America's Medicis Read online

  AMERICA’S

  MEDICIS

  THE ROCKEFELLERS

  AND THEIR ASTONISHING

  CULTURAL LEGACY

  Suzanne Loebl

  To Judy H. Loebl and John C. Gordon, whose love nourishes me;

  and to David, always.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - Preamble

  Chapter 2 - To the Glory of God

  Chapter 3 - A Passion for Asia

  Chapter 4 - Bridging the Past and the Present

  Chapter 5 - Rockefeller Center

  Chapter 6 - Mother’s Museum

  Chapter 7 - The Cloisters

  Photographic Insert

  Chapter 8 - Colonial Williamsburg and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum of American Folk Art

  Chapter 9 - MoMA Under Nelson A. Rockefeller’s Stewardship, 1939–69

  Chapter 10 - A Modest Man Assumes His Birthright

  Chapter 11 - The Rockefeller Collection at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

  Chapter 12 - The Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Mall

  Chapter 13 - David Rockefeller

  Chapter 14 - In Memoriam

  Chapter 15 - Smaller Gifts

  Chapter 16 - Kykuit

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Abbreviations

  Index

  About the Author

  Also By Suzanne Loebl

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  AMERICA’S ARTISTIC LANDSCAPE would be totally different were it not for the Rockefellers. Nowhere is this legacy as evident as it is in Manhattan, where it hop-skips from the glass towers of downtown’s Chase Manhattan Bank, to midtown’s United Nations—the latter built on Rockefeller-donated land—to Rockefeller Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Rockefeller University, Lincoln Center, the Asia Society on Park Avenue, and Riverside Church, to the medieval tower of The Cloisters, at the island’s northern end. Farther afield there is Kykuit, the Rockefellers’ summer home; the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Mall in Albany; and museums founded, or contributed to, by the family in California, Rhode Island, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and elsewhere, including Jerusalem.

  Even though more than two hundred books have been written about the family, none so far has looked at their artistic contribution as a whole. America’s Medicis celebrates thirty institutions that bear the imprint of this legendary family. This by itself might make the Rockefellers America’s greatest art patrons. In spite of this wealth of material gifts, the Rockefellers’ most important contribution was to teach America that art and its enjoyment, message, and healing power did not belong to a rarefied elite, but could be loved, understood, and even owned by all.

  Almost a century and a half after John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Senior), started to refine oil in Ohio, the family remains a puzzle, which is why it continues to fascinate. The unscrupulous development of a highly profitable oil monopoly mesmerized Senior, and he relished being America’s wealthiest man. However, as Ron Chernow1 wrote, the Bible-thumping aspect of his personality was as real as his robber baron side, and his greatest pleasure was found in singing hymns in a working-class Baptist church. From early on he wanted to use some of his money for the good of humanity. His descendants absorbed his god-fearing nature, though they translated it into social consciousness, and their goal was to be remembered as responsible American citizens. Education and civil rights remained important causes to these scions of teachers and abolitionists.

  A love of art entered the family via Senior’s daughter-in-law Abby Greene Aldrich. She, too, had been chastened as a child by the reputation of her beloved father, whom muckraking journalists branded a money-grubbing politician. Abby was passionate about art. As she wrote in 1928, “To me art is one of the great resources of my life. I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from or whatever subject it represents.” Abby Rockefeller, like her son Nelson, loved to shop. She bought furniture, dinnerware, clothes, knickknacks, and art. Most of these goodies were paid for with Rockefeller money, but since her husband hated modern art, she used Aldrich money to acquire prints, and out-of-favor and contemporary art. Her top price usually was $1,000, which paid for few masterworks but enabled her to support many artists at the beginning of their careers. Abby Rockefeller eventually owned more than sixteen hundred works on paper.

  Collecting art for her own pleasure was not enough for Abby. With some friends and collaborators she founded the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in the words of art critic Aline Saarinen, “the most important taste making institution in the world.”2 MoMA was an entirely new type of museum, one that sent some of its cutting-edge exhibitions to all parts of America and examined the artistic merits of photography, film, architecture, and design. The museum championed what Abby Rockefeller called “The Art in Our Time.” In practice, this meant art of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  It was not long before Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s collection attracted attention, and because of her prominent social position, she became a major force in the popularization of contemporary American art. This required courage then, because, as Alfred Barr, MoMA’s founding director, wrote, “not only is modern art artistically radical but it is often assumed to be radical morally and politically, and sometimes it indeed is.”3

  John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Junior), was less adventurous than his wife. During the first forty years of his life he struggled to fulfill what he considered his mandate: conscientiously and wisely to distribute some of his father’s oil money. Gradually he allowed himself to enjoy what he called “Beauty in the Well-Rounded Life.” He built great—though, in view of his enormous wealth, rather modest—houses, and bought himself expensive Chinese porcelains, medieval tapestries, and other artifacts, always figuring that they might one day belong to the public. Much of Junior’s artistic legacy—the term must be interpreted broadly, as it includes his vast building projects—came about accidentally. The Great Depression led to his being the sole sponsor of Rockefeller Center, one of America’s architectural gems, and in the process, commissioning much art at a time when artists were “begging.” His commissions were what led Frank Crowninshield to call him the Lorenzo de’ Medici of the twentieth century.4 Since Junior felt that the craftsmanship of “the art of his own time” was inferior, his museums taught his contemporaries about the great civilizations of the past. The Cloisters, considered one of America’s best museums, celebrates medieval Europe; Williamsburg highlights Colonial America; the Oriental Institute and the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem explore the ancient Near East.

