83 FIG. 3: Queen mother pendant mask, iyoba. Edo peoples, court of Benin, Nigeria. 16th century. Ivory, iron, copper (?). H: 23.8 cm. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1972. 1978.412.323. South Sea Islands, and African art. The year of his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1930, Rockefeller became a member of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA). The catalyst for MoMA’s establishment the year before had been the Metropolitan’s lack of interest in avant-garde art. Rockefeller in turn advocated for the Metropolitan’s engagement with another notable absence, Precolumbian art, although his lobbying efforts were thwarted by director Herbert Winlock. With the encouragement of René d’Harnoncourt, Rockefeller went on to conceive of founding a cultural organization devoted to those artistic traditions absent at MMA. The scope of this museological salon des refusés was vast, encompassing a diverse array of culturally distinct non-Western art traditions. In its initial 1954 charter this pioneering venture was named The Museum of Indigenous Art. Located in a townhouse adjoining Rockefeller’s boyhood home directly across from MoMA at 15 West 54th street, it came to be renamed The Museum of Primitive Art (MPA) (fig. 1). For more than two decades the MPA assembled a seminal collection of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas (AAOA). Co-founder and vice president d’Harnoncourt advised Rockefeller on pursuing that goal and on recruiting art historian Robert Goldwater as director. Goldwater in turn oversaw an extensive program of landmark exhibitions that introduced these traditions to the art world. Before his death in 1968, d’Harnoncourt oversaw the brokering of an agreement with MMA director Thomas Hoving for the creation of an AAOA department that was to encompass the MPA’s holdings as well as Rockefeller’s personal objects. This was announced in 1969 (fig. 2). When the MPA closed in December 1974, 3,500 artworks along with its library and staff were transferred to the MMA. Rockefeller died before the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, dedicated to the memory of his son, opened to the public in 1982. Sixty years after his founding of the MPA, Rockefeller’s vision of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas occupying a key role at the Metropolitan has allowed what he considered to be a great institution to fulfill the promise of its mission. Throughout his life Rockefeller was a passionate collector of art across many different fields. He was especially responsive to sculpture as a medium of expression and once noted “I’m interested in the strength, the vitality of it, the fact that you can touch it.” His collection of modern art was extensive but highly personalized. In contrast, his method for assembling works of art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas was systematic and professionalized, and from the beginning it was categorized as fine art. This emphasis on aesthetic quality was the institutional criterion that defined the MPA. Curator Douglas Newton noted that, unlike other museums of the day that privileged ethnological or anthropological interests for their collecting, “We look for quality within each element— the best of everything.” Beginning in 1957, Goldwater began providing Rockefeller with a steady stream of carefully considered memos regarding recommended purchases. Prior to sending these formal rationales for acquisitions, he reviewed them with d’Harnoncourt. Among the most expansive of these was a proposal dated December 31, 1957, making the case for his acquisition of the ivory pendant mask from the court of Benin that is among the MMA’s most celebrated masterpieces (fig. 3). In his brief, Goldwater argued for its superiority to the celebrated example in the British Museum: “I believe this mask surpasses it in delicacy of workmanship and penetration of expression. It is thus the best object of its kind known, nor will any others ever turn up.” In arguing for its transformative importance to the MPA collection he compared it to what was then one of the most recognizable works in MoMA’s collection, a painting by Henri Rousseau: “The purchase of this mask would give the museum a permanent, primary attraction—a popular masterpiece. It is one of those objects that ‘has to be seen’ by scholars, art lovers, and the public alike. As René has suggested, it is the kind of object that would … have to be put permanently on view; like the Sleeping Gypsy of primitive art.” On September 17, 1958, the New York Times announced the MPA’s unveiling of the Benin pendant mask acquired by Rockefeller for a record price. For Goldwater this singular acquisition came to “crystallize a policy.” From this time forward he recommended that the MPA mission be that of “A museum organized around permanent exhibition galleries where outstanding masterpieces of each area will be continuously accessible to the public and other galleries with changing exhibitions.” The following year, on November 2, 1959, Goldwater wrote to Rockefeller that they were to be presented with the opportunity to select works of interest from the “legendary” collection of the sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein before it was dispersed at auction. He prioritized a single work of inestimable importance: the Fang head from a reliquary ensemble known as “The Great Bieri” (fig. 4).
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