Word: art
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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, Miró, 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...
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...
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...
Rockefeller has always sought and welcomed advice from associates at the Modern. The person on whom he most relied was the late René 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...
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...