  The family’s artistic advisors included some of the twentieth century’s greatest experts, who became the shy and retiring John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s, closest friends, and their dedication and loyalty are a testimonial to the reciprocity of the relationship. Abby A. Rockefeller, too, established strong bonds with her advisors, and they responded with friendship and admiration for her uncanny artistic eye. For many years Abby’s maternal warmth and understanding enabled frail Alfred Barr, modern art’s American crusader, to achieve his mission.

  Art was such an important part of the Rockefellers’ life that the children incorporated it into their existence. John D. 3rd and Nelson Rockefeller, respectively, used art to promote U.S. relations with Southeast Asia and Latin America, and it is the art of these regions that became part of their legacy. As governor of New York, Nelson established the country’s first Endowment for the Arts, which served as the model for the National Endowment for the Arts. David Rockefeller interpreted his mother’s philosophy as a mandate to introduce art into the workplace.

  By establishing the Museum of Primitive Art in 1957, Nelson pioneered the view that non-Western was art, rather than just interesting ethnic objects. Twenty years later, approximately thirty-five hundred pieces of art migrated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  At heart, the Rockefellers were builders. Shy John D. Rockefeller 3rd was roped into assuming the chairmanship of Lincoln Center while it was being built some fifty years ago. His ebullient brother Nelson used all the resources at his disposal to turn New York State’s administrative seat into the most glorious in the nation. David Rockefeller helped revamp downtown Manhattan. Art was an important part of each of these Rockefeller projects. The Rockefeller legacies vary both in importance and in their success, but the sum total of their achievements earned the family a place among the great art patrons of the world.

  Chapter 1

  Preamble: An Imperial Nest

  IN 1938 A wrecker’s ball reduced numbers 4 and 10 West Fifty-fourth Street to rubble. Gone was the yard that had been flooded in winter for ice-skating. Gone were the kitchens with their immense cooking ranges, the butler’s pantries, the house organ, the dining rooms, and the master bedrooms. Gone was a piece of Manhattan history.

  In 1877, Arabella Worsham1 had remodeled a brownstone at 4 West Fifty-fourth Street into a fashionable residence. The stairs were of solid carved mahogany. Ceilings were elaborately painted, floors were intricately inlaid with costly wood, the windows were of stained glass, and the baths were lined with marble. The atmosphere was both opulent and gloomy, and very Gilded Age.

  A few years later, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the founder of the Standard Oil Company, was looking for
a permanent New York abode. Until then the family had lived in Cleveland, but as affairs of the company shifted to the East Coast, they had started to spend winters in various New York residential hotels. After Mrs. Worsham married Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate, she moved to even grander quarters, and put her house up for sale. In 1885, Senior bought it and all its furnishings for the then very tidy sum of $600,000. The oil tycoon and his wife were quite indifferent to the interior decoration of their homes and were content to leave this task to others. The same would not be true of their son and future daughter-in-law.

  At the time Senior bought the house from Mrs. Worsham Huntington, midtown Manhattan was still sparsely populated, but the character of the neighborhood was changing. St. Luke’s Hospital, Manhattan’s leading Protestant Episcopal medical institution, across the street from the house, sat on a large grassy plot stretching all the way to Fifth Avenue. In 1893 the hospital moved uptown, and its original painted brick building was demolished in 1896 and replaced by the University Club, an Italian Renaissance revival palazzo designed by Charles Follen McKim, and new St. Patrick’s Cathedral had been completed four blocks to the south. To the north, Central Park, stretching from 59th to 110th Street, had become an urban oasis, and the mansions of New York’s Millionaires’ Row were rising along Fifth Avenue.

  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was ten when the family moved into the Worsham mansion. He would live on that same block for forty-nine years. In 1901, when he was twenty-seven, he married Abby Greene Aldrich, and after a prolonged honeymoon, the young couple moved into 13 West Fifty-fourth Street, across the street from his parents. After another ten years, Junior purchased a plot at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street for $200,000.2 As he wrote his father, he and Abby planned to build a simple brownstone instead of the fanciful castles or turreted palaces favored by other multimillionaires.

  Junior hired William Welles Bosworth, an American architect who had completed his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Just then he was in the process of revamping Kykuit, Senior’s Westchester residence, and designing its gardens. Bosworth was a great admirer of Greek art, and all his creations were characterized by restrained elegance. As many of those who worked for the Rockefellers, he became a friend and advisor. He would later oversee the Rockefeller-sponsored rehabilitation of Versailles and design the Cairo Museum, which was never built.

