Oral history interview with Larry Aldrich, 1972 Apr. 25 - June 10

This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Larry Aldrich, 1972 Apr. 25 - June 10, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

PC: PAUL CUMMINGS
LA: LARRY ALDRICH

PC: Let me say it's the 25th of April, 1972. Paul Cummings talking to Larry Aldrich in his office in New York City. You just told me about the first pictures you acquired and we ascertained that it was the Van Nane and Louisenthal Gallery. You went to that gallery with a friend as you said before. I think you told me that little story.

LA: I started by saying I had no awareness of having any conscious interest in visual art whatsoever. In 1937 I was a bachelor living in an apartment at 38th Street and Park Avenue and a very close friend of mine one day asked me to go to an exhibition of an artist friend of his just sort of to keep him company. So I accompanied him and there were all these watercolors and they were of scenes of Paris and some scenes of Israel and Rhodes and painted in a manner that of course I now know was pseudo-impressionist. I thought that they were very decorative and might be nice to decorate my apartment, but I wasn't exactly mentally or emotionally prepared to pay five, six, or seven hundred dollars for a painting. Besides, they had no meaning or value to me up to that time. And the artist was there and I was introduced to him. There were two or three gold stars on the various paintings which meant they were sold, and I casually said to the artist that if any of these are left (since he was from Canada and I knew it would involve a problem for him to get them back to Canada), I'd be glad to take them off his hands at a hundred dollars apiece. And then we left and about three weeks later he called me and said, "I'm coming up with nine paintings and I'd like to have my money right away if I can get it." And I said, "Sure." And I acquired these nine pictures which I used to decorate the walls of my apartment and I enjoyed them very much as pure decoration and didn't think much about it. Many visitors to my apartment, as a result of them -- since not any of my friends had any interest in the visual arts at that time -- thought I was quite an art collector. We'll have to skip now to -- and incidentally, I might say that since I'm in the fashion business, I had been going to Europe and Paris particularly since the early thirties at least three times a year. Even though I knew that Paris was the art capital of the world, and I'd been to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume (but just out of curiosity more than anything else), it just never occurred to me to acquire any of those things for myself, even though at that time I had the means to do so. I was married in 1940 and we bought a house in Ridgefield, Connecticut. My wife could draw and sketch and that sort of thing, and when we acquired this house (it was really just meant to be a summer residence), but we found we enjoyed it sufficiently to make it a permanent home, while I more or less didn't do any commuting. I stayed in New York during the week and then came up weekends. And time was hanging heaviest for my wife. She was getting restless even though she got involved in the usual things one does in a small town like the garden club and thrift shop and all the rest of those things. And there was an artist -- a water color artist, quite well known -- by the name of Herb Olsen. I believe his work is carried at Kennedy Gallery. And he moved to Ridgefield, and we met him, and we had a chat, and he said he'd like to have my wife take painting lessons with him. Well, I was rather concerned about her being so restless in the country and to encourage her I started to bring home every weekend the kind of loose leaf -- they weren't really books as much as pamphlets that you could buy in most any stationary store on impressionists and post impressionists painters -- and during the cold winter nights I started to study them and they began to interest me greatly. I then bought much more solid and scholarly art books which I read rather avidly. As a matter of fact, by the time the war was over, and you could start flying to Paris again, I had already decided that I was going to acquire some paintings.

PC: Well, you really didn't pursue it very much between that first acquisition and your marriage. There was a real hiatus.

LA: I'm stressing that to make you aware that I really had had no prior interest in the visual arts whatsoever. In any event, in April of '47 we went to Paris and my wife had decided that she wanted a Utrillo. And so before we even left for Paris, I had written to my commissionaire and told her that I was interested in acquiring a Utrillo, and I asked her to investigate and find out which gallery in Paris carried a Utrillo at that time. And we went to the gallery, with her in fact, called Petrides. I'm not quite sure if he's still in business. And he was expecting us, and he had quite a number of Utrillos hung on the wall. And I looked through them and I selected one that I liked and the one I selected was one that had been painted in 1920 -- most of the others were all 1943, '45, '46 and what have you -- and the price of the one I selected was $2,800 and the price of the recent ones was only about $900 or $1,000. And my wife just couldn't see why one of the others for $900 or $1,000 wouldn't do just as well. And so while she was studying them, trying to make up her mind, there were two stacks of paintings that were standing against the wall at the end of this private part of this gallery, and I just was rifling through them. And I pulled out a painting of a man with a beard and I asked the gallery owner what this painting was, and it was the portrait of August Basil by Renoir that had been in the Vollard collection and he said he had just acquired it about four or five days ago with that whole group of paintings. In any event, we bought both of those paintings that one trip.

PC: Had you gone to the galleries and museums in New York prior to this trip?

LA: Not at all.

PC: Just reading the books, and . . . .

LA: Just reading the books. However, I did find as a result of the tremendous amount of reading that I had done that the first visit I made to the Metropolitan Museum -- just prior to 1947 in the area where they had their French impressionists -- for the most part I was able to tell whose painting it was without having to go up to it and reading the signature. Which, of course, was very pleasing to me.

PC: You really spent quite a few years in research and development before you ever started buying.

LA: Quite a few years of just patience. Not only that, but I acquired a pretty sizable library over those years. But all of it tended to be from Manet through probably Villon, in other words, from about 1860 to about 1910 or 12. In other words the Fauves and so on.

PC: The post impressionists.

LA: And the post impressionists.

PC: Do you think there's a reason why your interest in those people developed as opposed to American painting or something older?

LA: I think it's principally because those were names that were familiar to me, even though I had taken no active interest in the visual arts. I think it's pretty hard for anyone not to grow up and not have heard of Renoir and Van Gogh and Gauguin. So that's really principally why. Now, as I now know, there was a great ferment taking place in the forties in American art. But I was very, very far removed from any of it. After I got these two paintings home and had a chance to live with them, I gradually realized that there was much more to a work of art than mere decoration. There was something in a painting, done by a real artist that was in itself very exciting, and the more you studied it, the more things of interest you found in the painting. As a result, I began to read even more, and I might say that I definitely realized that I was hooked. I started to go to the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, and I arranged in all my subsequent trips to Europe that I would allow four or five days to do nothing but look at works of art, prior to my having to go to work. And now, let me see if I can't look through and remember what next painting I acquired.

PC: I assume that after that trip you continued going to Europe frequently.

LA: Oh, yes. I went to Europe three times a year, continued to go. And then also I started to go to galleries in New York, and I discovered Parke-Bernet auctions as well. As a matter of fact, the next acquisitions that I made were at a Parke-Bernet auction (that must have been about 1948 or 1949) where I bought a Manet sketch -- an oil sketch that was really the sketch for the important Manet painting, you know, that had the man with one leg on one side of the street and a carriage on the other side of the street with a flag -- which I think is in the Mellon collection. And at the same time I bought a Dufy at this same auction, and I also bought -- oh, dear, what's the name of that American water colorist? That's not one I subsequently sold. I gave that away.

PC: Was it early or recent?

LA: No, I think he was already dead at that time. Gracious, what's his name? Oh, it's an American that you would know very well.

PC: He was famous as a water colorist?

LA: He did a lot of the water colors in Maine.

PC: Marin?

LA: Marin, John Marin. That's it. I bought those three paintings at one auction at Parke-Bernet, and are you interested to know about what I paid for them?

PC: That's interesting. Not only what you paid for them, but that Marin was your first American acquisition.

LA: Yes, he was, but it wasn't because he was an American. The Manet I bought for $1,000, and this I suddenly found out later when Dr. Frankfurter, who was then publisher of Art News, saw my collection back in about '59 or so and saw that painting, he said that he was in Paris at the time of this auction, and he was with Paul Rosenberg who said he had sold this picture several years before for $10,000, which I bought at the auction for $1,000. It was painted in 1875 from the window of Manet's atelier in the rue de St. Petersburg. I think the next picture that I bought in Paris -- and my secretary happened to be there and I think she will be able to tell me the gallery -- was a Vuillard. It was called Ceilings in the Louvre or something of that sort.

PC: He became an artist with whom you became very interested, wasn't he?

