It’s been said that Nelson Rockefeller, who as a grown-up managed the opening of Rockefeller Center, the real estate colossus in Midtown Manhattan, liked to play with blocks as a boy: the ones between 49th and 55th Streets.
In fact, according to his most recent biographer, Richard Norton Smith, Nelson was “less concerned with Rockefeller Center’s commercial prospects than its artistic possibilities” (notwithstanding his eradication of a Diego Rivera mural there in 1934 after the artist defiantly superimposed a profile of Lenin).
Rockefeller, who was elected governor of New York four times and was Gerald R. Ford’s vice president, was infatuated with sui generis objects of art. He defined their value not by their provenance or price or the artist’s cachet, but simply by what he liked.
Inspired by Brasília, he created a new Capitol complex in Albany. He commissioned Picasso to produce tapestries, including one that hung in the boathouse of his vacation home in Seal Harbor, Maine, which he proudly showed off for visiting reporters after he was nominated to the vice presidency.
His first childhood love, he once said, was a marbled Bodhisattva — a figure of a Buddha — from the Tang Dynasty. (At his request, his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, left it to him in her will.) On his eighth birthday, he asked for Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, one of the few objects on his wish list that proved to be inaccessible; the 16th-century painting remains in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.
What his mother did for her trove of underappreciated American folk art by establishing a museum in Williamsburg, Va., as well as helping to found the Museum of Modern Art, Nelson Rockefeller did for Indigenous paintings and sculpture. He triggered a cultural revolution that elevated so-called primitive art from objects relegated to discreet ethnographic collections to their proper place as an integral component of global human creativity.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing originally opened in 1982, celebrating the arts and culture of Africa, the Pacific islands and the Americas. In 2013, introducing a yearlong celebration of Nelson’s artistic and cultural vision, the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell, acknowledged, belatedly, that the museum had embraced “a seismic shift” that “changed the direction of the museum radically.”
“For the very first time,” Campbell said, “the Met became truly global.”
Smith, who wrote “On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller” (2014), said in an interview, “I think he did as much to promote awareness of so-called primitive art as his mother did to make folk art respectable.”
On Saturday, after over four years of repurposing and reconfiguring, the $70 million renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum will reopen, supported by contributions from “the Rockefeller family and their affiliated philanthropies,” as the Met explains it.
The incandescent exhibition space and its contents prodigiously proclaim the fulfillment of a legacy that was inspired by Nelson’s mother. It was catalyzed by his first purchase of a carved wooden bowl in Hawaii on his honeymoon when he was 22 — the same age as Nelson’s son Michael when he traveled to what was then Dutch New Guinea for the first time in 1961 with a documentary film crew.
As much as the collection celebrates the incomplete career of Michael, a novice anthropologist who was lost on his second expedition to New Guinea later that year, it also salutes the steely determination of his fraternal twin sister, Mary Rockefeller Morgan, a psychotherapist who is the daughter of Nelson and his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, to preserve and display her family’s patrimony.
“I’m a watchdog for the family. and the world,” Morgan, who is a spry 87, said in an interview.
“Like Father and Michael before me, I have developed an emotional connection to Indigenous art,” she explained. “I love that this art so directly speaks to humanity’s most basic needs and desire for safety, power, order, beauty and meaning.”
A favorite example of “the art’s sophisticated patterns and echoing designs that often have symbolic meaning,” she said, is a 2,000-year-old wooden sculpture of a Mayan priest from Peru. “He kneels, hands clasped to his breast; his head is back, and his mouth is open,” she added. “To me, his face is filled with reverence and sheer awe of his gods. Whenever I see this ancient priest, I respond in stillness and with emotion. I am touched by Indigenous art’s honesty and receive it as intimacy.”
The 40,000-square-foot remodeled wing at the Met occupies the same footprint as the original, but feels more commodious and blazes with natural light. Its 1,726 artifacts represent about a quarter of the museum’s trove of Indigenous art, about a third of which was collected by Michael and Nelson Rockefeller.
But is the Met going against the grain by celebrating art from the Global South when “inclusion” has become a dirty word?
“We think of this as great art from three-quarters of the world,” said Alisa LaGamma, curator in charge of the Rockefeller Wing and a specialist in African art (Joanne Pillsbury and Maia Nuku have curated the Ancient Americas and Oceania collections, respectively). “We didn’t think of this as a diversity project.”
Provenance has been established. “We are not a colonial collecting institution,” LaGamma said. (The museum said that Michael typically traded tools and tobacco pouches for the artifacts he collected, which, since most were ceremonial, would otherwise have deteriorated or been destroyed.)
Smith, the biographer, suggested that the former governor’s attraction to primitive art might have been rooted in his dyslexia, a learning disorder that affects the ability to read, write and spell, which Michael and Mary inherited.
“With dyslexia comes a real visual sense of how objects are placed,” Mary said. Michael’s favorite painting was a whimsical collage by Georges Braque, she said, and recalled that her father once walked into Brooke Astor’s living room and, without missing a beat, began rearranging the furniture.
“I think Nelson saw parallels between Indigenous art and the abstract forms he was forever having to explain to the uninitiated,” Smith said. “Dyslexia may have been a factor in his enjoyment of both, but I think a greater influence was his globe-trotting for business as well as pleasure. Certainly his feelings for Latin America found expression in his collecting. Likewise, he showed interest in Africa in the 1950s, when most Americans were content to neglect the continent.”
Nelson once put it this way: “The more intellectual you get about art the less aesthetic you become.”
