MODERN AT NINETY.(David Rockefeller)(Interview)(Biography)

David Rockefeller, who will be ninety on June 12th, is celebrating his birthday a week early, at the Museum of Modern Art's annual benefit Party in the Garden. He could hardly ask for a more appropriate spot, because, as he likes to say, he was born there. Not in the garden, exactly, but in the private infirmary of the Rockefeller house at 10 West Fifty-fourth Street, a nine-story mansion that used to occupy the site. It was then the largest private residence in the city, and he greatly enjoyed briefing adult visitors on the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance treasures that his father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had acquired--among them the Unicorn Tapestries, which were installed in the adjoining Rockefeller house, at 12 West Fifty-fourth Street, until they moved uptown to the Cloisters. "Father disliked modern art," David wrote in his 2002 "Memoirs." "He considered it 'unlifelike,' ugly, and disturbing." His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, however, hung modern pictures in her private art gallery on the seventh floor, where her husband wouldn't have to look at them. "She made it a regular gallery," David recalled last week, sitting in his rather cozy office, on the fifty-sixth floor at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. "It was a wonderful education for me."

The youngest of six Rockefeller children (five boys, one girl), David was close to his mother, and he remembers going with her in 1929 to the opening ceremonies of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art, which she and her friends Lillie Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan had founded, in its first, modest quarters in the Heckscher Building, on Fifty-seventh Street. "I was a teen-ager when Mother and Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Sullivan were having conversations about the need for a museum," he said. "And I remember when they brought in Alfred Barr as director. So, in a sense, I've been involved with the museum pretty much throughout its history."

He did not become actively involved, however, until 1948, when his mother died and he was asked to take her seat on the museum's board of trustees. Not wishing to assert himself too vigorously in an institution whose president had been, since 1939, his dynamic older brother Nelson, David ...