LA: Well, eventually I wound up with six Vuillards; as a matter of fact, we had an all Vuillard dining room. But that one was painted in 1910, and at the same time I also bought two from the same gallery. Incidentally, this gallery had the estate and all of these I bought were to -- I had the testation they were to appear in the definitive Vuillard book, which I think was being written by his brother-in-law or nephew or something of that sort. So to hold the button up between the two of them was a 1915 landscape of trees and the other was a pastel. It was a 1920 interior of a chair and a table and a vase of flowers in the window and so on. On my next trip to Paris I went there again and . . . .

PC: Would this be 1948?

LA: It would be also about 1948 or '49, and I went to that same -- Reynold and Folliet was the name of the gallery. These things will just sort of come to me.

PC: That's fine. If they do, great.

LA: And I found a little black one from what I now know is his high period. It was painted in 1894.

PC: I'm curious about one thing. What was there about Marin that appealed to you because he was somewhat different from all the others?

LA: Well, it was sort of a sketchy watercolor. Very, very loose, and it was somewhat of a landscape. And I realize now that it was considerably much more abstract than any of the other things that I had been interested in up to that time because I had no particular knowledge of Marin's status in the world, excepting that I of course had heard of him. Well, at the same time that I bought the Dufy, of course I knew Raoul Dufy. And the Dufy was a very lovely painting. It was not one of his race scenes. It was one of the boats and that sort of thing.

PC: It's interesting the Marin because it's so different from the other things. Was it just immediate appeal to the picture?

LA: It was immediate appeal because you must understand that there was never at any time any specific plan that I had originated in my own mind of how I would proceed. It was just that my interest was aroused, and my appetite was aroused. I dare say that almost everything that I acquired in my earlier paintings were things that I just happened to see. In other words, I never went to the gallery and said, "Show me this kind of painting," or "Show me a painting by that artist." It was just walking into a gallery and looking around and seeing something that would strike me. There was only one acquisition I would say that I ever made because I set out to find one that I would like, and that was way, way later on. And that was Modigliani. But almost all the paintings that I acquired were acquired on a basis of walking into a gallery and seeing something that I liked. Suppose I go through this particular publication without speaking of what it is, because I don't believe I can exactly recall when I bought it, but I'll sort of try. Would it matter if this is not in chronological order?

PC: No, it doesn't make any difference.

LA: Well, there's a Wols drawing that I just saw in a window in Paris. Well, perhaps this is not a good idea. I'll try and give it to you more in chronological order. The reason for that is -- as a matter of fact, here's the Dufy, you see -- my memory was good enough to recall it.

PC: This was about 1949 or '50. Were there things in New York that you were interested in, or was most of the buying really done in Paris during your trips?

LA: Well, up till the early '50s, most of the things I acquired, and the only things I acquired in New York, were at Parke-Bernet auctions, and it was after that, that I also acquired things from galleries in New York. But prior to that the majority of the things that I bought were bought on my trips to Paris. And I'll sort of go through this. And it was at this point I must confess that unless I refer to my bills it would be rather difficult for me to tell you the dates when I acquired anything. But there's a Degas sculpture of a dancer of bronze. Well, it was acquired in New York too. I'm just trying to confine myself now to those things that I bought in Paris.

PC: Were there any particular dealers in Paris that you saw frequently or did you kind of go around and around?

LA: Well, I went around and around to start with, and then after a while when I got involved in the contemporary area, there were specific dealers that I mostly dealt with. This is going to be a lot more difficult that I thought it would be. There's so many things that have been in my life since the 1940's that it's rather difficult.

PC: Well, did you get to know any of the people in the New York art scene by, say, 1950?

LA: I really didn't get to know anyone in the art scene who were collectors or anything of that sort. But I did meet Bill Lieberman of the Museum of Modern Art at a party. It must have been in the '50s because at the time I had a considerable number of things; more than we've outlined up to now. And he was interested to know what they were. I don't know whether you've ever heard this before, but they always spoke of Bill Lieberman as the curator of the collectors. And he was always very much on the alert in getting to know people who had any kind of collection, with of course the hope of interesting them in doing something for the Museum of Modern Art. And I am one of the collectors with whom eventually he was very, very successful in getting things done for the Museum of Modern Art. And he was really about the only person that I had any real relationship with in the art world. And quite frankly in all of my activities in the art world, I had never particularly been involved with other people who had similar interests. In other words, while I had met a great many of them, there are very few people with whom I have become close friends as a result of my art activities. I think we've sort of missed the point of our story. Let's see if we can't go on. It's just wanting to know the next acquisition and all that sort of thing.

PC: Well, it's just the important ones -- not each particular item -- so we can get a general feeling of where you were going. Even though there wasn't a plan, there's still some . . . .

LA: No, there never was a plan.

PC: Well, the early things you bought were not that costly were they?

LA: No, they were not.

PC: But some of them eventually became very expensive.

LA: Well, they became very expensive, yes. I think that the most that I ever paid for anything was $35,000, and we'll get to that later on. That was a Picasso. But to tell you, some of the more important things that I acquired, and before I even go into that, I might I tell you that between the time I made my first purchase and January of 1951, I had spent a lot of time looking at exhibitions in New York as well as Paris and in the various museums. And abstract expressionism was of course coming very strongly into play at that time, and I must confess that while I had an open mind, I was not responding to it. But I continued to look and as I had said earlier, by this time I had become a contributing member of the Museum of Modern Art, which was the museum that I went to most often. I don't remember just when the Whitney moved uptown. Moved to 54th Street.

PC: It was about in the early fifties.

LA: Well, in any event when they moved up to 54th Street (I had never been to the Whitney when they were on Eighth Street), I used to go to them both at the same time --you know, you could go through the back door of the Modern to the Whitney. And once every two or three weeks when I would go to the Modern, I would go into the Whitney as well. But it wasn't until January of 1951 -- it was on a Saturday afternoon that I was in Paris -- that I passed a gallery, the Gallery Pierre Loeb on the Rue de Seine, and through the window I saw a red painting that interested me that was leaning against the wall. And I walked in, and it was still kind of wet, and I asked about it. I was told that it was something that had just been bought the day before, and it was by an artist that Mr. Loeb was considering carrying. He wasn't in at the time, and I asked how much it was and they said a hundred dollars. Then I looked around, and I saw another painting that was also abstract, with a lot of wavy lines, and I asked them how much it was, and they said a hundred and fifty dollars, and that was by an artist by the name of Vieira da Silva. In any event, the owner of the gallery, Mr. Loeb, came in, and I arranged to buy both of them. I remember at that time they had to have traveler's checks or something of that sort, because that was when the franc was in an odd figure and you had to declare your money as you came in and so on, and everyone that could sell anything would try and get money that they could send out of France - into Sicily mostly. In any event, those were the first two contemporary paintings that I ever bought. But now I can go back and hand you some of the things I had acquired before January of 1951. Gauguin's Washer Woman, which was painted in 1894, was one that I acquired in Europe before that time from a woman who had a gallery on the Left Bank. I can't exactly remember her name anymore but she had this painting, and I liked it, and she wanted $25,000 for it. She said that it was not hers; that it belonged to somebody else, and I said I was interested in it and could we do anything better about the price and so on. And she said "As a matter of fact, I'm going to America in about three weeks, and I'll have this painting with me and I'm going to be at the studio of someone by the name of Serger, who is a . . . ."

PC: A painter, yes.

LA: I think his wife has a gallery. I know she has a gallery now on Madison Avenue. He has since died. And she said, "I'll call you when I get there," and so she called me, and I went up to see. She had a whole bunch of things and apparently this was in somebody's estate in Paris, and I offered her the ridiculous price of ten thousand dollars, and she said "Oh, no. That's out of the question." I said, "Well, why don't you cable it at my expense and see if the owner will take it." And she cabled and sure enough the owner did take it, but insisted that she get a certified American check which I'm sure never got back to Paris. But as a result of this, the Sergers found out about me, and I acquired other things from them afterwards.

PC: Well, it's interesting that all these things were going on, and yet there were no real plans.

LA: There were never at any time any real plans. As a matter of fact, I found that I bought eventually more of my classic early paintings from American galleries than I did in France.

