91 ident of the MoMA board, he supported the innovative 1940 exhibit, Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, having personally traveled to Mexico for negotiations for the show. René d’Harnoncourt, who had lived in Mexico for many years and had been seriously involved with its art both ancient and modern, became a consultant and friend to Rockefeller. During World War II Rockefeller traveled widely in Latin America promoting commercial and cultural relations among the nations of the Western Hemisphere for the Office of Inter-American Affairs. He was, as a New Yorker profile of 1942 put it, “this country’s accredited lover of Central and South America.”2 In 1949, Rockefeller, with d’Harnoncourt’s consultation, began a serious program of acquisition from established art dealers in New York and Los Angeles that included American Indian and Precolumbian works of art. Advisors such as Junius Bird and Gordon Ekholm, archaeologists at the American Museum of Natural History, added substantial experience to Rockefeller’s and d’Harnoncourt’s enthusiasm for ancient American antiquities. Numerous American works were part of the first exhibit to be drawn from the Rockefeller Collection, Primitive Sculpture from the Collection of Nelson A. Rockefeller, shown in New York at the Century Association in 1953 (figs. 19 and 20). As the 1950s progressed into the 1960s, past the opening of the MPA, acquisitions of Precolumbian art continued. A number of Maya works of particular note were added to the collection and these remain unparalleled in museums in the United States. A rare, elegant seated figure of wood and a relief sculpture with intact painted surface both from the tropical Maya lowlands of Mexico/ Guatemala were acquired in 1962. A major work of Olmec sculptural ceramics (fig. 21) became the focus of a special exhibition in 1965, The Jaguar’s Children: Pre- Classic Central Mexico, where the figure was featured on the cover of the catalog (fig. 22) written by noted archaeologist Michael D. Coe. Peruvian antiquities were not neglected either. The last important purchase of Precolumbian art before the transfer of the Rockefeller Collection to the Metropolitan was that of metal objects that make up the Loma Negra find. Works of gold, silver, and copper—functionally varied from personal ornaments to embellishments for textiles deriving from what is now known to be from an important burial (or burials) in the far north of Peru—were a fitting cap on the Rockefeller years of collecting Precolumbian art. NOTES 1. From a letter to Julio C. Tello, dated May 21, 1937. Division of Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History. 2. Geoffrey T. Hellman. “Profiles: Best Neighbor—I.” The New Yorker, April 11, 1942. FIG. 21: Seated figure. Olmec, Mexico. 12th–9th century BCE. Ceramic, cinnabar, red ochre. H: 34 cm. The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979. 1979.206.1134. FIG. 22: Cover of The Jaguar’s Children: Pre-Classic Central Mexico. New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1965. The Robert Goldwater Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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