Capitalizing on a Collection

Nelson Rockefeller's venture in mail-order art

In price, they range from $65 replicas of 18th century Chinese-made porcelain salt dishes to a copy of Auguste Rodin's Age of Bronze, a statue of a nude male that stands 41 1/2 in. high and sells for $7,500. In scope, they embrace reproductions of such varied items as Picasso's Houses on the Hill ($650), a weather vane sculpture of a 19th century race horse ($975), an old Chinese temple jar ($1,000) and an 18th century Japanese wood carving of a sleeping cat ($125). Besides beauty and style, what these and 112 other art objects being offered in a slickly handsome new catalogue have in common is that all are copies of works in the huge private collection of one of the nation's newest mail-order salesmen: Nelson Rockefeller, 70.

Rockefeller's transformation from politician to art entrepreneur was swift. Only about a year ago, he decided that he might try marketing reproductions of some of the approximately 16,000 items in his collection, which in 1974, when he became Vice President, was valued at $33.5 million. Two months ago, the Nelson Rockefeller Collection, Inc., began with the mailing of its catalogue to 475,000 sales prospects, including 350,000 from the mailing list of the Dallas-based Neiman-Marcus department store. Rockefeller, who in 1974 was worth $218 million, will say only that the returns so far have been "encouraging."

The most popular item, which Rockefeller says has drawn 1,000 orders, is one of the least expensive: a $75 reproduction in unglazed clay of a Haniwa head, modeled in Japan sometime in the 5th to 7th centuries. Other popular sellers: $750 copies of a pair of andirons designed for Rockefeller by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in 1939; a $1,250 gold-plated bronze reproduction of a voluptuous female torso from a bronze cast sculpture by Gaston Lachaise. A slow mover is the $7,500 copy of the Rodin nude. Rockefeller, who has been collecting since the 1930s, invested $3.5 million in the project and admits he will close it down if it is not turning a profit. Says he: "I couldn't do it as a philanthropy."

Though in the past Rockefeller had often had things in his collection copied, especially china, he did not decide to go into reproductions as a business until 1977. Lee Boltin, a photographer who had taken the pictures for a book on primitive art, the first of a series to be published by Rockefeller, suggested the idea. Some experts urged Rockefeller to start slowly and do some market testing to see what items would sell best. Rocky said no. "We could have sneaked into the market over five years," he says. "But I wanted to do a real cross section, everything from primitive to modern, Chinese, Japanese, etc."

To oversee the making of some of the reproductions, which are produced by leading art-reproduction craftsmen in America and Europe, he hired Christine Roussel, former manager of the Reproduction Studio of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one of his advisers. Rockefeller personally supervised the recasting of the bronze objects and the hand painting of the copies of his rare Meissen china. For the reproduction of paintings, he decided against the often used lithographic method in favor of the Cibachrome photographic process, which closely captures the color of the originals.

There has been some grumbling in the art world about the high price tags on many of Rocky's reproductions, as well as about the propriety of reproducing important works of art for commercial purposes. Rockefeller counters that "good reproductions do not devalue originals. They enhance the value, and they make more people aware of art." Moreover, he insists, he is filling a need: "With the prices of outstanding art going up, it has been getting harder and harder for people to acquire it. Only a small number can buy originals."

He readily concedes that more than a few of his customers may be moved to buy a Rocky copy not because they know anything about the particular work but because they are reassured by "the prestige value, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" of the man who has the original. But, he adds, "I've always bought art because I love things. Art does something for me that's important." He believes what the real thing does for him, the copies can do for others.

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