The Mets new wing honors a vanished Rockefeller who may have been kidnapped and eaten by cannibals

Dissatisfied at being remembered merely as oil barons, real estate tycoons, political bellwethers, and lavish philanthropists, at some point the Rockefellers began to specialize in dramatic exits.Politician Nelson, at least as Johnny Carson would tell it, died doing what he loved best: his aide and alleged mistress Megan Marshack.

But it was Nelson’s son, Michael Rockefeller, whose tragic ending added “eaten by cannibals” to the family lore.His story has again captured the imagination of New York with the reopening of the Michael C.Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a refresh that took four years and $70 million.

First opened in 1982, the 40,000-square-foot wing now displays 1,726 artifacts — including the collections of the former Museum of Primitive Art — with the latest scholarship and technology.“We have the finest surveys of art from these three areas of the world – sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania, and the ancient Americas in a U.S.

museum,” Alisa LaGamma, the curator in charge of the wing, told The Post.The wing also houses more than 400 items Michael collected on his travels — though whether or not it contains pieces created by the very tribe that might have brought about his death is still open for debate.In March 1961, Michael — a newly minted Harvard history and economics cum laude and the son of the Governor of New York at the time — joined the Harvard-Peabody Expedition to New Guinea.

Its mission was to study the Ndani people of the Baliem Valley in the remote western portion of the island.But the 23-year-old Rockefeller had an ulterior motive: The stripling anthropologist was on an adventure to trade fish hooks, axes and pouches of tobacco for great masterpieces of tribal art.The art would be sent back home to his father’s innovative Museum of Primitive Art — a groundbreaking effort to extol the fetishes, tools and handicrafts of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania in a townhouse mansion at 15 West 5...