THE FIRST TIME PHOTOGRAPHER Larry Lederman visited the gardens at Kykuit, the Rockefeller family’s historic estate in Pocantico Hills, New York, he was greeted by a sudden downpour. He found cover in a grove of giant copper beech trees, whose position on the property was plotted by John D. Rockefeller himself, the oil tycoon who lead one of America’s most prominent families.
Among the rain-slicked tree trunks, Lederman noticed a massive, fire-engine red sculpture—Alexander Liberman’s Above II. To his left, he saw another sculpture, an eggshell-colored piece called Granny’s Knot, whose twisted form echoed the knuckled tree trunks surrounding it. “These were contemporary sculptures sitting in the midst of trees. A surprise,” writes Lederman in his new book The Rockefeller Gardens: An American Legacy (Monacelli Press, 2017). “Ordinarily, sculpture is…
