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The Rockefeller children—Abby, John D. Ill, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, David—have been brought up with Spartan simplicity and considerably less pocket money than most of their classmates. Mrs. Rockefeller has never bothered to own a diamond tiara or a box at the opera. She likes to do her own shopping, and she does most of it on foot.
Senator Aldrich bought many an expensive picture in his lifetime. The senior Rockefeller, though never a great collector, felt impelled from time to time to acquire extremely expensive pieces of Oriental art. The junior Rockefeller has limited his own artistic purchases to fine tapestries and sculpture, possibly because the collecting of paintings is so common with the kind of rich man that he dislikes most.
What started Mrs. Rockefeller buying modern art was the famed Armory Show of 1913, held in Manhattan's 69th Regiment Armory, which introduced modern French painting to the U. S. President and guiding spirit of the Armory Show was the gentle and reserved Arthur B. Davies, painter of ethereal nudes, wearer of excruciatingly stiff collars. Artist Davies was a great & good friend of Miss Lizzie Bliss. Before the exhibition closed he had persuaded Miss Bliss to buy a Renoir, two Degas and two Redons. Through her friend Mrs. Rockefeller also became interested in modern art, finally began to buy canvases and drawings pointed out to her by the long pale fingers of Arthur B. Davies.
Three Ways— There are three ways to be a collector. Caring nothing about art, one can buy famed rarities at great prices as the cheapest and quickest method of getting a reputation for culture. One can care so much for pictures that one is willing to go without many necessities in order to buy more & more. One can consider one's collection a sort of private investment, to provide artists with a little money to paint more & better pictures. It was perfectly impossible for shy, unassuming Abby Rockefeller to be any kind of a collector but the last.
Without for an instant relaxing her interest in the Girl Scouts, in musical scholarships, hospitals, asylums, and all her other welldoing, Mrs. Rockefeller set aside a certain amount of her own Aldrich money for art. As a collector's budget, it was no vast sum. All the pictures that she has since given to the Rhode Island School of Design, to Fisk University, to Dart mouth College and to the Museum of Modern Art—about 1,000 important items—probably did not cost anywhere near the $1,166,400 that Andrew Mellon paid the Soviet Government in 1934 for one Raphael Madonna (TIME, Aug. 27, 1934 et seq.) Yet for her money Mrs. Rockefeller was able to get good, if not great, examples of almost every well-known modern from Odilon Redon to Peter Blume.
Even before Arthur B. Davies' death in 1928, Mrs. Rockefeller had developed a sharp nose of her own for talent. Tramp ing through galleries, she has spotted many a promising newcomer. She was the first collector to buy a painting by an aged Pittsburgh housepainter named John Kane, who before his death in 1934 became the high-priced rage of the modern art world (TIME, June 3 et ante}. She was one of the first to buy from the eccentric Louis Eilshemius.