Full Nelson Painting

Nelson Rockefeller’s influence over modern and contemporary art, through collecting, patronage, and especially the importance of “mother’s museum” (New York’s MoMA) is well known. The controversial relationship between such art patronage and political ideology or economic objectives is less often included as part of “acceptable public discourse” about the Rockefellers or the history and development of modern art. Beginning in the 1970s, however, certain revisionist histories began to be written about the MoMA´s involvement, together with the U.S. State Department and the C.I.A., in the worldwide promotion of New York School abstract expressionism as what Eva Cockcroft has called a “weapon of the Cold War.” Decades earlier, during the Depression, Nelson Rockefeller had been instrumental in the inclusion of Mexican School mural painter Diego Rivera in the New York (and MoMA’s) art scene, despite Rivera’s openly communist leanings being at odds with the distinctly capitalist practices and ideology of the Rockefellers themselves. The famous historical scandal involving the destruction of Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center was one unfortunate result of such a predictable ideological and psychological conflict. Nelson was also a passionate collector of Mexican folk art and he loved buying directly from Mexican artisans on his trips south of the Río Bravo, beginning with his first trip to Mexico in 1933. The catalogue of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Folk Art Collection includes comments from several people—his brother Laurance; the legendary director of the MoMA, Alfred H. Barr; and one of Barr's successors at the helm of the MoMA, Nelson’s friend and advisor René d’Harnoncourt—about the way Rockefeller’s art buying was like a kind of "high" for him, similar to doing drugs or drinking alcohol. D’Harnoncourt is quoted describing “the euphoric pleasure” that art provided to Rockefeller as being “not unlike Benzedrine, a curious combination of excitement and relaxation…”. Of course, as a scion of one of the wealthiest families in the U.S., Rockefeller’s preferred method for “getting high” never cost him all that much (he remarked, for example, on the fact that he often spent only pennies or at most a few dollars on the folk art he bought from the Mexcians). But later, when as governor of New York he later passed the “Rockefeller drug laws,” it was the trigger for decades of often arbitrary arrests and imprisonment for countless people (most of them members of minorities) with less opulent means at their disposal for alleviating their pain or getting high, and just having a joint or two of marijuana (one of Mexico’s ancient herbal folk remedies, probably used by some of the very artisans whose folk art Nelson admired and collected) ended up getting many thousands of otherwise normal citizens incarcerated for years on end, some of them, no doubt, in facilities like Attica State Prison in upstate New York. That prison was the scene of an inmate uprising in 1971 that ended in a brutal bloodbath, ordered or condoned by then-governor Rockefeller, when authorities stormed the prison to end the stand-off, shooting inmates, hostages and guards alike. The combination of imagery utilized in this painting is an attempt to provide a “fuller” picture of Nelson Rockefeller than the ones disseminated by himself and the institutions his family controls, generally used to promote him as a smiling philanthropical benefactor of only positive historical import. The image of him happily “drugging” himself by purchasing folk art in Oaxaca has been combined with a scene of prisoners after the Attica prison was retaken by force by the authorities, and the remaining prisoners were forced to strip and submit to body cavity searches. The play on words of the title, which refers to a wrestling hold, rhymes with the position in which the prisoners are shown: with hands on heads in enforced self-subjugation, as if being placed in a "full nelson" by some invisible hand.