PC: Oh, really?

LA: Yes, but it's principally the contemporaries through the '50's that I acquired in Paris.

PC: Was that because you were in Europe frequently, and you saw a great number of things there?

LA: Yes, but I found that there was always a certain fear connected in my own mind with buying the work of artists that were no longer living from European galleries because to begin with, you had to give them a certain amount in francs and a check for the balance which went to Switzerland. And I never did, since I had never had anyone with me when I bought anything, and I had no certainty in my own mind that I couldn't be fooled very easily by something that was a fake. I was always a little hesitant about acquiring any work by an artist who was no longer living from European galleries.

PC: Because you'd have a different kind of recourse in that country?

LA: Exactly, and as I look back over it now, after having read that book, Fake, and having read many other articles about people who were taken in by fakes, I think it's rather interesting that the only painting I ever bought that was a fake was bought in a Paris gallery and it was a 1948 L?ger water color. And it must have been a pretty good fake, because I gave it to the Museum of Modern Art, whom you would think were experts, and it passed their acquisition committee. And when I attempted to send it to the Art Dealer's Association for an appraisal, they sent it back and said they refused to appraise it because they didn't think it was a genuine L?ger. So it had to be very good for having gone through the Museum of Modern Art. I returned it to the gallery that I bought it from in France, and they totally disputed that it was a fake, but they eventually returned the $2,000 that I had paid for it.

PC: That's interesting. When was that?

LA: The '50's.

PC: That's interesting to have faked a L?ger at that point in history.

LA: Well, I found out subsequently that there are lots of L?ger water colors that are faked, and it's very possible that that one was not a fake. But there were so many that were, that there just wasn't anybody that would do something about it and say this is right or this is wrong. And so they just universally said they're all no good.

PC: 1951 seems to be a great transitional year.

LA: Very much so, because when I got those two contemporary paintings home, I found them gradually becoming far more fascinating than all the others I had collected up to that time that were representational. And over a period of years while I continued to add to my collection of classical paintings, I became more and more deeply involved in the contemporary ones. As a matter of fact, I wound up acquiring 24 Zao Wou-Ki pieces eventually, and seven of Vieira da Silva. The Zao pieces were all created from 1951 through 1953. That's the last one I acquired. The last time he was in America was while the Kootz Gallery was still in business, and I saw him there, and he came up to my apartment in New York and saw the various Zao pieces I had. At that time he said he would swap any one of them because he didn't have of his own earlier work. He would swap them for any one that was being exhibited at the Kootz Gallery, which were all in the six to eight foot range. But I had a fondness for them, plus the fact that this was still in the late fifties and I neither was mentally adjusted nor had the facilities to handle anything that size.

PC: What was it about the abstract paintings that appealed to you in the early fifties?

LA: Well, to begin with, I think I mentioned that I had looked at a great many abstract paintings in America and in Europe prior to this time, and I had not liked any well enough to want to own them; I have never acquired anything unless when I saw it it reached out to me. And none of them ever had reached out to me, but they must have been insidiously doing their work all of the time. So that now whenever any one expresses an interest in art and asks me how to go about it, I always tell them the same thing: there is no substitute for exposure. That if you're sufficiently interested, you should take the time and trouble to look and look and look some more, and eventually things will begin to gel, and that everyone inherently has an ability to make comparisons. And if you only start -- assuming you're in a room where there are ten paintings and you hate them all -- looking at each one of those individually and say to yourself, which ones do I hate the least, or rather, which one do I like the best. You'll find that everyone does have some comparative sense and that's the way one begins. And I suppose that by having an open mind and exposing myself during those years, even though I had no desire to acquire one, by January of '51 I was just sort of right for it. And it seems to me that a red color always kind of gets me, and this first Zao was a very brilliant beautiful red and black and yellow, but predominately red, and that was what had drawn me from the street into the gallery. And while I was in there I looked around and I also acquired this Vieira da Silva which happened not to have any red in it, but . . . .

PC: That's fascinating. Well, Zao Wou-ki's then were quite lyrical, weren't they as I remember?

LA: Yes, quite. Actually they had a kind of oriental play quality; they were not pure abstracts at the time. His work now of course is pure abstract. But while they weren't representational either, there were things that you could discern in them.

PC: Well, how did things progress then during 1951? You had these two abstract paintings along with a classic predecessor.

LA: As a matter of fact, by this time almost all of my friends were very, very much interested in the collecting activities that I was involved in, and whenever I came back from Europe they were always keen to see what I had brought back with me. And I remember when they saw these abstracts -- because you must realize that even at this late date of 1972, that the greatest preponderous of painting that had sold, not in New York but in America, are representational. I don't know whether you're aware of that or not, but you have an entirely distorted picture of what people like in art from living in New York. When you get out of New York in the major centers like Chicago and so on, even there it's only a very small percentage of the people who are actively interested in art that are able to have any feelings for abstract work. Even on Madison Avenue where there are some of the top galleries, you also find an awful lot of galleries that show all sorts of scenes and interiors.

PC: Right, that's true. When did you start to bring paintings into your office here, was that very early on or later?

LA: About 1952 or 1953, I had run out of wall space in my house in the country, and I had also by that time run out of wall space in my hotel apartment in New York. Well, I have to digress a moment, but I have been in the fashion business for myself since March 13, 1927. The fashion industry is a rather odd one in that the buyers only like to buy from someone very successful, and at the same time they resent the fact that their sources are people who are successful. I have always operated in a slightly different manner than most manufacturers in that my attitude was that we have a product, and it has certain merits, and you either buy it on the basis of merit or don't buy it at all. I'm not interested in socializing with my customers, and we don't entertain them and so, without it being the factual truth, they had the idea that I was very, to use a southern word, uppity. But they were successful with my clothes and for that reason they bought them. But that doesn't mean that they were particularly fond of me because of the fact that I wasn't "kissy, kissy" as they say. You must have a fairly good idea of what I mean. I wasn't entertaining them or doing them favors, or anything of that sort. And before I hung anything in my showroom, I contacted someone who was very close to me then, who was the editor of Vogue magazine, Ms. Jessica Davis, and I asked her opinion about the idea -- and she knew the kind of paintings that I owned at the time -- of hanging these in my showroom and she advised me against doing it because she said, "You know how the buyers and customers feel about you. They think that you're so rich and so on, and this would only just be rubbing salt in their wounds." But I sort of decided that I didn't give a damn, after all I was at that time spending most of my time on my own premises, and I saw no reason why I shouldn't be in surroundings that pleased me. And so I started by just hanging them in my office to begin with, and then as I acquired more things and there wasn't any room in the office, they spilled over into the showroom so that at one time, about 1957, I had a large Monet water color in the showroom, a Bonnard, a Vuillard self portrait. A Gauguin, The Washer Woman, was in the showroom. There were about seven important paintings in the showroom. And it was vaguely amusing to me the number of times my selling staff would come in and say that such and such buyer from an important store would say, "Mr. Aldrich painted all these himself."

PC: Oh, my!

LA: Suppose I tell you some of the important things I acquired at this point, even though I can't give you exact dates, because from 1951 on, I was buying both contemporary and so-called master paintings at the same time. In other words, if I saw something of a master nature that appealed to me, I bought it, and if I saw something of a contemporary nature, I also bought that. Well, I won't bother telling you about things that aren't terribly important. But there's a Picasso, Pipes of Pan, that I bought at a Parke-Bernet auction sometime in the late fifties, for which I paid $18,000.

PC: What sculptures are there?

LA: This is a Degas sculpture called The Schoolgirl, which I bought in the fifties from the Fine Arts Associates, but it's . . . .

PC: Gerston.

LA: Gerston. He is someone that I bought quite a lot of things from. I was particularly fond of him and, I would go there on the average of once every two or three weeks, and whenever something came in that he thought would interest me, he'd call me and I'd go over.

PC: When did you start with sculpture?

LA: I think the first sculpture I bought was a Degas in the early sixties and that one I also bought from Mr. Gerston at Fine Arts. This Schoolgirl, I bought subsequently, possibly a year later.

PC: Well I'm always curious because a lot of people who collect paintings do not collect sculptures because it's a different sensibility.

