(See front cover) Any exhibit opening in the wake of the enormously popular van Gogh show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was bound to begin with an initial handicap. As if this were not enough, the Museum's discreet directors last week placed two additional handicaps upon the first comprehensive showing of one of its finest gift collections, simply because the Museum's principal benefactor happens to have a great name and a great modesty. Handicap No. 1 was encountered on the first floor in the form of a gigantic portrait of beefy, bewhiskered Henry Hobson Richardson (see p. 29) and an exhibition of that architect's work. The second floor was given over entirely to the flaming posters of A. Mouron Cassandre, French advertising artist who produced the chunky little man who drinks Dubonnet all over the world. Only those long of wind and strong of purpose who clumped up to the third and fourth floors were rewarded with the sight of 127 paintings, water colors and drawings by most of the best known names in modern painting, collected during the past ten years by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr. Because the name of Rockefeller had been successfully minimized in the papers, comment on the exhibition was limited to a few desultory paragraphs. It deserved more, since Mrs. Rockefeller's gift, designed to supplement the collection bequeathed by her good friend Lizzie P. Bliss,* has made the Museum of Modern Art one of the greatest collections of modern painting in the world.
Probably no person of great wealth has done more for living U. S. artists than Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. But her purchases are now all regulated by the trustees of Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Mrs. Rockefeller is not yet incorporated as an impersonal buying agency. The prizes she offers, the pictures she acquires and the gifts she makes are all done with such skillful reticence that few recognize her for what she undoubtedly is: the outstanding individual patron of living artists in the U. S.
Grocer-Senator. Born 61 years ago in Providence, R. I., Abby Greene Aldrich Rockefeller has known great wealth and its power all her life. Her father, the late Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, onetime grocer, was probably the richest man ever to enter the U. S. Senate. When he died in 1915 he left a fortune of over $30,000,000 largely made out of banking, sugar, rubber, public utilities, tractions. But Nelson Aldrich was also one of the most potent men ever to enter the Senate. With Platt of Connecticut, Spooner of Wisconsin and Allison of Iowa, he practically ran the country from 1897 to 1905 when the quartet broke publicly with Roosevelt I. In 1909, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, he was co-author of the notorious Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act which cost the Republicans the House of Representatives in the 1910 election. After 30 years in his seat Senator Aldrich retired in 1911.
All these years his daughter had to listen to almost continuous public attacks on the way her father made his money, his love of display, his "secret government" of the U. S. It gave her a lifelong horror of publicity and all forms of ostentation. In 1901 Abby Aldrich married a young man who thought the same way about great wealth for the same reasons. His name was John D. Rockefeller Jr.