THE ART OF MAKING IT
“Christie’s has been selected as the global auction house for the collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller. This vast collection will be offered for sale in May 2018 at our flagship auction rooms in Rockefeller Center in the heart of New York City. The sales will be conducted in keeping with David Rockefeller’s pledge to direct the majority of his wealth to philanthropy, and provide for the cultural, educational, medical and environmental causes long supported by the couple.”
It is a bald statement, but there is nevertheless, in those words, a world of pride and satisfaction. And so there should be. It is a once in a generation, perhaps once in a lifetime event. Topping the list of these museum-quality works is what is described as a Matisse that will “reset the artist’s record”; a stack of Picassos that Rockefeller bought from the estate of Alice B. Toklas, who had been bequeathed them by Gertrude Stein; and works by Seurat, Gauguin, Manet, Signac, Gris, Corot, Van Gogh, Sargent, de Kooning, and Monet, each worth millions on their own merits before being enhanced by the Rockefeller provenance.
One simply runs out of superlatives when describing the riches of this collection, as one does when attempting to describe the wealth and influence of the Rockefeller family. After all, art was just a hobby, one of the many things they spent money on. During the 1920s the family name had replaced that of Croesus as the synonym for limitless riches.
Irving Berlin’s title number for the show Puttin’ On the Ritz features the family name as one of the axioms of money and the high life:
Come, let’s mix where Rockefellers walk with sticks
COr ‘umberellas’ in their mitts
CPuttin’ on the ritz
And of course, the address at which the Rockefeller collection will be sold keeps it in the family. While others were wiped out by the stock market crash of 1929, John D. Rockefeller Jr. decided he would build, in effect, an eponymous Art Deco city within a city, in Midtown Manhattan, that kept 40,000 busy during the nadir of the Great Depression.
David Rockefeller, John Jr.’s son, was born in 1915, a year after one of the defining moments in American labour relations. In 1914 miners working
