53rd Street Patron

(See front cover) Any exhibit opening in the wake of the enormously popular van Gogh show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was bound to begin with an initial handicap. As if this were not enough, the Museum's discreet directors last week placed two additional handicaps upon the first comprehensive showing of one of its finest gift collections, simply because the Museum's principal benefactor happens to have a great name and a great modesty. Handicap No. 1 was encountered on the first floor in the form of a gigantic portrait of beefy, bewhiskered Henry Hobson Richardson (see p. 29) and an exhibition of that architect's work. The second floor was given over entirely to the flaming posters of A. Mouron Cassandre, French advertising artist who produced the chunky little man who drinks Dubonnet all over the world. Only those long of wind and strong of purpose who clumped up to the third and fourth floors were rewarded with the sight of 127 paintings, water colors and drawings by most of the best known names in modern painting, collected during the past ten years by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Because the name of Rockefeller had been successfully minimized in the papers, comment on the exhibition was limited to a few desultory paragraphs. It deserved more, since Mrs. Rockefeller's gift, designed to supplement the collection bequeathed by her good friend Lizzie P. Bliss,* has made the Museum of Modern Art one of the greatest collections of modern painting in the world.

Probably no person of great wealth has done more for living U. S. artists than Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. But her purchases are now all regulated by the trustees of Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Mrs. Rockefeller is not yet incorporated as an impersonal buying agency. The prizes she offers, the pictures she acquires and the gifts she makes are all done with such skillful reticence that few recognize her for what she undoubtedly is: the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the U. S.

Grocer-Senator. Born 61 years ago in Providence, R. I., Abby Greene Aldrich Rockefeller has known great wealth and its power all her life. Her father, the late Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, onetime grocer, was probably the richest man ever to enter the U. S. Senate. When he died in 1915 he left a fortune of over $30,000,000 largely made out of banking, sugar, rubber, public utilities, tractions. But Nelson Aldrich was also one of the most potent men ever to enter the Senate. With Platt of Connecticut, Spooner of Wisconsin and Allison of Iowa, he practically ran the country from 1897 to 1905 when the quartet broke publicly with Roosevelt I. In 1909, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he was co-author of the notorious Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act which cost the Republicans the House of Representatives in the 1910 election. After 30 years in his seat Senator Aldrich retired in 1911.

All these years his daughter had to listen to almost continuous public attacks on the way her father made his money, his love of display, his "secret government" of the U. S. It gave her a lifelong horror of publicity and all forms of ostentation. In 1901 Abby Aldrich married a young man who thought the same way about great wealth for the same reasons. His name was John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The Rockefeller children--Abby, John D. Ill, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, David--have been brought up with Spartan simplicity and considerably less pocket money than most of their classmates. Mrs. Rockefeller has never bothered to own a diamond tiara or a box at the opera. She likes to do her own shopping, and she does most of it on foot.

Senator Aldrich bought many an expensive picture in his lifetime. The senior Rockefeller, though never a great collector, felt impelled from time to time to acquire extremely expensive pieces of Oriental art. The junior Rockefeller has limited his own artistic purchases to fine tapestries and sculpture, possibly because the collecting of paintings is so common with the kind of rich man that he dislikes most.

What started Mrs. Rockefeller buying modern art was the famed Armory Show of 1913, held in Manhattan's 69th Regiment Armory, which introduced modern French painting to the U. S. President and guiding spirit of the Armory Show was the gentle and reserved Arthur B. Davies, painter of ethereal nudes, wearer of excruciatingly stiff collars. Artist Davies was a great & good friend of Miss Lizzie Bliss. Before the exhibition closed he had persuaded Miss Bliss to buy a Renoir, two Degas and two Redons. Through her friend Mrs. Rockefeller also became interested in modern art, finally began to buy canvases and drawings pointed out to her by the long pale fingers of Arthur B. Davies.

Three Ways-- There are three ways to be a collector. Caring nothing about art, one can buy famed rarities at great prices as the cheapest and quickest method of getting a reputation for culture. One can care so much for pictures that one is willing to go without many necessities in order to buy more & more. One can consider one's collection a sort of private investment, to provide artists with a little money to paint more & better pictures. It was perfectly impossible for shy, unassuming Abby Rockefeller to be any kind of a collector but the last.

Without for an instant relaxing her interest in the Girl Scouts, in musical scholarships, hospitals, asylums, and all her other welldoing, Mrs. Rockefeller set aside a certain amount of her own Aldrich money for art. As a collector's budget, it was no vast sum. All the pictures that she has since given to the Rhode Island School of Design, to Fisk University, to Dart mouth College and to the Museum of Modern Art--about 1,000 important items--probably did not cost anywhere near the $1,166,400 that Andrew Mellon paid the Soviet Government in 1934 for one Raphael Madonna (TIME, Aug. 27, 1934 et seq.) Yet for her money Mrs. Rockefeller was able to get good, if not great, examples of almost every well-known modern from Odilon Redon to Peter Blume.

Even before Arthur B. Davies' death in 1928, Mrs. Rockefeller had developed a sharp nose of her own for talent. Tramp ing through galleries, she has spotted many a promising newcomer. She was the first collector to buy a painting by an aged Pittsburgh housepainter named John Kane, who before his death in 1934 became the high-priced rage of the modern art world (TIME, June 3 et ante}. She was one of the first to buy from the eccentric Louis Eilshemius.

