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| New York museum disposes of its star attraction: the Rockefeller rooms |
| Time: 2008-03-05 |
NEW YORK. The Art Newspaper can reveal that the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has decided to quietly deaccession its Rockefeller Rooms to make way for a modernisation of its building on upper Fifth Avenue. The two period rooms from the Manhattan townhouse of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller have been the museum’s signature attractions for 70 years. The dressing room is likely to go the Metropolitan Museum which is currently reinstalling its suite of American period rooms, expected to reopen in January 2009.
According to a spokeswoman, the MCNY’s reconfiguration will consolidate offices on the fourth and fifth floors, displacing the Rockefeller Rooms; ceiling heights on the three lower exhibition floors preclude reinstallation. She says that the rooms, which went off display in January and are being documented and dismantled, will be deaccessioned or permanently loaned to a public institution, and that trustee Allison Rockefeller (wife of John D. Rockefeller’s great great grandson Peter Clark Rockefeller) had “no objections” to the plan. “The overriding goal is that they be publicly accessible,” says the spokeswoman, “and we believe that this goal will be achieved.”
The Gilded Age interiors, both created in 1881 by the New York firm George A. Schastey & Co, are remarkable not only for their superbly crafted sumptuous décors, but also for their association with the legendary New York robber baron who acquired the house at 4 West 54th Street in 1884 fully furnished by its previous owner Arabella Worsham Huntington.
Rockefeller’s eldest daughter, Bessie, was married in the home in 1889 in a quiet but elegant family ceremony. In the 1918, the last year of World War I, the building was used, along with other millionaires’ mansions, as auxiliary workrooms for the Red Cross, where women would sew garments and surgical dressings for troops.
A year after Rockefeller’s death in 1937, his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. demolished the structure and its carriage house to provide space for the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, which his wife Abby had co-founded in 1929. He donated three rooms and their contents to the Museum of the City of New York which installed the American Renaissance dressing room (pale-green-and-gold with rosewood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl) and the Anglo-Italianate bedroom (red-and-gold with an ebonised sleigh bed, stained glass and jewelled arch leading to a sitting recess); the Moorish-style smoking room went to the Brooklyn Museum.
Morrison Heckscher, curator of Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum says, “We have long been committed to the display of historic American interiors—there are 20 such rooms, dating from the late 17th to the early 20th century, in the American Wing—and we are in discussion with MCNY about the possibility of adding to that number.”
The MCNY spokeswoman says that there has been interest from other institutions “not necessarily in New York”. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which is constructing a new American wing, says it is too early to say if they are interested and Crystal Bridges, the museum of American art being built in Bentonville, Arkansas by WalMart heiress Alice Walton, did not return calls asking if they were seeking to acquire the rooms. The Brooklyn Museum says it is not pursuing them.
The MCNY has raised $55m towards its $80m refurbishment project, designed by Polshek Partnership, which will add a small structure to the rear of the building to house a curatorial centre and storage for most of the museum’s photographs, prints, costumes, textiles, theatre material, documents and ephemera. After that phase is completed in June the renovation of the existing building will continue through 2011.
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