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Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2021
Abstract
The “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.
Keywords
- Type
- Sovereign Aesthetics
- Information
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History
Footnotes
Acknowledgments: The author thanks Sally Promey, Matthew Engelke, Jeremy Biles, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Pamela Klassen, and Monique Scheer.
References
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15 Mrs. Rockefeller has been consistently represented as having less than stellar taste in modern art while being praised for her organizational acumen and liberal support of Barr and MOMA staff. She appears to have done very little to challenge this view, and in fact may have courted it, as it seems to have worked to her advantage. “Beginning of the Museum of Modern Art,” Rockefeller Archives Center, Rockefeller Family Collection, Record Group 2, series AA-AAR box 7, folder 99.
16 Kert, Bernice, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993)Google Scholar. Bliss died in 1931, and her art collection was given as a bequest to the museum and established its permanent collection. Sullivan served on the MOMA board until 1933.
17 “Prayers—Disbound Transcripts, 1920, n.d.,” series 2, box 13, folders 154–55, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Papers (FA336), Rockefeller Archive Center. John D. Rockefeller Jr. continued his father’s tradition of holding a Bible study every morning before breakfast, which all in the family including guests were expected to attend.
18 Kimberly Jannarone, “Exquisite Theater,” 229.
19 On relational personhood and the embedding and disembedding of forms of relations through “contracts, titles, and deeds,” among other “modes of textualizing,” see Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John. “On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from Africa,” Social Identities 7, 2 (2001): 267–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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23 It is worth underlining that the gaps and connections—nascent networks and juxtapositions —of the twenty-seven contributors to the Tribute Book offer the opportunity to assemble other corpora and thus other stories and interpretations of other religious and social interactions. To take one example, the contributions by a number of prominent Black and white leaders of New York’s Young Women’s Christian Association might offer a new, or complimentary, image of relationships at the YWCA at a time when it was on the cusp of major organizational changes that would result in major changes in the YWCA’s programs on race both in New York and nationally. See Nancy M. Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA 1906–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Weisenfeld, Judith, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA 1905–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 My thanks to Zhaohua Yang and Michael Como for their assistance in translation and identification.
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26 Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 540, 549.
27 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to Lucy Aldrich, 13 Feb. 1925, in Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Letters to Her Sister Lucy (New York: private printing, 1957), 128–29. See also Kuchiki, Yuriko, “The Enemy Trader: The United States and the End of Yamanaka,” Impressions 34 (2013): 32–53 Google Scholar.
28 David Rockefeller, Memoirs/David Rockefeller (New York: Random House, 2002). David Rockefeller also reminisced that dealers would occasionally bring prospective buyers to the Rockefeller residence at 12 West 54th Street to view the Buddha room. See also Neil Harris, “Period Rooms and the American Art Museum,” Winterthur Portfolio 46, 2/3 (2012): 117–38.
29 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to Lucy Aldrich, 14 Sept. 1922, in Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s Letters, 77.
30 Rockefeller Family Collection, Record Group 2, series AA-AAR, box 13 folder 159, Rockefeller Archives Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.
31 Sally Promey argues that liberal Protestant aesthetic sensibilities taking shape in the late 1800s and beyond understood the appreciation of beauty and “taste” (in the terms of Horace Bushnell) as “democratic in that anyone could cultivate it: taste was a ‘universal possibility’ open ‘to all.’” A “harder” and more “masculine” articulation of beauty and the beautiful would take shape in the mid-twentieth century, Promey argues, with a different alignment of taste, beauty, and culture. Promey, “Visible Liberalism: Liberal Protestant Taste Evangelism, 1850 and 1950,” in Sally Promey and Leigh Eric Schmidt, eds., American Religious Liberalism Revisited (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 76–96; and “Taste Cultures: The Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940–1965,” in Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Marc Valeri, eds., Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 250–93.
32 “Tolerance,” Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, undated speech, Rockefeller Family Collection, Record Group 2, series AA-AAR, box 13, folder 159, Rockefeller Archives Center, Pocantico Hills, New York.
33 Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur, quoted in Clifford, “Ethnographic Surrealism,” 562.
34 Oral History Program, interview with Philip Johnson, 18 Dec. 1990, pp. 18–19, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
35 Leah Dickerman, “Leftist Circuits,” in Leah Dickerman and Anna Indych-López, eds., Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 10–47.
36 Mary Ann Staniszewski, The Power of Display (Boston: MIT Press, 1998). Barr experimented with a number of display techniques in the early years of MOMA, and in the 1930’s several Bauhaus-trained curators would continue the MOMA’s experimental projects. See Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Both Staniszewski and Turner argue that these varied practices were connected in their vision of a solitary, independent, and “autonomous” viewer of modern art.
37 Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” Marxist Quarterly 1, 1 (Jan.–Mar. 1937): 77–98.
38 Staniszewski, Power of Display, ch. 2.
39 Alfred Barr, “Russian Icons,” The Arts 17 (1931): 297–313, 355–62. See also Meyer, Richard, “Revolutionary Icons: Alfred Barr and the Remaking of Russian Religious Art,” in Promey, Sally, ed., Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 215–24Google Scholar.
40 This process could be applied in different ways, at different turns. In 1936, for example, MOMA’s first major show of surrealism, Fantastic Art, nonetheless downplayed surrealism’s “literary, theoretical, and political engagements and focused on its techniques of automatic processes and on the fashionable psychological content of its paintings.” Barr’s choices to emphasize the “fantastic” in art as process rather than surrealism as politics translated the irrational in art into technique of artistic production. To the further shock and outrage of surrealists, the exhibition also included works by children and the mentally ill. Living artists withdrew their work from the planned national tour that was to follow, angry at discovering their work “actively framed as both an escape from and an antidote to the anxieties of the Great Depression, the state of world politics, and even modern life in general.” See Zalman, Sandra, “The Vernacular as Vanguard: Alfred Barr, Salvador Dalí, and the U.S. Reception of Surrealism in the 1930s,” Journal of Surrealism in the Americas 1 (2007): 44–67, 48Google Scholar.
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46 Biles marks this approach as consistent with Bataille’s version of surrealism which, in “deviating and descending from Breton’s correlative “belief in the superior reality of previously neglected associations” [instead approaches] analogy as a base reality, parodically, entering into its tenebrously mirrored chambers as one must enter psychoanalysis: through the back door.” (“Task of *Surealism,” 116).