Rockefeller And The Good Oil From Asia

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 3, 1999

BRUCE JAMES

Wary of the limelight but cashed up and ready to go, John D. Rockefeller 3rd had an all-consuming interest in Asian art. He founded the pioneering Asia Society in New York in the fifties, and his legacy has now come to Sydney

TREASURES OF ASIAN ART: SELECTIONS FROM THE MR. & MRS. JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 3RD COLLECTION OF THE ASIA ART SOCIETY, NEW YORK.

Art Gallery of New South Wales to 15 August.

FROM Alexander the Great to the grey little Bill Gates, the psychology of acquisition is a subject of some fascination. Art collecting, as an unadulterated distillation of the instinct to possess, is transfixing.

Collectors themselves figure strongly in the publicity surrounding any exhibitions of their holdings. Generally speaking, the richer the individual, the greater the curiosity about their psychological makeup.

Turning to my own comments a fortnight ago about Sara Lee's founding CEO, Nathan Cummings, I took several stabs at the sources of his motivation. Faced with his conspicuous expenditure on such contradictory artworks, I wanted to understand the man - and to understand him as a man.

Cummings was only modestly flush, so my comments remained superficial. However, with the mega-rich American, Paul Mellon, whose collection of British art at Yale University toured Australian States a couple of years ago, press speculations ran riot, including mine.

Mellon's impulses were born of a provincial's desire for class certification and cultural prestige.

It wasn't enough to say that a love of horses drove him to collect George Stubbs, or that his interest in Van Dyck's sitters reflected a humanist bias. In both cases, Mellon consciously strove to construct an aristocratic aura around himself.

Snobbery played a part. It was sufficiently informed by connoisseurship not to offend good manners, or the born-to-rule high breeding he admired in his Cambridge classmates, but it was snobbery. The swagger portraits and Adam ceilings of the English horsey set were integral to Mellon's inventory of mental furniture - to his personality.

His home was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; his heart was in the home counties. My own experience of collectors, in all but one exceptional firsthand instance, is workaday journalistic. Figures such as Australia's James Fairfax or Switzerland's Ernst Beyeler, to put forward a contrasting pair, make themselves available for press conferences, and one-on-one interviews with reporters, in the uncomfortable awareness they'll receive as much analysis as their artistic acquisitions. Inevitably, to gather an art collection of any significance or size is to make oneself an exhibit in it.

In Fairfax's case, he thwarts ultimate exposure by gifting his Australian and European Old Master works in judicious parcels to public institutions. Not all collectors put journos off the psychological scent in this fashion.

Like many of their peers, James Agapitos and Ray Wilson, the Sydney-based collectors of Australian surrealist and irrational art, have become inseparable from the paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs around them. The Gleesons, Dupains, Nolans, Eberts, Klippels, Tuckers, Friedebergers, Mareks, Thakes, Purves Smiths, Feints and Heckroths that distinguish the walls of their Alex Popov-designed residence contribute to a bold, collective self portrait. (A declaration of interest: it has been my privilege to advise the Agapitos/Wilson Collection in a curatorial capacity for many years.)

Increasingly, as the importance of the collection grows, the house and its contents have been made available for scholarly and charitable purposes, as have the uncomplaining, public-spirited owners. When their collection achieves the institutional destiny intended for it, either by exhibition-related loan or permanent placement, you can be sure that this personable duo will be as scrutinised as any Fairfax or Beyeler. The why, when and where of their chronicle of collecting will be under the microscope - an examination I'm confident they'll endure with aplomb. I'm equally persuaded they'll survive the psychic probing as well.

An exhibition currently at S. H. Ervin Gallery, to be reviewed in these pages next week, puts the spotlight on an earlier generation of local collectors. The Innovators 1963-1978: Collectors Who Shaped Sydney's Avant-Garde explores the Australian art market of the '60s and '70s through the private collections of several indispensable art dealers of the period.

The habits and taste of Rudy Komon, Anne Lewis, Chandler Coventry, Geoffrey and Alex Legge, Frank Watters and Clive Evatt are examined by way of the works of the artists they championed.

An extensive program of lectures and floor talks runs in parallel to the show.

All very well, you say, but what about the Rockefellers? Synonymous with 20th-century capitalist affluence on the grandest scale, the Rockefeller family name has entered popular culture in song lyrics and cinematic asides. In terms of art and art benefaction, it's almost as prominent as Guggenheim.

Actually, it's hard to keep track of the various Rockefeller individuals and their cultural activities. David and Peggy, for example, collected Impressionist and early Modern paintings throughout the 50-plus years of their married life, finally offering the fruits of their partnership as a promised bequest to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

These extraordinary works were previewed at the museum in 1994, including that quintessential Cezanne, Still Life with Fruit Dish, 1879-80, once owned by Gauguin, himself a collector of considerable historical note.

The artist/collector, of course, embodies a special category of collecting, as the examples of Gauguin, and more remarkably of Edgar Degas, prove. Degas was in the happy position of besting Gauguin by collecting Gauguins, along with superlative Manets, Cezannes and prints by Japanese masters.

Meanwhile, the cashed-up, art-loving Rockefellers collected them all. David Rockefeller's mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had joined with a small circle of wealthy, cultivated associates to create MOMA, ground up, in 1929. For his own part, he enjoyed two successive terms as chairman of the museum's board of trustees, and was elected chairman emeritus on his retirement.

For all his money, power and influence, perhaps because of it, David managed to remain an unassuming and publicity-shy character. His brother, John D. Rockefeller 3rd, was similarly wary of the limelight. With his wife, Blanchette, he pursued an early, all-consuming interest in Asian art and artefacts, beginning with ceramics, then moving to objects and legitimate sculpture, his abiding passion.

