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Abby Rockefeller has never successfully downed the idea that to pay as much as Lizzie Bliss used to pay for single pictures is slightly sinful. As far as is known, the highest price Mrs. Rockefeller ever paid for a work of art was $20,000 which she gave Marguerite Zorach for a tapestry portrait of the Rockefeller family in front of their summer home at Seal Harbor (TIME, Nov. 4). In general, $1,000 is her top price. This has tended to bring her the best work of unknown artists, the second-rate work of men with established reputations. It has also brought her a great diversity of works of art. At one time or another Mrs. Rockefeller has collected Japanese bird and flower prints, folk art, Amerindian paintings. New England primitives, Siamese sculpture.
Several years ago her purchasing became too widespread for her to do all by herself. To her assistance as a special agent under special circumstances went handsome, grey-haired Edith Halpert, widow of Painter Samuel Halpert, onetime efficiency expert for deflated S. W. Straus & Co., and for the past ten years director of the Downtown Gallery.
There are far more drawings and water colors than oils in Mrs. Rockefeller's collection. This has little to do with the fact that drawings are cheaper than paintings. All artists know that the best way to study the manner and character of an artist is through his unretouched drawings. And drawings take up little room. Most of the pictures that Mrs. Rockefeller has bought for her own enjoyment are crowded into her specially lighted gallery on the seventh floor of the old Rockefeller town house in West 54th Street.
Two Views. It is difficult to pick favorite artists of one who has bought so widely, but Mrs. Rockefeller's intimates know that she has two favorite views : one from her gallery window; the other a vista in Central Park. She has commissioned the dryly accurate Charles Sheeler to paint the latter, the more impressionistic Stefan Hirsch to do the gallery view.
Since 1932 Mrs. Rockefeller's chief interest has been within rifle shot of the same window. The Museum of Modern Art is housed in a handsome limestone house in West 53rd Street with a back door facing the Rockefeller backyard.