Abby Rockefeller has never successfully downed the idea that to pay as much as Lizzie Bliss used to pay for single pictures is slightly sinful. As far as is known, the highest price Mrs. Rockefeller ever paid for a work of art was $20,000 which she gave Marguerite Zorach for a tapestry portrait of the Rockefeller family in front of their summer home at Seal Harbor (TIME, Nov. 4). In general, $1,000 is her top price. This has tended to bring her the best work of unknown artists, the second-rate work of men with established reputations. It has also brought her a great diversity of works of art. At one time or another Mrs. Rockefeller has collected Japanese bird and flower prints, folk art, Amerindian paintings. New England primitives, Siamese sculpture.

Several years ago her purchasing became too widespread for her to do all by herself. To her assistance as a special agent under special circumstances went handsome, grey-haired Edith Halpert, widow of Painter Samuel Halpert, onetime efficiency expert for deflated S. W. Straus & Co., and for the past ten years director of the Downtown Gallery.

There are far more drawings and water colors than oils in Mrs. Rockefeller's collection. This has little to do with the fact that drawings are cheaper than paintings. All artists know that the best way to study the manner and character of an artist is through his unretouched drawings. And drawings take up little room. Most of the pictures that Mrs. Rockefeller has bought for her own enjoyment are crowded into her specially lighted gallery on the seventh floor of the old Rockefeller town house in West 54th Street.

Two Views. It is difficult to pick favorite artists of one who has bought so widely, but Mrs. Rockefeller's intimates know that she has two favorite views : one from her gallery window; the other a vista in Central Park. She has commissioned the dryly accurate Charles Sheeler to paint the latter, the more impressionistic Stefan Hirsch to do the gallery view.

Since 1932 Mrs. Rockefeller's chief interest has been within rifle shot of the same window. The Museum of Modern Art is housed in a handsome limestone house in West 53rd Street with a back door facing the Rockefeller backyard.

Six years ago the art columns of Manhattan newspapers were filled with attacks on the stodgy direction of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum, it was charged, was willing to spend a quarter of a million for a Titian when it already owned several; its collection was appallingly weak in French Post-Impressionists; its interest in living U. S. painters seemed to have died with Winslow Homer. From all sides the suggestion loudly arose that Manhattan should have a museum comparable to the Luxembourg in Paris that could buy and exhibit modern paintings, not with the idea of preserving eternal masterpieces for the ages, but so that the public could see what living artists were producing. As with the Luxembourg, masterpieces, bought cheap, might later be passed on to the historic museums, like the Louvre or the Metropolitan, when time had verified them. Besides Mrs. Rockefeller, founders of the Museum of Modern Art included Miss Bliss, Mrs. W. Murray Crane, A. Conger Goodyear, Editor Frank Crowninshield, Paul J. Sachs of Harvard's Fogg Museum. Gallery space was rented in the Heckscher Building, and on the advice of Professor Sachs, lean, 27-year-old Alfred H. Barr Jr. was hired as Director.

Cash & Collections. Hardly was the museum established than the immediate need for it seemed to diminish. Mrs. Whitney established her Museum of American Art. Stodgy Director Edward Robinson of the Metropolitan died, to be succeeded by the more liberal Herbert E. Winlock. Still the Museum of Modern Art grew and prospered, gained much prestige and more publicity with its loan exhibitions of almost everything from Henri Matisse to modern kitchen utensils. But it still owned no important pictures. In 1931 Miss Bliss died, leaving the bulk of the pictures she had been buying since the Armory Show to the Museum on condition other members raise an endowment fund of $1,000,000 (later reduced to $750,000) to care for them. With Mrs. Rockefeller leading, 160 members produced $630,000, including $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation. Promising the other $120,000 the Museum found itself the proud owner of a collection of Cezannes equaled only by those in Moscow and the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pa., the finest group of Seurat drawings in the U. S. and 59 other important works. In 1932 the Museum moved from the Heckscher Building around to its present quarters on West 53rd Street.

In the six years of its existence the Museum has also: 1) held 46 major art exhibitions in its own quarters; 2) sent 28 traveling shows to 98 cities in the U. S. and Canada; 3) established a modern valuable art library; 4) published 38 different books and pamphlets; 5) put on many a radio art program; 6) established a cinema museum which is preserving for students such valued films as the first Mack Sennett custard pies, The Birth of a Nation, Sarah Bernhardt as Queen Elizabeth, the first sound picture (Al Jolson's Jazz Singer), Rudolph Valentino in Monsieur Beaucaire. Besides the donations from Miss Bliss, Mrs. Rockefeller and others, the Museum acquired few months ago Surrealist Salvador Dali's famed canvas of the limp watches on the seashore, The Persistence of Memory (TIME, Nov. 26, 1934).

The pictures which Mrs. Rockefeller has given the Museum and which were put on view last week in such a way as to play-down the name Rockefeller, had nothing of equal importance to such Bliss bequests as Cezanne's Man in a Blue Cap, Gauguin's The Moon and, the Earth, or Daumier's Laundress. Still, if the Museum ever finds the additional space for a gallery in which the masterpieces of its permanent collection can remain permanently displayed, there are at least four of Mrs. Rockefeller's pictures that should remain on its walls: 1) Alexander Brook's oil portrait of Artist George Biddle playing a silver flute in a pair of bright red socks (see cut);

2) Otto Dix's portrait of a fat little German girl holding an equally fat little doll;

3) Charles Burchfield's study of a frightened old lady in the yard of a haunted house; 4) a self-portrait of hollow-eyed Vincent Canade.

*Christened Lizzie, Miss Bliss preferred to be called Lillie.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.