Word: modern
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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...
...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 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...
...Harnoncourt's dream for the Museum of Primitive Art may have been realized last week, but the successor he groomed as director of the Museum of Modern Art was in trouble. A terse announcement from the museum said that Bates Lowry, 43, had "resigned for personal reasons." Actually, the reasons were not so much personal as mysterious. One put forth by knowledgeable observers was that President William S. Paley had demanded Lowry's resignation because he felt that Lowry had shown insufficient interest in raising funds. That was hardly enough to fire a man outright. An additional motive...
...started a Wednesday meeting session at which heads of departments could hash out their problems. He had promoted an ambitious acquisition program, whose most notable purchase was 47 paintings from the Gertrude Stein collection for $6,500,000. He had hired enterprising young associate curators to put the maturing Modern in touch once again with the artistic underground. Most of the staff thought it a shame that Lowry had to leave almost before he had moved his furniture into the modest co-op on Park Avenue that the museum had obtained for him-even though, contrary to rumors...