2021 Articles

Mrs. Rockefeller's Exquisite Corpse

Bender, Courtney J.

In the months before Christmas 1931, two of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s associates took it upon themselves to create and present a gift book for their employer, benefactor, and friend. After Mrs. Rockefeller’s death in 1948, a secretary prepared the book for inclusion in Mrs. Rockefeller’s archives by typing a transcript of its contents and identifying many of its contributors. The secretary also gave it a title: “Tribute Book.” Both book and transcript rested in the subterranean vaults of the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, New York until October 2014, after which the book was removed to a reserved area of the collection, available to researchers only with special permission.

The Tribute Book’s transformation from forgotten to special object was put in motion entirely by happenstance. I had traveled to the Rockefeller Archive Center to see what I could learn about Rockefeller’s religious views and habits in the decade when she was also busy founding the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. I had spent nearly two days reading through files and boxes that presented an expansive image of Mrs. Rockefeller’s multiple artistic, domestic, family, religious, and philanthropic investments before turning to several boxes of ephemera. The “Tribute Book” was in one of these boxes, filed among ocean-liner passenger lists, prayer books, and other sundry materials; the finding aid entry made no mention of its fascinating arrangement of contributors, nor of the presence of a small painting by the artist Diego Rivera that it contained.

Together, the book’s contents and the inadvertent way that they had come to my attention set me on a different train of thinking about the role of religious networks and influences in MOMA’s earliest years. Taking to heart the peculiarity of the Tribute Book’s position within the archive and likewise the peculiarity of my encounter with it, I have sought in this essay to keep the sense of these juxtapositions alive in my analysis, and to use them to broaden our ways of thinking genealogically about the location of religion and spirituality within “secular” organizations—in this case, secular modern art museums.