LA: No, I think that Mr. Gerston of Fine Arts handled more sculpture than he did painting, and I found that while my original interest was in painting, it wasn't long before it extended to sculpture as well.

PC: You never collected prints at any point?

LA: Never, no.

PC: So it's paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

LA: I do happen to have a whole series of Dubuffet's done, I think in '58. I can't recall his title for it now, although they were in a book that represented the Earth.

PC: Oh, the texturology.

LA: Texturology. Yes, although that's not exactly the title. It's a 165 black and white and 75 in color which I got over a period of years through a gallery there. They would come to me as they got them from Dubuffet, and Dubuffet himself at that time set out to acquire these for me as they were done. As a matter of fact, at least 70% of them are artist's proofs that I have. While I had never met Mr. Dubuffet personally, I had I guess sometime in the late '50's started to acquire quite a number of them. Or I should say in the middle '50's. And he heard about me, mostly because of the fact that -- it's very amusing, but I had kept a Rolls Royce in Paris from 1956 until I stopped going to Paris, when I got kind of annoyed with Mr. de Gaulle in 1964 or 5. And I guess his dealer at the time must have mentioned it, and so he heard about me and became interested in the fact that there was an American that liked his work and was buying his work and was riding around Paris in a Rolls Royce. And so through his dealer, he arranged to send them always for Mr. Aldrich and I acquired all of these. And you might be interested to know how and why I had gotten to know Mr. Bergrom, the dealer, quite well. I bought quite a number of things from him in Paris, and he came here to America and we had dinner with Bill Lieberman. Bill Lieberman said to me that this whole series of prints -- apparently Dubuffet had not done any prints for a long time, and he set up his own plant in which to do them -- they were eager to know just how many prints there would be in this particular series. He said that if I were to acquire them, he'd like to show them in the Museum of Modern Art (at that time he was the curator of the print department). So I said that I would, and arrangements were made for some supposed special price for the black and white and for the color as they would come. I think it was over a period of nearly two years that I was getting a bundle of these every so often. Then finally word came from Mr. Bergrom that this was the last shipment, and then I would have all of them. So I contacted Bill Lieberman and said I had all of these prints now, and he took them up to the museum, and we had boxes made for them, because they just came to me rolled. I asked when they wanted to borrow them to show them and he said he'd like to borrow about fifty of them to send out on tour. And I said, "Well, I'm sorry. I'm not going to lend any of them to send out on tour. You ought to be showing the whole series in the Museum, that was why I acquired them and so let's forget about it." So I still have all of them. [BEGIN TAPE 1 SIDE 2]

PC: This is Side Two. What happened with the Dubuffet prints? Do you still have them?

LA: I still have them.

PC: Are they in your collection or your museum's collection?

LA: Well, my museum doesn't have a collection. The only thing that museum owns is the property and the building. And it owns my allegiance to pay for the operating budget. Would you like me to list the more or less classical things that, are you more interested in those?

PC: I think if we could just go through that, yes.

LA: Well, you have both of the Degas?

PC: Right, we talked about those.

LA: Then there was a Henry Moore, Mother and Child, that was executed about 1953, that I bought from the New Gallery, Eugene Thaw. Then I had another Moore, Girl Seated Against a Square Wall, that was executed in 1957, that I bought also from Gene Thaw.

PC: It's interesting that you would keep up on figurative things and abstraction, and new and old. A great, broad range of interest.

LA: Well, I guess I have to confess that like most people who become hooked, it gets to be a disease. Then there was a Matisse, Venus in the Shell, that I bought in Paris, and there was another much more important Matisse, that woman with her hand on the ground so to speak, executed about 1910. The Venus in the Shell was executed in 1931. That I bought from Gerston. Germain Rousseau, the Trio. I bought that I guess it must have been about '59 or '60 in Paris. And at that same time I bought the two other Moore ones which I still have. I'm coming to paintings. Now this is rather an interesting one that Henri Matisse executed in 1924. It was a Corsican landscape and I subsequently found out that he had denied in 1894 -- let me see and make certain of my dates -- 1898 rather, and it was painted in a Jacia in Corsica. He had spent considerable time there on his honeymoon, and that is when he painted it. By this time, about 1954 or '5 possibly, I had become quite friendly with Pierre Loeb of Gallery Pierre Loeb, and we stopped in there one winter day, and he hadn't anything new to sell me because by that time I had bought representations of all the artists that he had carried. And so I went upstairs into this little cave to have tea, and on the wall I saw this small Matisse and I said, "What is it doing here? You sell contemporary paintings." He said he had just bought it at an auction a week before in Paris for himself and his own pleasure. Anyhow, by the time I had finished the tea, I had talked him out of it. We were such close friends that he showed me what he had paid for it, $4,000, and he wouldn't even let me pay ten percent more. He insisted that I have it for what he had paid for it, and of course there was a photostatic copy of an endorsement of this painting by his daughter, dated I guess it was '56 that I bought it, must have been dated January, '56 and it was to a painting that would be produced in a forthcoming catalogue raisonne of the artist's work, which was then in preparation.

PC: Did you collect those big reference works like that too, so if you got interested in an artist would you buy his catalogue raisonne?

LA: If a big one came out, yes I did. Have I mentioned about this 1896 Vuillard, his high period, the small black one?

PC: Right, that you've mentioned.

LA: Which was painted on a board. And incidentally, I paid $1,000 for it and I no longer have it. That was one of the last things I parted with regretfully, but it brought $24,000. Then I had a Paul Klee which I bough from the New Gallery. And a small 1919 L?ger which I acquired from Bergrom.

PC: You seem to have done a lot of business with him.

LA: Well, it was a gallery that I got to know and had confidence in. I would visit it in Paris every time I was there. As a matter of fact, the time I bought this L?ger, I also bought a Miro. I bought both of them at the same time. To go on, I bought a small Miro which was painted about 1930, and this is one that I loaned to the Tate Gallery for the big Miro exhibition that they did about 1964.

PC: Which artist did you have the most pictures of, besides Vuillard?

LA: Of the classical ones?

PC: Yes.

LA: I think the only I had a group of was Vuillard. All the others were just one, with the exception of two Picasso paintings. Then there's a Bonnard, painted in 1922, that I bought at Parke-Bernet auction. That's something else I continued to do right along was to attend the collections. And this was acquired from the Oliver B. James collection, and I subsequently found out that my opposing bidder was the Paul Rosenberg Gallery, which had sold it originally to Oliver B. James.

PC: Did you like buying at auctions, the activity of it?

LA: Oh, yes. But I would never buy anything at an auction unless I went to the preview first and examined the things that I bought very carefully. As a matter of fact, I still continue to buy at auctions. The last thing I bought was a year ago at Parke-Bernet, a Noland.

PC: Have you used the London auction houses ever? Or Paris?

LA: For buying or for selling?

PC: Well, for buying.

LA: Not for buying, but I have sold things there. We'll go into that again. To continue, or perhaps I should stick something in here and come back to it later. In 1953, there was a gallery in New York called the Canby Burch Gallery [phon. sp.], which no longer exists, and they were doing an exhibition of Zao Wou-ki. It probably was 1952, or '53. My name had been given to her, and she called me and told me she was doing this exhibition and could she borrow my Zao Wou-ki's for the exhibition. So first I loaned her four or five, I don't remember. In any event, it was through that means that I got to know her. And when I went to the gallery to see this exhibition, in the back room I saw a Vuillard Self Portrait, and I found out that she had acquired it from the same dealer in Paris that I had acquired my Vuillards from. In other words, as things were released to him (or as he sold), other things were released -- he had the whole Vuillard estate, apparently -- and so I had not seen it before, because it hadn't been released yet when I was there. Anyhow, it was just a knockout, and I bought it from her, so that was about 1952 or '53. Well, by that time I had six Vuillards, and in my house in the country all of them were in one room, in the dining room. We spoke of our dining room as the Vuillard Room. Then I had a Redon which was painted in I think it was something like about 1908 or '09, or something of that sort, which I bought from that Mrs. Serger, who had found out about me from my having visited that French lady whom I bought the . . . .

PC: Oh, yes. Yes, right.

