Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller's Sculpture Collection
Of the hundreds of works of art Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller collected, it was sculpture to which he was the most drawn. Between 1935 and the late 1970's, he assembled an extensive collection, and while Nelson Rockefeller made major gifts from his fine arts collection to museums, often anonymously, his finest sculptures, 120 objects, remain at Kykuit.
From both a historical and aesthetic point of view and because of the range and completeness of the collection, these sculptures are the most important part of the art collections at Kykuit. The collection includes works by those sculptors in Europe and the United States who are widely thought to have created some of the most original art of the twentieth century—Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, and David Smith. Nelson began to acquire many of these works after World War II, when most collectors remained preoccupied with painting, and he assembled works by both well known and little known sculptors. In the 1950's, when he purchased works by such sculptors as David Smith and Reg Butler, they were relatively obscure.
Governor Rockefeller once said, "I am more drawn to the plastic, three dimensional, than to pure line and color. I seriously considered being an architect when I was in college; perhaps my love for sculpture is related to my forgotten vocation." His mother stimulated his interest in art in 1929, when he was still a student at Dartmouth College , by taking Nelson to the avant garde galleries in downtown Manhattan . "If you start to cultivate your taste and eye so young," she once wrote Nelson, "you ought to be very good at it by the time you can afford to collect...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 same and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever age it springs from, whatever subject it represents."
Although his mother inspired Nelson to collect, two other people were important influences on him - Alfred H. Barr, Jr. who became first director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1929 at the age of twenty-seven, and Dorothy Miller, the museum's first curator of paintings. "From the start," Nelson wrote in 1969, "Alfred and Dorothy set standards, as those of us who shared their interests felt our way in these innovations of expression. They not only helped us to understand, but they gave us courage to make our own decisions." Rene d'Harnoncourt, another director of MoMA, was also one of Nelson's close advisors. It therefore comes as no surprise that Rockefeller's twentieth-century sculpture collection is absolutely complementary to MoMA'S.
Because it needs a place with space around it, sculpture often looks best on a site framed by architecture; garden settings are particularly ideal because they are intentionally created as spaces in which people experience and relate to the natural world and seek solace and renewal. At Kykuit, the house acts as a visual anchor for the collection of sculpture around it: visitors walk through various three-dimensional spaces -- enclosed gardens, terraces at different levels whose walls and hedges create volume, and garden pavilions and gazebos. Sculpture is fundamentally a physical presence; it creates a physical and psychological impression. In paintings, volume is only described on the surface of the canvas. Viewers cannot enter a painting as they can the space of a sculpture. Indeed, the presence of three-dimensional art can enliven the space around it. Bosworth certainly envisioned sculpture in this role when he created the Kykuit gardens, directly based on European Renaissance models in which sculpture was integral to the design.
Although Bosworth was enamored of the way sculpture was used in Italian gardens, it was Nelson Rockefeller who actually realized the concept at Kykuit. In the 1960's, when he began to place twentieth-century pieces around the grounds, he both continued a western tradition and was part of a movement that pioneered the sculpture garden in the United States . Moreover, most of his works were abstract, avant garde, modern, a remarkable departure from the classical legacy of the gardens themselves.
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