  The Rockefeller houses on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Even though automobiles would magnify their oil fortune, Junior preferred a horse and buggy. (Courtesy of The Rockefeller Archive Center)

  The house at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street turned out to be far from ordinary. For a while it was the largest brownstone in Manhattan. Its nine floors included sumptuous living quarters, a ground-floor sitting room for Abby, a study for Junior, umpteen bedrooms, a nursery, playrooms, a gymnasium, a “sick bay,” servants’ quarters, and a roof garden.

  Once completed, the home had to be decorated, which was mostly Abby’s job, but Junior took a major interest. Most collectors start out by buying art to decorate their houses, and the Rockefellers were no exception.From the time she was a young child, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller had been passionately interested in art. Her taste was broad and all-encompassing. Looking at and learning about art was her greatest pleasure, and she relished creating tasteful environments for her family. She was an adventurous, impulsive buyer.

  For her husband, buying art was quite a different matter. He enjoyed objects that reflected superior craftsmanship, but he had no great liking for pictures. Also, since he believed that his excess money was earmarked for the benefit of mankind, he felt guilty spending millions of dollars on artworks. But, as he told Raymond Fosdick, his sympathetic biographer, “In the end I came to the conclusion that a man could buy things for himself without jeopardizing other causes, particularly when they would in time probably come into public possession through their ownership by museums.”3

  John D. Rockefeller and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller during the early years of their marriage. (Courtesy of the Rockefeller Archive Center)

  A reluctant Junior participated in the selection of European masterpieces. His father had taught him to keep accurate financial accounts, and he kept a watchful eye on all expenditures. Copies of bills and letters dealing with the building, decoration, and upkeep of all Rockefeller residences are now at the Rockefeller Archives, located in the family compound in Pocantico Hills, New York. The correspondence is so voluminous that one wonders how Junior ever had time to do anything else.

  Money alone cannot buy great art, and it took time and effort to fill the house with treasures. With the help of advisors and art dealers, who vigorously zero in on the wealthy, the Rockefellers succeeded in acquiring a stunning personal art and artifact collection. The showrooms of Joseph Duveen,4 an art dealer par excellence who catered to a few wealthy clients, were conveniently located on Fifty-sixth Street, near the Rockefeller residence. Duveen’s American headquarters had been modeled on the Ministry of the Marine, originally built by Louis XV’s court architect, on the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The New York version, built of imported French stone, had cost $1 million.

  Duveen, an excellent judge of people, realized that it was not easy for Mr. Rockefeller to spend the large sums of money necessary to acquire masterpieces. One of his strategies was to let his clients take art home for a year-long approval, reasoning that by the time they had to return the art, they would have become so attached to the objects that they would pay his exorbitant prices. Always partial to sculpture, Junior bought Verrocchio’s bust of the Daughter of Corleone, Laurana’s head of Beatrice of Aragon, and a work by Desiderio da Settignano. These had been part of the Dreyfus Collection, and Duveen now offered them to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for a hefty $1.5 million. Junior balked at the price, but finally bought them on December 31, 1934, the day his approval period was to expire.5

  As she was selecting paintings for her new home, Abby Rockefeller fell in love with art of the Italian Renaissance. These works had been mostly ignored in America until the charismatic Charles Eliot Norton, America’s first professor of art history, popularized them toward the end of the nineteenth century. In time, the Rockefellers bought The Raising of Lazarus and Christ and the Woman of Samaria, painted by Duccio between 1308 and 1311. These tempera-on-gold panels once graced the predella of the historic Maestà altar in the cathedral of Siena, the very church that had so inspired Norton. Today The Raising of Lazarus is at the Kimbell Museum in Houston, and Woman of Samaria is at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Even though the Rockefellers had a preference for Italian Renaissance works, they also bought later Dutch, Spanish, French, and English paintings. Junior was particularly fond of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Lady Dysart. They did not own any works of the Dutch golden age so beloved by the previous generation of American tycoons.

  THE DECORATION OF his new house provided John D. Rockefeller with a life-long passion. One day, as he was searching for objects with which to decorate a large mantelpiece, he was offered two tall Black Hawthorn vases, created in China during the K’ang-hsi period, between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rockefeller was not the first American millionaire to fall in love with these exquisite objects. Benjamin Altman, Horace O. Havemeyer, and J. P. Morgan, all future benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collected them, too. Morgan died in 1913, and two years later his porcelains were up for sale by none other than the ubiquitous Joseph Duveen. Junior, accompanied by Theodore Y. Hobby, keeper of the Altman Collection of Chinese porcelains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, went to view the porcelains and was entranced by their beauty. At the time, Junior did not have the more than $1.5 million it would take to secure the porcelains. Fearful of losing his heart’s desire, he asked his dad for a loan. The elder Rockefeller was quite shocked by the idea of spending so much money on such completely nonessential objects and refused. His son did not give up. In an often-quoted letter he wrote: