Pervasive Excitement for the Eye and Mind

TO future art historians, the Rockefellers of Manhattan may well rank with the Medicis of Florence as patrons of the best artists of their age. In most respects, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller stands as the Cosimo of the dynasty, by all odds the most lavish and most outspoken proselytizer, the most passionately concerned collector and patron in the family.

Actually, the interest began with Mother, whom the Rockefeller sons have always talked of in capital letters. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was a woman of powerful prejudices, and most of them were good. She collected Indian art before many people thought it worth collecting, ventured into Greenwich Village to see the works of struggling young artists and in 1929 was a founder of the Museum of Modern Art. Nelson was the second son of her five (John D. is older, and Laurence, Winthrop and David are younger), but he was the most responsive to her artistic instincts. As a boy, he conceived a fancy for a 6th century Chinese Bodhisattva and begged her to leave it to him in her will. While a Dartmouth freshman, he tagged along on one of her regular tours of Manhattan galleries and decided that he would start "a tiny bit of collecting" of contemporary art. In his early 20s he toured the world, picking up curios in Polynesia, pottery in Mexico, carvings in Indonesia.

Charming Examples. Today Nelson Rockefeller's holdings are so vast and his tastes so far-ranging that this month three Manhattan museums will be devoting much of their special display space to parts of his collections--which still puts no pressure on his reserves, or even denudes his private walls. A Kline may have had to be substituted for a Pollock here and there, but a rotation of pictures is often rewarding, as every housewife knows. For art lovers, the result is an unprecedented look at many treasures that have heretofore been visible only to friends dining at the Fifth Avenue apartment or visiting the family estate in Pocantico Hills.

The Metropolitan Museum put on display 1,000 wondrously carved headdresses, fetishes, stools, ancestor poles and soul ships--and other primitive sculptures--from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. All were on loan from the Museum of Primitive Art, which Rockefeller founded in 1957 and endowed with his collection. Since then, the museum has been expanded considerably, most notably by the Asmat carvings collected by Nelson's son Michael before he was lost off the coast of New Guinea in 1961. This week it puts on view 700 charming Mexican folk toys and figurines, festival masks and terra-cotta ewers that reflect Rockefeller's continuing interest and many southward junkets. The exhibit's gaiety derives in part, as Rockefeller notes in the catalogue's introduction, from the fact that Mexican folk art is "an ongoing tradition, bound up with everyday life and festivals, producing a pervasive, ever-present excitement for the eye and mind."

Next week the Museum of Modern Art unveils the most engrossing display of all: more than 175 examples from Nelson Rockefeller's unparalleled collection of 1,500 modern paintings and sculptures. It is almost impossible to assess such an exhibition. It begins with landmark works of Picasso, Miro, Matisse, Mondriaan, Moore, Maillol and just about every famous name from the first half of the 20th century. But Rockefeller's tastes have not stagnated or calcified. Particularly in sculpture, he has cheerfully moved on to buy many younger minimal artists. Among his newest purchases are the 11 1/2-ft.-tall white Granny's Knot of The Netherlands' Shinkichi Tajiri and Clement Meadmore's upswinging 14-ft. U Turn.

Latter-Day Midas. If there is one characteristic that dominates Rockefeller's selections in the three exhibitions, it is strength of form. Significance or meaning are secondary to Rockefeller. "My enjoyment of art," he says, "is more an esthetic than an intellectual reaction." This leads him to favor Cubists over Surrealists, color-field painters over pop. Yet he is not doctrinaire about his preferences for schools, and his collection includes George Segal and Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love.

As Governor of New York, Rockefeller has little time to browse through galleries. Instead, he operates like a latter-day Midas. He looks through catalogues, marks what catches his eye. "If it's in New York, they send it up overnight, or on the weekends," he explains. "I just check what I want." On almost any day, a visitor is apt to find a new painting propped against one of the walls of the underground gallery (ending in a grotto) that his grandfather built in Pocantico, while the Governor gives it his consideration. He spends days selecting sites for new pieces of sculpture to be placed on the rambling grounds. His wife Happy is admittedly a neophyte, but she is more and more an enthusiast with a growing personal taste of her own. "If I like something, he'll get it," she says.

Welcome Advice. Rockefeller modestly does not refer to himself as an art expert but as an art lover. He points out proudly that, under his urging, New York was the first state to set up an arts council. He loves to conduct bemused state legislators through the executive mansion past Calders, Picasso tapestries and Klees, pointing out their hidden beauties. "They have recognized that art is not a liability from a political point of view," he says with delight. In fact, the legislators have voted to open the capitol's corridors to exhibits of artists from different areas. Rockefeller is proudest of the part played by the Museum of Modern Art, for which he has twice served terms as president. The Modern's great achievement, he feels, has been "to cut down the time between creation and appreciation, so that a Van Gogh didn't have to die in poverty before his work was appreciated."

Rockefeller has always sought and welcomed advice from associates at the Modern. The person on whom he most relied was the late Rene d'Harnoncourt, the museum's former director and a vice president of the Museum of Primitive Art, who was killed in an auto accident last summer. Rockefeller met the courtly d'Harnoncourt, an extraordinarily knowledgeable specialist on primitive art, in the late 1930s. Together, they built Rockefeller's collection into one of the finest in the world. In 1949, he became director of the Modern, demonstrating a flair for showmanship, fund-raising and that mysterious ability that knits an organization together.

Last week, at the opening of the exhibition of primitive sculpture at the Metropolitan, Rockefeller announced that Director Thomas P. F. Hoving had agreed to merge the Museum of Primitive Art into the Met. Subject to ratification by both sets of trustees, the collection will be housed in a new wing to be built into the south end of the museum. To Rockefeller, the merger fulfilled an ambition that he had cherished since the 1930s. Then, as a youthful trustee of the Met, he had tried to interest its director in starting such a collection on the ground that its esthetic beauty was as great as that of more classical sculpture. "Rene d'Harnoncourt and I shared this hope, this thought, this dream," said Rockefeller. "I am pleased that it has been realized."

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