LA: Yes, and so she brought this picture down for me to see one day and with it a small Manessier, and I bought both of them, the small Manessier I still have. And then I bought this Chagall, Homage to Paris, Notre Dame from the New Gallery. I haven't mentioned any of these. This I'm going through now, which will subsequently come out in the things I have auctioned and I haven't mentioned what I paid for them and what they brought. Is that of any . . . .

PC: Well, you can comment I think on what you feel are the more important things; it's interesting to see how these change.

LA: Well, I do happen to remember I paid $17,000 for the Chagall and it went for $52,500. Incidentally, if you'll make a note of when we get to the auction part to ask me who it was that helped me in connection with the auctions, so far as giving me an appraisal of what the things ought to go for. Then I had a Kandinsky, 1908, which I also bought from Thaw at the New Gallery and a Signac painted in 1909, which I bought from Mr. Gerston. All the way up to about 1960, I was still buying masters along with contemporaries. Here's a Braque that I bought from the Gallery Maeght in 1957. Painted in 1956.

PC: I find it very interesting, the two parallels -- one wasn't dropped for the sake of the other one. They both count.

LA: After I had the auction in 1963, people on the outside who didn't know me personally always said, "How fascinating that you disposed of all your earlier collection because you wanted to go into contemporary". Well, at the time that I had the auction of my earlier collecting, I owned about three hundred contemporary works.

PC: Do you still have many works of that period in your collection?

LA: No, there are a few things that I never put into the auction, and it was principally because my wife agreed with my decision to dispose of them since by this time I was so deeply involved with contemporary things that I didn't want to live with the so-called masters. In fact, they were gone for about three years during which time everything was replaced with contemporary things. And when they came back, I left them in storage. I didn't rehang any of them, and that's how I made the decision that it doesn't make much sense to have these things in storage while paying the very, very high insurance costs. Plus the fact that since I don't have unlimited resources and means, and I knew I was going to continue to acquire contemporary things. I decided that I would dispose of my earlier work and thereby have the funds available to buy anything else of a contemporary nature that came along. Well, there were a half a dozen things that did not go into the sale and as I will tell you later on, it was a rather fortunate stroke for me that they didn't. One of the last important things that I bought was in 1956, and that was a Monet water lily from Knoedler. I guess you were too young to remember the story in the New York Times about when the Germans evacuated Paris, they had to pass the path through Geverny and they just idly machine gunned Monet's studio, and it wasn't until much later that his aunts went to the studio and found all of these paintings, and all of them had machine gun bullets through them, and they all were repaired. Apparently, Alfred Barr saw them in Paris, and I think he may have contacted the Knoedler Gallery. In any event, they had a large exhibition in New York. And Mr. Barr in Paris, before they came to New York, had bought some for the museum through certain funds. I know he bought one for each of the Rockefellers and some other people that were very close to the museum. In any event, when I went to see this exhibition, which was the day before it opened, I arranged to go and see them. The only one that I liked were ones that Mr. Barr had bought -- other than some that were so colossal, you know, there were many that were eight feet high and twenty feet long and that were totally impossible for me to handle in any way at all. And I saw Mr. Koker and told him that I was sorry I was all primed to buy one, but the ones available in the size I could handle, I didn't like because they were all too light. And he told me about one that had not been finished. The repair on it hadn't been finished, and he'd have it in about a week, and he would reserve it for me. And so I came in about a week later, and I saw it and immediately bought it. There was a gallery that opened on Madison Avenue. A Mr. Mayor, I think, started it. Very fancy, with the two architects, and Armand Bartos and -- what was the name of the sculptor who was his partner as an architect at the time?

PC: Kiesler?

LA: Kiesler. Anyhow, they did this gallery and the opening exhibition was to be a loan exhibition, and Mr. Bartos asked if he could borrow this Monet and a little small black Vuillard and three or four other things for the exhibition, and I did lend it to him. And this has come back to me from several people who saw the exhibition: they said that I had the best of the late Monets. The fact that Mr. Barr had first crack at them in Paris and I got what so many people said was the best Monet, apparently it got back to him, and so he went to see the exhibition with someone, Monroe Wheeler or one of the other people at the museum, and when he saw it he said that he had not see this picture in Paris. And it was true. He hadn't. In other words, that one had not as yet been repaired. And it was darker than most of them, and harder to photograph. Bill Seitz did a Monet book about 1959, I think it was. And apparently none of these water lilies were dated. And this one is hanging in my showroom, and Bill Seitz spent about two days sitting in front of it and finally came to the conclusion that this was painted in 1918, because apparently in 1920 Monet's cataracts developed to a point where he couldn't perceive colors very clearly. And he did have a cataract operation and the paintings that were done after this particular date were different in appearance because of his difference in color values. Incidentally, I paid $26,000 for this painting in 1956 and when it was auctioned in '63 it brought $187,500.

PC: That was for the Foundation, wasn't it?

LA: I had given it to the Foundation prior to the auction. To tell you why will get ahead of the story, so we'll remember to come back to that. And there was a 1905 Kirchner, which I bought from Mr. Gerston, again of the Fine Arts.

PC: That's one of the rare expressionist paintings you have, isn't it?

LA: Yes, very rare.

PC: You don't buy very many of them?

LA: No.

PC: Was there a reason?

LA: No, it was just that when I saw this one I liked it. That's how I acquired everything. There was never any logical sequence, and there was never any hunting out to attempt to fill in a collection or anything of that sort.

PC: It was just the individual object.

LA: It was just the individual object that appealed to me and if I had the money to buy one, I'd say yes, and if I didn't have the money to pay for it, I'd say yes and borrow the money. But the lack of funds was never allowed to interfere with my acquiring it once I saw something that I liked. The only times when I would not buy something that I liked was when it was much larger than I could handle. As a matter of fact, in 1952, I guess it was, I went on a holiday with my wife in Rome and we went to the Gallery Odelisk. It was very amusing -- it was about eleven o'clock in the morning and I walked in and looked around and I saw that there were quite a number of things I'd be interested in and I asked for the proprietor. And the man that was showing me things said, "I'm the proprietor." He told me his name and I said, "How would you like to lock the door and pull down the blinds as if you were closed." And he looked at me rather odd and asked, "Why?" I said, "Well, I see a lot of things here I'm going to be interested in and I would rather not be disturbed." And so -- it was not a large gallery -- he said alright and he locked the door and pulled down pulled down the blind as if it were closed and I looked at everything that he had. Then we went out to lunch and came back, and by the end of the day I bought twelve or thirteen Italian paintings. This was, I think, in 1952, and there was one -- again I'm going to have to test your memory -- an Italian who did sort of industrial scenes. A contemporary. Still alive and still painting.

PC: Was it Catuso?

LA: No, earlier than that. He's an older man now. He had a brother that came here to teach.

PC: Oh, right. I know his brother was at Harvard.

LA: His brother was at Harvard, right.

PC: I can't think what his name was.

LA: Well, I can supply that at a later date. In any event, we got to be close friends during the course of the day and I selected a painting by this artist to acquire that was about two and a half by four feet. And there was another one that was about five foot high and almost seven feet long that I liked very much, but because of the size I couldn't take it because I was only putting things in my apartment in New York and in my house in Ridgefield, Connecticut. And he said "I'm so insistent that you have this painting that I'll give it to you for the same price." Which was maybe $300 or $400 for the small painting. And I said, "I like it very much, but I just don't feel I have a wall for it where I live." He still insisted, and he said, "How long are you going to be in Rome?" I said about another four or five days. He said,"Well, let me send it up to your hotel and you can at least leave it hanging on the wall while you're in Rome and then you decide." Well, he did, and we liked it very much, but again, it was a matter of size. Well, naturally we didn't take it. About four or five years later there was a Pulitzer exhibition for charity at the Knoedler Gallery in New York, and low and behold there was that painting. Here's Henri Hayden, who is one of the cubists that I bought in London, which was sometime in the middle fifties. And I found out later that Hayden had done a cubist Three Musicians, and that when Picasso painted his famous Three Musicians, he gave Hayden credit for the concept.

PC: Oh, really? I didn't know that.

