Multi-billionaire Nelson Rockefeller was early on involved with art, as a fact more influential than the stars he sponsored, a major patron of the abstract expressionists fifty-sixty years ago. His career is archived for the public and would print out in volumes, interests and accomplishments beyond horizons I can’t conceive, achieved with a ruthlessness one might expect from a great baron. I only know him as an artist.
He was there to deliver a groin kick to all of art in the person of Diego Rivera back in the early thirties. Rivera had become the figure-head of a movement which depicted the way things were for common people, and it made the extremely rich uncomfortable. They commissioned a fresco for the Rockefeller Center, allowed Diego and his assistants to work on it day and night for months, paid his fee and then covered the mural, allowing no photographs to be taken by anyone. Before it had been seen it was jackhammered down and hauled away in wheel barrels, and if you think you’ve seen it, it’s because Diego painted it again in Mexico. He had walked into their trap, plying his vanity and with his leftist credentials at stake, they intended this ‘cultural vandalism’ all along, the way it looks to me. They then began a campaign to disparage the representational mode of painting altogether as being too easy, too pedestrian, too commercial to possibly be interesting. ‘We have better things to do with our time than to go around copying nature,‘ became their brusque refrain.
Big abstracts went up in large banks and government buildings while Rockefeller was governor of New York, and representational art was banned from the kingdom, problem solved. The ability of progressive artists to influence common thought had been eliminated without the obvious drawbacks of direct censorship, even though the culture had lost its feelers like a lobster in a tank. But Nelson eventually got old, played with the grandkids, spent time on his boat, and he softened as he reminisced, began to feel guilty. Then he did something very strange.
He opened a gallery on 57th to sell state-of-the-art reproductions of his own collection, old masters don’t you know. Seems the the abstractionists never quite made it to over the mantel up at the old home place. One would guess he had become concerned with the drift in culture toward non-consequential things, and had the ego to feel somehow responsible. To make amends he decided to offer two centuries old dutch paintings of rich guys like himself to tourists, thinking he could restore their humanity at least a mite. The family must have nodded and smiled.
Wiki says -- In 1977 he founded Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., (NRC) an art reproduction company that produced and sold licensed reproductions of selected works from Rockefeller's collection. In the introduction to the NRC catalog he stated he was motivated by his desire to share with others "the joy of living with these beautiful objects."
That’s all they’ll say about it, his odd aesthetic u-turn, but we can bet he didn’t do it for the money. I was surprised at the time that this great champion of living artists would open a gallery of reproductions just up the street to compete with them, but it was only his own legacy that filled his mind late.
He was there to deliver a groin kick to all of art in the person of Diego Rivera back in the early thirties. Rivera had become the figure-head of a movement which depicted the way things were for common people, and it made the extremely rich uncomfortable. They commissioned a fresco for the Rockefeller Center, allowed Diego and his assistants to work on it day and night for months, paid his fee and then covered the mural, allowing no photographs to be taken by anyone. Before it had been seen it was jackhammered down and hauled away in wheel barrels, and if you think you’ve seen it, it’s because Diego painted it again in Mexico. He had walked into their trap, plying his vanity and with his leftist credentials at stake, they intended this ‘cultural vandalism’ all along, the way it looks to me. They then began a campaign to disparage the representational mode of painting altogether as being too easy, too pedestrian, too commercial to possibly be interesting. ‘We have better things to do with our time than to go around copying nature,‘ became their brusque refrain.
Big abstracts went up in large banks and government buildings while Rockefeller was governor of New York, and representational art was banned from the kingdom, problem solved. The ability of progressive artists to influence common thought had been eliminated without the obvious drawbacks of direct censorship, even though the culture had lost its feelers like a lobster in a tank. But Nelson eventually got old, played with the grandkids, spent time on his boat, and he softened as he reminisced, began to feel guilty. Then he did something very strange.
He opened a gallery on 57th to sell state-of-the-art reproductions of his own collection, old masters don’t you know. Seems the the abstractionists never quite made it to over the mantel up at the old home place. One would guess he had become concerned with the drift in culture toward non-consequential things, and had the ego to feel somehow responsible. To make amends he decided to offer two centuries old dutch paintings of rich guys like himself to tourists, thinking he could restore their humanity at least a mite. The family must have nodded and smiled.
Wiki says -- In 1977 he founded Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., (NRC) an art reproduction company that produced and sold licensed reproductions of selected works from Rockefeller's collection. In the introduction to the NRC catalog he stated he was motivated by his desire to share with others "the joy of living with these beautiful objects."
That’s all they’ll say about it, his odd aesthetic u-turn, but we can bet he didn’t do it for the money. I was surprised at the time that this great champion of living artists would open a gallery of reproductions just up the street to compete with them, but it was only his own legacy that filled his mind late.
1 comment:
In the whole of art history, the 20th Century is an enormous aberration that tried to turn its back on all that came before it leaving mostly a wide swath (is there any other kind?) of destruction in its wake.
Having said that, I see hope in the academies and ateliers that have sprung up in the last fifteen years or so. I also see hope in places like the University of Alabama at Birmingham where a fellow 1980's Berea College art major named Gary Chapman became head of their art department and teaches the kind of painting classes we would have killed for as students. He unites the hearts,minds and the hands of his students in such a way that show to me that the damage Nelson Rockefeller and others like him did was not lasting. Rockefeller may have worried about his legacy at the end, but in my opinion, it didn't matter because artists would find and teach again what was nearly lost. I figure it will take our local scene at least twenty or thirty years to catch up but fortunately there is a world outside of that one.
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