Board (GEB), was drafted. Senator Aldrich had helped to steer approval for this foundation through Congress the previous year. Originally envisioned to underwrite high school education for blacks in the South, the foundation quickly expanded to include a myriad other educational projects, including the establishment of the progressive Lincoln School in Manhattan, which several of the Rockefeller children attended. The GEB preceded the Rockefeller Foundation by more than a decade and underwrote exhibitions and studies of the evolution of good design and of museums, helping to lay the groundwork for some of the later programs at the Museum of Modern Art. The Annual Report of The General Education Board, 1926-1927 declared: "Museums in this country have not thus far been organized with a clear perception of their distinct functions and the different ways in which these functions must be discharged. It is one thing to arrange material so that it will attract and inform the general public, it is another thing to assemble and organize the large collections needed for study by students of art, designers, etc."
(3) Ida M. Tarbell's two-volume The History of the Standard Oil Company (McClure, Phillips and Company, New York, 1904) began as a serial in McClure's Magazine. She published articles on Aldrich in American Magazine in December 1910 and January 1911.
(4) AAR to Charles Eliot, May 9, 1921 (folder 29, box 1, series 1, correspondence, record group 2, OMR/AAR, RFA, RAC).
(5) Many of these pieces from the Kangxi period were given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
(6) Now in the collection of the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum.
(7) Both sculptures are now in the Frick Collection in New York City.
(8) AAR to A. Conger Goodyear, March 26, 1936 (folder 105 box 8, series 1, record group 2, OMR/AAR).
(9) Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner; a German-born art historian, was curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum from 1908 to 1915; art adviser and subsequently director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (1921-1924, 1924-1945); codirector of the Los Angeles County Museum (1946-1949); consultant to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu (1952-1955); and director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh (1956-1958). He founded Art in America and Art Quarterly magazines and began collecting German expressionist works in 1920.
(10) Diane Tepfer's dissertation "Edith Gregor Halpert and the Downtown Gallery Downtown: 1926-1940: A Study in American Art Patronage," 2 vols. (University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, published U.M.L. 1989) remains the definitive source on Halpert.
(11) NAR to AAR, January 2, 1928, and AAR to NAR, January 7, 1928 (both in folder 65, box 5, series 1, correspondence, record group 2, OMR/AAR).
(12) AAR also purchased art from the Kraushaar, Frederick Keppel, J.B. Neumann, and Weyhe galleries, all in New York City.
(13) On January 12, 1932, Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) of the University of Hamburg lectured on classical mythology in medieval art in the gallery. Among others who lectured there were AHB, Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903-1897). Philip Johnson (1906-), and the French art historian Eustace de Lorey (d.c. 1938).
(14) AAR to NAR, April 26, 1929 (folder 65, box 5, series 1, correspondence, record group 2, OMR/AAR).
(15) Cornelius Newton Bliss (1833-1911), Lillie's father; and Senator Aldrich were prominent Republicans from New England and colleagues, serving together on a committee in Rhode Island as early as 1880. They were also at work in Washington, D.C. with their families at the same time. Although Lillie Bliss was ten years older than AAR, as adults they shared many interests. See Rona Roob, "A Noble Legacy," Art in America, November 2003, pp. 73-83.
(16) The often-told story of AAR and Mary Quinn Sullivan hatching the plan for a museum of modern art aboard the ship Ile de France sailing from Le Havre to New York City in March 1928 may be apocryphal. Before she married at the age of forty, Sullivan had been a progressive arts educator and benefited from extensive schooling in the arts including study in London with Roger Eliot Fry (1866-1934), the influential author of Vision and Design (Chatto and Windus, London, 1920). Her energy and enthusiasm undoubtedly helped to launch the idea of a modern museum, and in its initial stages her husband, a lawyer, drew up the various papers of incorporation. However, once the museum opened, Sullivan's role diminished quickly.
(17) Dikran G, Kelekian opened his New York gallery after coming to this country to participate in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
(18) Forbes Watson, "The John Quinn Collection," Arts, vol. 9 (January 1926), pp. 3-4.
(19) When La Serpentine was first exhibited at the Montross Gallery in New York City in 1915, it was vilified in the press. Davies bought it from the exhibition, and AAR knew it from her visits to his studio.
(20) Now in the Art Institute of Chicago.
(21) Whereabouts unknown.
(22) Now in MoMA.
(23) Whereabouts unknown. AAR did not attend the auction or bid directly but made her purchases through others, as she had at the Quinn sale.
(24) Josephine Boardman Crane (Mrs. Winthrop Murray Crane; 1873-1972) was also a founder, but she was not active in the early stages.
(25) Goodyear's collection contained several important works by Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh and a very important Paul Gauguin, Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York), none of which ultimately ended up at MoMA.
(26) But not, as has been reported elsewhere, a product of the graduate seminar in museum administration that Sachs established at Harvard in 1921.
(27) AHB to Mary Ellen Chase, February 6, 1950 (frame 1176, microfilm roll 2175, AHB papers, MoMA, AAA).
(28) See frames 1312-1323, roll 2175, AHB papers.
(29) Whereabouts unknown.
(30) Quoted in Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (Random House, New York, 1993), p. 439.
(31) Quoted in William Lieberman, Twentieth-Century Art from the Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Collection (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1969), p. 20.
(32) A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (privately published, New York, 1943), p. 39.
(33) The exhibition, entitled Mexican Fine and Applied Arts, was held at the Art Center in New York City in October 1927. In his recent Memoirs (Random House, New York, 2002), p. 58, David Rockefeller stated that his mother began to collect Diego Rivera's work on the advice of AHB, but AAR did not yet know AHB in 1927.
(34) This exhibition, Diego Rivera, was held in December 1931 and January 1932 and was underwritten by the Paine Mexican Arts Foundation with a grant from John D. Rockefeller Jr. Rivera executed seven movable frescoes for the exhibition, which were later sold to the Weyhe Gallery in New York City. AAR loaned thirteen works.
(35) NAR to Alan Blackburn, December 16, 1933 (folder 706, box 94, series III2c, record group 2, OMR/NAR).
(36) AHB to NAR, April 17, 1948 (frame 1000, microfilm roll 3264, AHB papers).
(37) Dorothy Miller, "Contemporary American Paintings in the Collection of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller," Art News, vol. 36 (March 26, 1938), pp. 104-116 and 182-184.
(38) AAR to NAR, January 7, 1928.
WENDY JEFFERS is at work on a biography of Dorothy C. Miller, the first curator hired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.