LA: There was a small exhibition that traveled around the country. There was some from the Modern Art Museum in Paris. There were 25 choice things from their collection, and one of them was the Hayden Three Musicians in this country. But to give you an idea of how odd my collecting was, here's a Marsden Hartley that I bought in the early fifties from the New Gallery, one that was painted in 1913, that was from the group that he did when he was in Germany during that time. Then this is the Picasso, which, as I said before, was the most I ever paid for a painting. And I bought this from the Saidenberg Gallery for $35,000 and for a while I believe, it was the only 1908 Picasso in the Western hemisphere. What's fascinating about it is that you can see all of the indications of cubism. What's amusing is that in the auction it went for $100,000, and it was bought by the Marlborough Gallery and was sent to Switzerland. Then I found out later that it was Norton Simon who had acquired it. And then I was in California in 1966 and I had dinner with a Mr. Wiseman, who is a brother-in-law of Norton Simon. And as a matter of fact, there were two paintings that were bought by Marlborough in that gallery, both of which went to Norton Simon. And he told me that it was still in Mr. Simon's rack, that he had never hung it, that he hadn't got accustomed to anything quite that contemporary. It was rather amusing. But of course this is a painting that I loaned a great deal prior to the auction.

PC: Well, some of the paintings that were in the auction traveled a great deal. I mean you lent them to many exhibitions.

LA: Yes, we'll come to all of that when we get to about 1958 or '59. In the auction, on the advice of Gene Thaw -- who I had become close friends with at the time and felt he was very knowledgeable -- and as you know at an auction, you have to sort of protect your . . . . See, in 1963 at Parke-Bernet there was no . . . what is the right word?

PC: Reserve?

LA: Reserve. And so you had to do your own protecting, and so Mr. Thaw worked with me to give me an idea of what something in his opinion ought to go at what figure. And if during the auction it didn't reach that figure, I had to make the decision either to let it go or buy it back myself and pay the full commission. In other words, the auctioneer wasn't aware of the fact that I was doing any bidding.

PC: How accurate was Parke-Bernet appraisals at that point, as compared to what pictures brought?

LA: I don't really remember, because frankly I never even bothered to find out what the appraisals were. I'm not right about that, they did have appraisals on them. Let me see some of them to get an idea. Well, now here's the first one. The Bonnard. They had $45,055, and it was sold for $55,000. I'll only try to find some of the more important ones. Then there was a 1953 Miro. A large one that they appraised at $35,000 to $40,000, and it went for $35,000. That's pretty close. And there was another Kirchner, a couple under a Japanese umbrella that was dated 1912, that they appraised at $15,000 to $20,000 and it went for $15,500. Then this Picasso they had at $90,000 to $110,000 and it went for $100,000. So I think they were fairly close.

PC: They're pretty good estimates, yes.

LA: The Monet they had $100,000 to $125,000 and it went for $137,500.

PC: So it's interesting. It averages out very closely, doesn't it?

LA: Yes, the Gauguin they had $90,000 to $100,000 and it went for $110,000. We're kind of getting ahead of ourselves, but you might find it interesting that at the time the auction was held, Henry Ford had separated several months previously from his wife, and he had quite a collection, and apparently she took all of them. So he was in the market for a new collection. And I think that he was the largest individual buyer at the auction.

PC: That's interesting to see where they went.

LA: Well, I have a list of where everything went. We sort of have gotten off the track from a chronological standpoint. In any event, I was continuing to acquire classical things as I also was buying contemporary things, and the majority of the contemporary things were bought from the Gallery Pierre Loeb in Paris, and from the Gallery de France. As a matter of fact, I think that from about 1952 to my last time in Pairs in 1964, I might have bought more than fifty some odd items there.

PC: Well, do you continue buying things like that or have you stopped buying? LA; The old, the classical, or . . . .

PC: The classical.

LA: The modern masters so to speak, oh heaven's yes. The only thing I still have left are: in 1945 and '46 Picasso did a series of 21 women -- small sculptures in series of ten -- and I bought the first two from Kahnweiler in Paris, for about $600 or $700 a piece, and I found a couple of others from the Fine Arts Gallery that were around $700 or $800. In any event, all under $1,000. I had acquired nine of them and the next time I found one that was unlike what I already owned, I was asked about $1,300. And I thought well, that's ridiculous. The next time I saw another one that was unlike the nine that I owned, it was $1,600 and so while I had that, the only time I deliberately set out hoping to acquire a whole series, the prices had gotten away from me and I just didn't feel that keen about it to warrant my paying any more than that. Besides that, I have a 1958, well, I wouldn't . . . . Well, Picasso is a master, but that was a contemporary work. He did a series of five bulls, all unique. I acquired one of those. One of the five from Kahnweiler in Paris, and prior to that, a publisher friend of mine came to see me in the middle fifties or something of that sort with a lot of photographs had been taken by David Duncan of Picasso and he asked my opinion -- only because he knew I was involved as a collector -- whether the fact that it was known that Picasso was a communist would interfere with the sale of a book that he was contemplating which subsequently came out and was called The Private Live of Pablo Picasso. It was a soft cover book. And so looking through the photographs there was one photograph of the steps of his house at Vallouris. And there was a bronze pot with a spout and a handle, and it was positioned so that you could see that it had a face etched on either side of it, and I put that one aside. And then in the entry hall there was a large thin bronze in the figure of a woman, but it was an urn with two handles that was in a niche in his entrance hallway. I'd been told that Mr. Duncan was going to go back to the Vallouris to complete this job and I said when he sees Picasso, would he ask if I could have both of those items and I would be in Paris again in January. And so when I came to Paris, I went to Kahnweiler, and the pot was there with a tag on it with my name, and Mr. Kahnweiler said that Mr. Picasso was sorry , but he was going to keep that urn in the shape of a woman. The next time I saw it was during the Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

PC: It's fascinating how the objects move around through the world and collections and things.

LA: So, the majority of what I still own has been created from 1950 on. [BEGIN SIDE ONE TAPE TWO]

PC: It's the third of May, 1972, and this is Side Three. I think we might just continue discussing the modern masters.

LA: I believe where we left off, we were discussing the fact from 1951 on, after my first acquisition of the Vieura da Silva and the Zao Wou-ki, that I gradually became more and more involved with contemporary art, while at the same time I continued to buy paintings of the master classification. If it's of any interest to you to know where I bought them, and since we've already mentioned the auction, there was a Walf, which I bought from the Gallery Craven in Paris. I can't exactly remember the dates, but all of these were purchases somewhere between that first purchase of 1948 and my last purchase of a master painting, which was probably late '58.

PC: So it's a decade really.

LA: Yes, then there was a small Picasso, Pipes of Pan, which I bought at a Parke-Bernet auction -- which incidentally, I paid $7,000 for. It was sometime in the later fifties and in the auction, it sold for $18,000. I think I may have mentioned the Dufy that I bought in about 1949 for $300 at a Parke-Bernet auction, and in my auction it went for $4,000.

PC: Did auctions hold any special appeal for you, or was it just things that came up that interested you, and it was just another place to acquire things?

LA: No, I would read about the auctions that were taking place, and as a matter of fact, I think the principle reason that I bought so many things at Parke-Bernet is because I was actively running a fashion business, and I was spending, as part of it, so much of my time in Europe, since I made at least three trips a year, and it was very, very difficult for me to ever leave here during the day. Whereas Parke-Bernet auctions were only held in the evenings, and I could go to the preview which was also from three or four evenings before and see if there was anything that interested me, and then with the auctions being held in the evening, my time was free and available.

PC: There are so many people I know who rarely buy things at auctions, and you seem to have bought so many, that I was curious about why.

LA: Well, that's how it happened. There was a Degas sculpture that was bought from Fine Arts for which I think I paid about $1100 for it, and it was sold in the auction for seven thousand dollars. I might mention at this point that this Degas was one of the things that I bought for one of my daughters. I bought several things for one daughter and one painting that I will tell you about a little later for another daughter, which they both elected to have included in the auction. Then I bought another Degas called La Reverance from Fine Arts Association. And that I think I paid about $1500 for it. And that's another one that I had given to my daughter and that was sold for $8000. Incidentally, that's one that Mr. Hirshhorn bought and still has. So it will wind up in his museum. And then there was a Henry Moore, Girl Seated Against a Square Wall, that I also bought from Fine Arts for about $2000, and that went for $8,750. Then I don't know whether I mentioned the Venus in the Shell, which I bought in Paris for about $1,800, which went for $6,500. And then there was another much more important Matisse, the woman with her hand on the ground, and much larger that I had bought from the New Gallery for about $2,500 or $2,800 and that went for $13,000.

