From Hawai’i, to New Guinea, to New York By Eric Kjellgren, Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art Nelson Rockefeller’s collection of the arts of Africa, Oceania, 88 and the Americas began with an Oceanic work—a Hawaiian bowl that he purchased in Hawai’i during a round-the-world honeymoon trip in 1930. Recalling the acquisition years later, he reflected on the immediate appeal and lifelong passion it engendered: “I couldn’t resist it,” he wrote, “and I still get great satisfaction from the shape of the bowl, the grain of the wood, and the warm, soft patina that came from centuries of loving care.” Later in the trip, he purchased three more objects while traveling through Indonesia. Although he undoubtedly would have seen the works in René d’Harnoncourt’s landmark exhibition Arts of the South Seas at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, for much of the 1930s and 1940s, Rockefeller focused almost exclusively on the arts of the Americas. By 1949, Rockefeller again began purchasing Oceanic objects, including a masterfully rendered hair ornament from the Biwat people of New Guinea (fig. 13). Worn as an element of personal attire at dances and religious ceremonies, it is a consummate expression of one of the rarest and most highly sought-after traditions within Melanesian wood sculpture and it remains a vital work within the Metropolitan’s presentation of the arts of New Guinea. Rockefeller continued to add Oceanic works to the collection: In 1953, just prior to the formation of the MPA, he purchased an extraordinary and exceedingly rare figure from Mangareva (fig. 16), which almost singlehandedly elevated his Oceanic collection to international importance. Following the 1954 founding of the MPA, Rockefeller’s Oceanic collection grew rapidly. Furthered by the appointment of Douglas Newton as assistant curator in 1957, the discerning eyes of Goldwater and d’Harnoncourt, backed by Rockefeller’s financial support, saw the acquisition of many of the MPA’s greatest Oceanic masterworks, including an ivory figure from Tonga in 1957 (fig. 15). Probably representing a powerful female deity, the figure served as a supernatural vessel in which the power of the divinity resided during ceremonies. One of only roughly a dozen known, its expressiveness and sense of movement elevate it above other examples of the genre and it remains one of the most iconic works in the Metropolitan’s Oceanic collection. In the 1960s, the MPA began to acquire objects directly in their countries of origin, most famously the collection FIG. 13: Hair ornament, manyan. Biwat people, Yuat River, lower Sepik region, Papua New Guinea. Late 19th– early 20th century. Wood, paint, shell, fiber. H: 40.3 cm. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.1458. of Asmat art assembled by Rockefeller’s son, Michael C. Rockefeller. In 1961, Michael Rockefeller made two trips to the Asmat region of New Guinea, acquiring more than 600 works and meticulously documenting and photographing Asmat art, artists, and cultural practices before his tragic death on the 18th of November of that year. The following year, the MPA organized the exhibition The Art of the Asmat, New Guinea: Collected by Michael C. Rockefeller, which presented the collection along with a selection of his photographs. Mounted in a specially constructed pavilion in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, the installation was designed to evoke the original settings of the works (fig. 14). It was followed in 1967 by the publication of The Asmat of New Guinea: The Journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller, containing many of his photographs, writings, and a fully illustrated catalog of the works. Newton also collected in New Guinea, concentrating on the Sepik River region, and made a number of important acquisitions, including a group of early wood figures from the Inyai-Ewa people of the upper Korewori River, a tradition that had just recently become known in the West when he purchased them in 1964 (fig. 17). Back in New York, the MPA continued to acquire Oceanic works on the art market. When the museum’s holdings, along with the works still held privately by Rockefeller, were transferred to the Metropolitan in 1978 and 1979, the Oceanic collection had grown to nearly 1,500 works. Today, many of the MPA’s Oceanic works on view in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing remain enduring icons within the Metropolitan’s Oceanic collection—a lasting tribute to Nelson Rockefeller’s vision for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas and Michael Rockefeller’s passion for Asmat art. Precolumbian Art, the Beginning Years By Julie Jones, Curator Emeritus Nelson Rockefeller’s adventures in Latin America and the inception of his interest in Precolumbian America began with a trip to Mexico in 1933, when he visited the country, seeing Maya ruins and “studying its cultural life.” Three years later he was in South America, first in Venezuela, where family business took him, and then in Peru, where its “tremendous archaeological richness fired his imagination and interest.”1 While there, he met the noted Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello, who at the time was engaged with the disposition of hundreds of mummy bundles from the important necropolis on the Paracas Peninsula in the south of Peru. In return for fi- ART on view
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