The Financial Times did one of its well-known lunches with David Rockefeller, Jr. at The Modern in New York City, a restaurant housed in the same building as MoMA. The conversation recorded in the paper ranges from the world’s oceans to American politics. But the subject of his father’s art collection comes up and David Jr. reminds us that his parents, whose income came from family trusts, began collecting after he went off to school as young man:
Rockefeller did not grow up with all the art that is going under the hammer — he left for boarding school at 14, just as his parents were getting serious about collecting — but he is sadsee some of them go. “I will miss the Matisse ‘Odalisque’ more than anything else,” he says.
[…] David Sr’s will let each of his children choose up to $1m worth of the collection before it went to Christie’s, and Rockefeller says he surprised himself by falling for some porcelain he found in a basement. Three family homes were put up for sale on his father’s death (his mother died in 1996), but Rockefeller decided to buy a fourth, a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley, complete with its “much more informal” contents. (“Mexican dinnerware,” he explains.)
David Rockefeller Jr: ‘Does happiness come from material wealth?’