PC: It's interesting to see, in the short space of time, how the prices have increased.

LA: Well, I dare say, this auction was held in 1963 and if it were held today it would bring three times that, which was something that I was well aware would very likely be the case at the time that I held the auction, or decided, rather, to dispose of them. But I deal with that a little later. Then there was a Germaine Rouseau that I bought in Paris for about $700 or so, called The Trio, and that went for $3,000. And then there was a Henri Laurens sculpture that I bought in Paris for about a $1,000. It went for $4,500. I think I've mentioned the small Matisse that I had gotten from the Gallery Pierre Loeb, which I had for $4,000, which was exactly what he had paid for it, and that went for $9,500. And then there was a Paul Klee that I had gotten from the New Gallery. And I think I had paid about $7,000 for that, and it went for $15,000. If this is of any interest to you, I have the record of who bought what.

PC: You said Mr. Ford bought quite a number of them?

LA: Henry Ford bought quite a few of them. I think I mentioned that before, because it was just at the time when his marriage had broken up and his wife had taken all of their art work. And then there was a 1919 L?ger and I bought at the same time a L?ger and a Miro in one package for $15,00, and the L?ger itself sold for $15,500. The Miro was not in the auction. I disposed of that later on, and we'll get to that. And then there was a Bonnard that I had gotten at a Parke-Bernet auction from the collection of Oliver B. James that I had bought for $17,000 and that went for $55,000.

PC: You know, I'm curious. As you go through all of this, and you'd been collecting ten years by the time of the sale . . . .

LA: No, 1948 to 1963. That's fifteen years.

PC: Well, did you have an investment idea in mind at any point?

LA: Never had any investment idea in mind at all. As a matter of fact, I never had in mind to become known as a collector. My original acquisitions were purely for pleasing me and decorating my home. And it wasn't only till later that I acquired that disease that makes a casual buyer of a work of art to decorate their home, become an avid collector.

PC: When do you think that happened? Can you ascertain a particular time?

LA: I think that happened within a very, very few months after I got my first two purchases, which were an early Utrillo and a Renoir. And I still had those original ten paintings that I told you about that I had bought from this artist, and they were still decorating our house in Ridgefield, and I think that the comparison of these two paintings with this group that I had bought in 1937, made me very, very much aware that there was a great deal more than surface decoration in a work of art. Plus the fact that I think I mentioned before that before I had made these two acquisitions in Paris, I had been reading almost everything that was written by top authors about the period from Manet right on through. And so probably looking back now, I would think that I was slightly hooked before I made my first acquisition, but after living with those first acquisitions I guess I really was hooked. If I had not been possessed of the means to acquire more, I just don't know what I would have done about it. I probably just would have bought reproductions or something of that sort. But fortunately besides the great interest, I did have the means and that's how and why I continued. Then I bought a Soutine and a Braque flower painting, both at the same time in 1957. I know because when I went into the Catcher Granoff Gallery in Paris, this was after the 1956 exhibition in New York of Monets at the Knoedler Gallery, which had created so much interest because of the story connected with how these Monets came into existence. And Catcher Granoff was quite a character, and she insisted on letting me know that these Monets that were sold so presumably inexpensively at that time by Knoedler, that she wasn't quite as much of a fool as the world thought her to be, because she had deliberately given them these eighteen or twenty paintings to sell, while she had a stock of about a hundred just for them to establish the market for her. And she showed me some that she had in the gallery that she was selling for $50,000 that were of the same late Monets in about the same sizes that the ones that had been sold at Knoedler. Anyhow, I bought this Soutine, a 1926 Soutine for about $4,000 in 1957, and I bought the Braque painting of about 1930 -- a flower painting as a matter of fact -- which also was disposed of in this auction for more than the Soutine, about $6,000. I believe I've mentioned the Manet sketch for the famous picture which I paid only $1,000 for, and it went at the auction for $11,000. This may be of interest; this was a sketch for the famous picture that Mr. Mellon bought and auctioned from that German ex-patriot that was sold and I think it was Sotheby's in London, somewhere around 1959 or '58, and I think he paid more than $300,000 for it which established a record at that time. Someone, when they saw this picture, someone from Richmond, Virginia, which is where Mr. Mellon lives, said, "Why don't you contact Mr. Mellon and I'm sure he would very, very, much like to have this sketch, since it is the only sketch of the major painting that Mr. Mellon has bought." And I knew that was true too, because in early '58 or '57, around there, I'd met Douglas Cooper in Paris and his friend, I'll try to think of his name, Richardson I believe it was, who is now representing not Sotheby's, but the other.

PC: Christie's?

LA: Yeah, Christie's in London.

PC: Jacques Richardson.

LA: Yes, and he had told me that he had just completed a book on Manet, and he was hunting high and low for this particular sketch to include in this particular book. And this Richardson said that he'd been very keen to find the picture, but he hadn't had any success because he thought that was a key sketch in the Manet picture. Anyhow, I met someone, as I mentioned earlier, from Richmond, Virginia, who suggested that if I ever wanted to sell it, to contact Mr. Mellon, which I never did because at the time that this was mentioned to me, I had no intention of selling anything. In any event, it went at the auction for $11,000, and it was bought by Mr. Russack personally who was with Wildenstein. And I found out later that two weeks after he'd bought it at the auction he did sell it to Mr. Mellon for more than $20,000. I thought that was rather amusing. And I think I mentioned the self portrait by Vuillard. I had paid $6,000 for it, and it went for $57,000. And that's one of the paintings that Mr. Thaw bought. It was rather interesting at the auction; it was one of those sort of things that just as the auctioneer slammed his little hammer down and said "sold", someone bid sixty and he said, "I'm sorry, it's too late," and the whole audience protested. But in any event, that was it. Then this Redon, Mystic Sailing, which I had bought from Mrs. Serger for about $7,000, that went for $19,000. The Utrillo, which was one of the first two paintings that I had bought in 1948 for $2,800 was the one that had increased in value the least. That went for $13,500, although the estimate had been 20 to 25,000. And then there was this Chagall, that I bought from the New Gallery for $17,000 and that went for $52,500. The Miro which was in the auction, which was the one that I bought at the same time as I had bought the L?ger -- the small Miro, which was painted about 1930 -- was one that I was particularly fond of, and I bought it back at the auction. As a matter of fact, there were several things that I put in the auction that I had not intention of ever selling, but on the advice of Gene Thaw, who I sort of became very close to -- at that time he was very involved with all of the kind of paintings that I owned, as he no longer is, he just deals in old masters. Because of my own lack of background knowledge of values of everything, and since I never made it my business to find out what things were valued at the time I decided to have the sale, I contacted Gene and asked him whether he would work with me and give me an opinion as to about what -- this had nothing to do with Parke-Bernet's appraisals incidentally -- but a limit within what I should let something go and how to protect it. Would it be of any interest to know how this worked at the auction?

PC: Yes, that'd be great.

LA: Well, I sat with Gene Thaw in the first row in the balcony and with arrangements with the auctioneer -- there was a railing on that first row, and whenever Mr. Thaw put his hand on the railing, it would mean the next highest bid. In other words, usually bids up to a certain point, or two fifty additions at another point they're five hundred and another price range they're a thousand and so on.

PC: That was his bidding sign?