He founded the pioneering Asia Society in New York in the mid-fifties. Its aim was to broaden understanding between Asian and American people, and to expand channels of communication; a prophetic and enlightened brief in the chill interregnum between World War II and the Vietnam War.

An aspect of cultural diplomacy, therefore, attached to John D. Rockefeller 3rd's collection from the start, and this aspect is by no means absent from the present exhibition of masterworks from his collection at the Art Gallery of NSW. Treasures of Asian Art: Selections from the Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of the Asia Society, New York dispatches 85 of the 285 works given to the Asia Society by this Rockefeller. It arrives in Australia on the occasion of the second anniversary of the AustralAsia Centre, the newest of five regional centres established by the Asia Society in key locations around the world.

Launched by the Prime Minister, John Howard, in May 1997, and based in Melbourne, the centre refers to itself as "an independent, private philanthropic foundation which receives all its financial support from Mobil Corporation". Out of the mouths of babes is the expression that comes to mind, but I reckon it's too cuddly by half. Continuing in this butter-wouldn't-melt vein, the centre asserts to promote awareness in Australia and New Zealand concerning Asian culture and society, and to inject "an Australian and New Zealand perspective into the Asia Society's approach to regional issues of importance".

I am still wondering, even now, what such a thing as an Australian and New Zealand perspective might be, apart from a two-headed, flightless hybrid of the corporate imagination. It sounds idealistic. So does the press release from this exhibition's principal sponsor - surprise, surprise, Mobil.

"Sponsoring an exhibition like this is a great way for a global company like Mobil to use its international resources to put something back into local communities," claims the company's chairman and managing director, Mr P. C. Tan; and probably correctly so.

More problematic are the uncredited statements that follow: "The Rockefeller Collection, in particular, is close to Mobil's heart. The Rockefeller family, through the creation of Standard Oil Company in the 1870s, laid the foundation for the current day Mobil Corporation. In addition, Mobil has a long association with the Asia Society New York, formed by John D. Rockefeller 3rd in 1956, and is a founding member of the AustralAsia centre of the Asia Society."

Don't any of these highfalutin' pronouncements derive from hard-nosed ambitions to shift product and make profit in the lucrative Asian market? And if so, why not shout it from the pagoda tops plainly and proudly? Mimicking altruism is not the cleverest party trick capitalism performs. Make money by all means it should do, and fund artistic projects with the proceeds if it wants to do. But demand sainthood in return it shouldn't do.

None of this takes away from the quality of the exhibition, which I accept is very high; or from corporate sponsorship itself, which I wholly support. In fact, work for work, Treasures of Asian Art gives every indication of ranking in artistic excellence with last year's Indian omnibus, Dancing to the Flutes.

If it lacks the specialisation, and the attendant depth of representation, of that show, or even its modernist Japanese equivalent at the same venue, Modern Boy Modern Girl, that cannot be taken as a sign of anything but a difference in focus. It's an oranges-and-apples comparison.

In essence, the Rockefeller ensemble is an exquisite corsage, a bouquet of masterpieces. It ranges across the complex field of Asian art selectively, not encyclopedically, plucking the form of a Thai Bodhisattva here or a Japanese Arita dish there, more from the point of view of unmediated aesthetic response than considered historical significance, though that significance is assuredly there.

For the lay viewer, for anyone not deeply tutored in the multifarious schools of Hindu, Buddhist and other pictorial practice, it's an easier way to experience the subject than the all-stops-out museological approach.

And there's also that sense of the exhibits having been an intimate part of someone's, a couple's, erstwhile domestic life.

Before they assumed the display cases and plinths of the Asia Society, they were objects in a private interior, somewhat humbler in function perhaps, but no less evocative for that. Certainly they spoke of their cultural origins in China, Japan, Thailand, India, Tibet, Nepal, Cambodia and Korea - a vital communication they continue to make - but they also spoke of the living man and woman who collected them in a city of silver towers in the West.

It's probably this that Australians will hear most, and most want to hear. Mr and Mrs Rockefeller's collections are spaciously installed, allowing for unimpeded scrutiny. The Asia Society can rest easy that Sydney has treated their rarities with professional and personal respect.

In most instances, statuary can be viewed fully in the round. Some vessels are mirrored to permit the display of otherwise hidden facets of design and decoration.

Lighting is clear, unfussy and serviceable. A subtly oriental mise en scene has been pursued via the placement of partitions, alcoves and contemplative spaces. Musical soundtracks, in the main Indian in derivation as I recall, issue from under- amplified speakers. As usual, a video monitor intrudes.

It occurred to me as I was doing it that to stare in bug-eyed amazement at the Bodhisattva Kshitigarbha, carved from cypress wood in the Japanese Kamakura period, and magnificently crisp after almost 800 years, is probably extremely vulgar.

The gravity of Kamakura religious and philosophical systems of thought, and of Asian artistic production as a whole, is trivialised by our modern conventions of spectatorship. So is the gravity of the Parthenon marbles. It's pointless to fret about it.

Speaking of vulgarity, and at the risk of committing it myself, can I suggest a name change for the show? Treasures of Asian Art: Selections from the Mr & Mrs John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of the Asia Society, New York, for all its class, isn't a title calculated to attract the audience this enterprise deserves. Too polite. Too general. Too tame.

Try The Rockefeller Hoarde: Contents of a Manhattan Penthouse Revealed. Or John D's Squillions: From Buddha to Broadway. How about Asian Art, American Royalty, Mobil Oil?