Art: Beautiful Doings

(5 of 5)

Considered by his friends to be the most lively and happy-go-lucky of his rigid grandfather's grandsons, Nelson has shared from childhood the artistic interests of his mother ("one of the most extraordinary persons I've ever met"). At Dartmouth, besides playing two years on the soccer team, he edited a magazine called The Five Arts. In 1930, he married hearty, charming Mary Todhunter Clark of Philadelphia, took her honeymooning around the world and settled in a big remodeled farmhouse near the golf course at Pocantico Hills. Since then they have had five children: Rodman, Ann, Steven and the twins, Michael and Mary, born last year.

In 1932 Nelson showed his independence and his taste by hiring his friend Diego Rivera to paint a fresco for Rockefeller Center. This turned into a famous, first-class educational incident for all concerned. When Rivera's great mural was destroyed—for the public reason that it contained a portrait of Lenin—the Rockefeller family suffered once more in the eyes of liberals, and Nelson, naturally, took the rap. At first he was strong for showing the mural, sins and all, at the Museum of Modern Art. Then he came around to his father's view that the less said and seen, the better.

Since then Nelson Rockefeller has thought of art, and now thinks of the Museum of Modern Art, as a quality of style that can just as well pervade as it can be at odds with modern commercial society. He is proud of the pioneer work the Museum has done, prouder that "last year our traveling shows were exhibited in over 250 cities and towns. . . ." He admires the great art collectors but has not emulated them. He buys sculpture for his desk (last week he had a woodcarving by William Steig), paintings for his walls, wishes that all men could do the same. As president, he wants to put the imaginative and lucid work of Alfred Barr and Co. into even greater circulation.