In 1954, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Indigenous Art in a townhouse on West 54th Street between his boyhood home and the Museum of Modern Art. (He changed the name to the Museum of Primitive Art only after too many people associated the name with “indigent” or “indigestion.”)
Nelson recruited Rene d’Harnoncourt (who later became the president of MoMA) and Robert Goldwater to curate the art bought from New York dealers or acquired on his forays abroad — beginning with the Hawaiian bowl and including a feathered Peruvian textile, a Yam Mask by the Abelam people of New Guinea and a whale carved in ivory from Tonga — as coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs in the early 1940s, which sought to strengthen U.S. influence in the region, and on his private philanthropic ventures.
Michael Rockefeller first traveled to southwest New Guinea as the technician recording sound for a documentary film by the Peabody Museum’s Harvard Film Study Center about the Asmat people who inhabited the uncharted jungles and rainforests of what they called “the land of lapping death.”
“Michael had never been happier than in the nine months he spent in New Guinea,” Nelson recalled.
But Mary wrote, in her wrenching memoir of losing a twin, “When Grief Calls Forth the Healing” (2014) that she had a premonition that the 1961 expedition would be perilous and that her brother would not survive.
“I was dead set against your decision to go to such a dangerous and remote place,” she wrote in a post-mortem paean. “Father championed the whole idea, so there was no way I could change your mind.”
She wondered, though, why Michael hadn’t rebelled when Nelson, a larger-than-life figure at home and in public, vetoed his intention to major in architecture at Harvard.
“God, I’m still getting out from under Father,” she wrote. “Is that part of what you were doing by going to New Guinea? An unspoken agenda — but with his blessing? I have to admit, it was perfect for you, perfect for finding out about yourself without the family and for exploring your love of art.”
Michael’s love of art brought him and Nelson “together in a special bond,” she wrote.
After coming home to the United States briefly in a vain attempt to dissuade his parents from divorcing, Michael returned to Dutch New Guinea to collect and meticulously catalog artifacts, including nine 20-foot-high Asmat ceremonial poles to honor their ancestors, a 49-foot-long longboat canoe and fertility figures, ancestors, gods and spirits carved from mangrove trees.
Michael had warned, though, that, “many of the villages have reached that point where they are beginning to doubt the worth of their own culture and crave things Western.” He wrote his uncle John: “There is a beauty in the simplicity and something compulsive about the way the Ndavi people have a grip on life” and recommended that Americans would benefit from the experience.
When his catamaran capsized 10 miles from the coast, near the mouth of the Eilanden River, he decided to swim to land. He disappeared, either drowned (the official explanation) or killed by the Asmat, who had been known to practice head-shrinking and cannibalism. A partner on the expedition, a Dutch anthropologist who couldn’t swim, was rescued from the boat 22 hours after Michael had dived in.
“I see now that you made your final choice, steeped in the Asmat environment where you’d found life and death exposed and intertwined with everyday reality,” Mary wrote.
She accompanied her father to New Guinea to search for Michael, but his body was never found. Three years later he was declared legally dead.
In 1974, after President Gerald R. Ford tapped Nelson as vice president, Mary became the last president of the Museum of Primitive Art. She also joined the board of the Met where she headed a joint committee that oversaw the transfer of the Rockefellers’ collection — including some 400 objects that Michael had collected and were shipped to Westchester and stored in the old milking barn at the family’s estate in Pocantico — to a new wing dedicated in his memory.
Prolonged negotiations between d’Harnoncourt and Thomas Hoving, the Met’s director, to transfer the collection to the museum had begun in the mid-1960s. In 1969, Nelson donated 1,400 artifacts, worth more than $20 million. He left the museum some 1,400 others valued at $5 million when he died in 1979.
The wing finally opened in 1982. After Mary’s fund-raising efforts and her insistence, supported by the museum’s own conservators, the vast glass curtain wall facing south has been screened to protect vulnerable objects from the sun.
“Father wanted that collection in the Met and the collection being there is the stamp of approval,” she said. “That wing being what it is today really impressed the world of the greatness of these art traditions.”
The 1982 version of the wing cost $8.8 million to build and $9.5 million more to install the exhibits. Financing was supplied partly by members of the Rockefeller family, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Vincent Astor Foundation and other donors.
The original catalog explained that describing the art as primitive was misleading. “The art is not crude or rough, nor were the social or intellectual structures of the people who made it,” the catalog said. “What then is primitive art? Properly it is the art of those peoples who have remained until recent times at an early technological level, who have been oriented toward the use of tools but not machines.”
The new wing, Mary Morgan said, finally represents closure to a devastating episode for the Rockefeller family.
“Michael and I were lost,” (he literally, she figuratively) Mary wrote, but “the thing that enabled us to accept Michael’s death was that life really continues in this gift that he brought back from New Guinea.
“I feel like the reopening of the wing is the fulfillment of father’s dream,” Mary said. “And Michael’s dream.”
Nelson never got to be president. Nor did Michael fulfill his dream of becoming a professional anthropologist. But if any proof were needed of their commitment to art for art’s sake it can be found in an alcove on the first floor of Kykuit, the Beaux-Arts mansion in Pocantico Hills that was home to four generations of Rockefellers and is now open to the public.
A 30-inch-tall sculpture that Michael made in high school, of galvanized iron wires protruding from a stone base, is prominently displayed there — along with works by Gilbert Stuart, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell and Picasso.
But it wasn’t merely parental pride. Mary Morgan recalls that when she was in the third grade, she crafted a wooden wastebasket. Nelson kept it in his dressing room on Fifth Avenue, and never showed it publicly.
“Father would not have put that there,” his twin said of Michael’s sculpture, “if he didn’t like it.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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