Abby Aldrich Rockefeller

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Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (born October 26, 1874 in Providence , Rhode Island as Abigail Greene Aldrich , † April 5, 1948 in New York City ) was a well -known American patroness , art collector and co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Life

family

Abby Aldrich was born to the influential Republican Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and Abigail Pearce Truman Chapman (1845-1917). In 1891, at the age of 17, she enrolled in Miss Abbott's School for Young Ladies in Providence, where she studied languages ​​and art history until 1893. On June 30, 1894, she embarked for Liverpool , the beginning of a four-month journey through Europe. Back in Providence that fall, she met her future husband, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , the only son of wealthy oil industrialist John D. Rockefeller . After a lengthy engagement period, the couple finally married on October 9, 1901. The wedding was considered "the wedding of the Golden Age " and was a major social event to which about a thousand dignitaries and personalities were invited to the summer home of the Aldrich family in Kent County .

After the wedding, the couple moved to Manhattan . Together they had a daughter and five sons ("Rockefeller Brothers"). The family formed the second generation of the Rockefeller dynasty :

Patronage

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was a supporter of Société Anonyme Inc. , an artists' association founded in 1920 by Katherine S. Dreier , with whom Rockefeller was friends, and Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New York. From 1925 she began collecting paintings, watercolors and drawings by a number of contemporary American artists including Edward Hopper , Charles Demuth and Maurice Prendergast , as well as European modernists including Paul Cézanne , Edgar Degas , André Derain , Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Camille Pissarro and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . In her apartment on 54th Strasse, which she had furnished in the Art Deco style, she showed her collection under the name Topside Gallery and her contacts a. a. The art connoisseur and gallery owner Edith Gregor Halpert (1900–1970) quickly made her a prominent supporter of modern art and contemporary artists in the United States.

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was next to Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan (1877-1939) one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. If Abby Aldrich Rockefeller could not hope for financial support from her husband, who was not interested in contemporary art, she built up a supporting network of companies and prominent individuals to secure the financing of ongoing operations and purchases. On November 7, 1929, the museum was opened under the direction of Alfred Barr .

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller was an elected member of the Board of Trustees, Vice-President (1934-1936) and first Vice-Chairwoman (1941-1945). In 1935 she donated 181 paintings and drawings to the museum; 1939 36 sculptures and 45 works of American folk art. Between 1940 and 1946 around 1700 prints were added from their collection; some collection items also went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , The Cloisters and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum .

Her son Nelson, Vice President of the United States from 1974 to 1977 , became a very active collector of modern art. He continued his mother's commitment to the Museum of Modern Art and a number of other museums.

assignments

Facilities

  • The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden was planned by Philip Johnson as a sculpture garden for the Museum of Modern Art in 1953 and redesigned by Yoshio Taniguchi in 2004 .
  • The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Print Room in the Museum of Modern Art contains a collection of more than 1,700 Rockefeller prints that she donated to the museum in the 1940s.
  • The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Gallery , in the Rhode Island School of Design Museum , has been showing Japanese woodcuts from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller collection since 1953 .
  • The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg is the nation's premier center for the research, preservation and exhibition of American folk art and holds the extensive collection of Abby Rockefeller, who was particularly interested in folk art.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kathleen Thompson: Edith Gregor Halpert in: Jewish Women's Archive
  2. ^ The Rockefeller Archive Center
  3. ↑ A Modern Garden: The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art Museum of Modern Art, New York 2007
  4. ↑ Introduction to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden (audio)
  5. ↑ Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Gallery ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the RISD Museum @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / risdmuseum.org
  6. ↑ Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum
  7. ↑ Beatrix T. Rumford; Carolyn J.Weekley: Treasures of American Folk Art from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center . Boston 1989

literature

  • Bernice Kert: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family, with an introduction by David Rockefeller , Random House, 2003
  • Kathleen D. McCarthy: Women's culture: American philanthropy and art, 1830-1930, University of Chicago Press, 1992

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Aldrich Rockefeller, Abby
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Greene Aldrich, Abigail; Aldrich Rockefeller, Abigail; Rockefeller, Abby
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American patroness and co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Providence , Rhode Island
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 1948
Place of death New York City