America's Medicis by Suzanne Loebl

Author:Suzanne Loebl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

Chapter 10

A Modest Man Assumes His Birthright: The Asia Society and Lincoln Center

THE ASIA SOCIETY

IN 2006, to celebrate its fiftieth birthday, the Asia Society mounted an exhibition entitled A Passion for Asia: The Rockefeller Family Collects.1 The shows—actually there were two consecutive ones—occupied two floors of the New York headquarters of the Society at Park Avenue and Sixty-ninth Street in Manhattan. Various institutions and members of the Rockefeller clan loaned the objects on display, and the exhibition combined great art with more mundane objects. Old photographs of interiors at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, the Eyrie, 740 Park Avenue, and Kykuit reminded visitors that the objects on display had been bought for private use. Visitors familiar with Rockefeller lore were informed of who had collected what, and what had been willed to whom. Objects had been subdivided into four separate sections: “Nourishing the Spirit” included photographs of Abby’s Buddha rooms and of related sculptures. “Home as Aesthetic Retreat” emphasized decorative arts and prints. “Landscape Design” illustrated the great Rockefeller gardens at Kykuit and Seal Harbor. “The Archival Room” documented Junior and Abby’s only trip to Asia and the history of the Asia Society.2

A large gilded Buddha from the Ming period (1368–1644) greeted visitors upon their arrival. This seated Amitabha Buddha, also known as Buddha of the Western Paradise, usually lives in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Maine, where it is paired with an almost identical Shakyamuni Buddha. The most famous of the Rockefellers’ Asian statues, the seventh-century Tang-period bodhisattva, which at one time greeted visitors in the entrance of their brownstone on Fifty-fourth Street, shared a gallery with other large statues.

The Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design sent a selection of Abby’s Utamaro and Hiroshige prints, and robes from the Lucy Truman Aldrich Textile Collection. Abby’s grandson Steven C. Rockefeller contributed a contemporary Japanese woodcut by Itō Shinsui of a traditionally clad young woman shown against a full moon. Steven, professor emeritus of history and religion at Middlebury College in Vermont, also lent a small ivory statuette of Guanyin with Child, from China’s fifteenth-century Ming period, which closely resembles a medieval European work, and a wooden cross, created by George Nakashima, the American modernist furniture maker. The simplicity and beauty of the finished artwork attests to the artist’s reverence for the life of the tree, and of his responsibility to justify its sacrifice.3 The Met loaned some of Junior’s Chinese porcelains and Kashyapa, a wooden polychrome figure from 1700 Korea, a gift from Abby Rockefeller. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV and Hope Aldrich, two of John 3rd and Blanchette’s children, sent an elaborate gilt-bronze Eleven-headed Lokeshvara encrusted with jewels, and a simple Buddha from Thailand.

The David Rockefellers had a particular liking for animal art and contributed a unicorn and a deer, from Nepal, dating from the thirteenth to fourteenth century CE, and an eighteenth-century Tureen and Cover in the Shape of a Goose they had inherited from their aunt Lucy. The most beautiful objects of the show, however, were favorites selected from the 285 pieces Mr.

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