John Elderfield Quotations

When they were both older artists, they had reached a kind of eminence and recognized that they were truly pre-eminent in their generations, and they had experiences, they had a notion of painting which nobody else shared.

For our 1992 retrospective of Matisse, I'd traveled from Japan to Australia to Mexico to the Soviet Union and could not find this painting. So this summer, when the call came, I said, 'How could it be?

The van Rysselberghe is very good, but that early part of our collection we don't wish to develop,

It's great. For a curator, the two great thrills are, first, finding and acquiring real monuments of art. The other part is being able to hang them.

We also took images of what we already owned so he could see them in context with his collection, ... It was a great couple of days. He had really thought about things.

At first I couldn't figure out which Matisse he was talking about.

We have been buying a lot of contemporary art, but we add great monuments like this whenever we can.

Ed moved into the hotel so he could work with us,

We had three pictures by Brice; now we have six. So this doubles our holdings.