LA: That was his bidding sign. As he put his hand on the rail, then the bid was one higher and of course, sitting next to each other, we were constantly consulting and I had the catalog in front of me with his notations of the area in which it should go. We did not have the Parke-Bernet appraisals at all because that didn't mean anything whatsoever. And so the Miro I bought back for $6,500. Incidentally, I had to pay full commission because the Parke-Bernet was not at that time on a basis of having a reserve, and they had no idea whether there was anything I would be buying back or not. I did buy back quite a number of things that were in the auction, some because they did not come up to the price area that Gene Thaw had outlined as what they ought to bring. This is rather amusing. I naturally had to pay capital gain, and I contended that the commission I had paid on the paintings that I had bought back should become part of my cost, because I had put things into the auction in order to sort of screen the whole idea and draw a larger audience with no intention of having to sell them to begin with, and for that reason I felt as though it should be part of my cost. But the IRS did not agree with that at all. They said it could become part of my cost on the things I bought back if and when I were to dispose of them. At any event, this Miro is one that I did buy back, and then there was a 1909 Kandinsky that I bought from the New Gallery for $9,000 and that went for $20,000. There was a Signac. Is this getting to be dull?

PC: No. It's very interesting to see when you think of the years when some of the pictures are painted and then what you bought them for and what they were sold for. The percentage increase in a shorter space of time.

LA: Well, of course, what would be even more fascinating, here we are in '72, if we had an idea of what they would do now. Then there was a Garden at St. Tropez by Paul Signac that was painted in 1909. I had bought that for $6,000 from the New Gallery probably around 1951 or '52, that went for $43,000. That's another one that went to Henry Ford. And the Braque flower painting that I had bought at the same time as I bought the Soutine, that went for $24,500 and to the best of my recollection, I think that may have cost about $4,000 or $5,000. Incidentally, that was painted in 1956, so I bought it the year it was painted. No, I bought it in '57. The Vuillard Self Portrait, I paid $3,000 for that (it was quite sizeable, 29" by 27 1/2"), and that went for $22,000. I think I mentioned the Gauguin which I bought from Paris. I can't even remember her name now, but from a friend of Mrs. Serger's. She brought it here, and I bought it for $9,000. That went for a $110,000, and that was also bought by Henry Ford. Then the Renoir which was the same painting I originally bought in '48, I bought that back in the auction for $17,000. That was the only painting that I discussed with Parke-Bernet, and that was the only one I told them that I was not going to dispose of and please see what you can do about knocking it down as low as possible. Incidentally, I only paid about $1,500 or $1,600 for it in 1948, and I bought it back for $17,000. And then a Louis Valtat water color that was a fauve painting of 1905, I bought from Gerston for about $300, I think I must have bought that about 1950 or '49, or '51. That went for $4,250. The Monet which I had gotten from Knoedler (we may be kind of jumping ahead of my story), I gave to my private foundation, and I will go into that later. I had made an arrangement with the Museum of Modern Art to make available to them $10,000 a year for the express purpose of buying the works of American painters, and I limited the acquisition to no more than a $1,000 per item. They could be either painting or sculpture. And my reason for limiting it to that was to make certain it was only new artists who would get into the collection. The Museum of Modern Art -- and I'll go into that later, how I became rather close to them through Bill Lieberman, who was known at time as the curator for the collectors, among his other duties and he was damn good at it. They had no problems getting donors for paintings that were 10, 20, 30, 50, $100,000 even. There was no limit as I recall, but they found it impossible to find a donor for a new artist that had a low figure because apparently there was not much glory connected with having your name as a donor on something that no one particularly had ever heard of up to that point. In any event, to continue, my arrangement with them was on a five year basis and 1963 was just about the end of that five years. I wanted to extend it for another five years, and by that time I had become interested and active in the Whitney Museum as well. I thought that according to Mr. Thaw's calculations that the Monet should bring about $75,000, and so I arranged to give this painting to my foundation prior to the sale. And again prior to the sale I made the arrangement with the Modern to extend their program for five years and I originated a program with the Whitney Museum for five years, but only giving them $5,000 a year to be used in the same manner. Much to my surprise and pleasure, the paintings brought $137,500, which had cost me $26,000 in 1956. I won't bother with some of the lesser important paintings. There was a 1905 Kirchner that was a fauve painting of the Negro dancer, that I had bought from the Fine Arts Gallery for something like $4,000 or $5,000, and that went for $26,000, which was much less than the Parke-Bernet figure. They had $35,000 to $40,000 on it, because it was a very large painting. It was 67" by 37". But Gene Thaw's figure on it was $23,000, and so when it got to $26,000, I let it go. Then there was a Henri Hayden cubist painting, which I bought in London about 1951 or '2 for about $1,000 and that went for $5,500. Then there was a Marsden Hartley that I bought from the New Gallery. This was a 1912 or '13 painting which was the period that he'd been in Berlin, from 1912 to about 1914, and I bought this from the New Gallery for about $5,000, and it's interesting that Mr. Thaw's figure on that was between $2,000 and $3,000, and it went for $5,000. Then the Picasso -- and incidentally, earlier I had said I'd pay $35,000 to the Saidenberg Gallery but I later recollected that I paid $35,000 but for the Picasso and for a 1917 or '18 Juan Gris, so I think that it was on a basis of $7,500 for Juan Gris and $27,500 for the Picasso. And this is one that went for $100,000, and it was bought by the Marlborough Gallery for Norton Simon. And then there was another Kirchner which I bought from the New Gallery I think for about $2,500, and that went for $15,500. And then there was Miro that I bought from the New Gallery for -- this was a large one 76 1/2" by 38". It was painted in 1953, and I really had no desire to part with it, excepting that it was just so . . . . It was in my storeroom. I had no place to hang anything quite that large, and so I put it into the auction and it went for $35,000. That was another one that Henry Ford bought. And then there was a Max Ernst, which I bought in Paris in the Gallery Edward Loeb, who is the brother of Pierre Loeb. And I bought it the year it was painted, 1958, and I think I paid $1,200 or $1,300 for it, and it went for $6,250. Then there was a Dubuffet which I had loaned to quite a number of various exhibitions including one at the Museum of Modern Art. And everyone acknowledged it is the outstanding painting in the group that he had painted in 1950. But it is probably the ugliest painting that ever existed, and my wife absolutely refused to let me hang it after I had bought it from Pierre Matisse Gallery, and I had it in my office for a while, but everyone that came into my office absolutely shuddered and was carried away. I knew of course of Dubuffet's importance by the time of the auction because at that time I had eight Dubuffets, and I still have five, and incidentally, it went for exactly what Gene Thaw thought it would go for, but less than the Parke-Bernet appraisal. It went for only $17,000 and the Pace Gallery tells me that they would pay $60,000 for it today if the woman who bought it was willing to sell it. I think I paid $9,000 for it from the Matisse Gallery.

PC: It's interesting about Dubuffet. He really creates that difficult reaction in a lot of people.

LA: Then there was another Dubuffet that was one of his earliest; it was 1945. It was a profile of a man, very, very heavily thickly painted and also about as ugly as a painting as you could imagine to look at, and I actually paid $9,000 for it in 1958 or '59, and Gene Thaw thought it ought to go for about twelve and it went for $9,500, and I said, oh the hell with it. I can't hang that anyhow, and so we let it go. I think all of these early forty paintings are now really priceless. Then there was a Nicolas de Stael. A large one that I had bought from the Gallerie Pierre Loeb about 1956 or something of that sort. It was very, very dark, it was 51 1/4" by 35 1/4", and I paid about $12,000 for it, and I let it go for less than Mr. Thaw's estimate. It went for $25,000. And then there was a Ben Nicholson, and I can't even remember now where the devil I got it from, but I know it didn't cost me more than about $600, and that was '55. And that went for $6,500 and I really don't know why I sold it. Then there's a Riopelle, -- and this is rather interesting -- this Riopelle was painted in 1952. By 1952 after my January of '51 acquisition of the Zao and Vieira de Silva, I had become very friendly with Pierre Loeb in Paris, and in 1952 he had an exhibition of Riopelle, and I thought they were just terrific, and they were about $800 or $900. But these paintings were all too large. About 1955 or '6, I was visiting Pierre Loeb at the Gallery, and by this time I think I had bought every one of his stable, so to speak, and I said, "You know, time has passed, and I no longer buy just to hang in my house. I have the disease to such an extent that I buy things and stick them right in a storeroom. I have never forgotten that Riopelle show that you ever had in 1952. I thought those paintings were so beautiful, and I've regretted that I never got one." So he said, "Come with me." And we went through several back alleys where he had his storeroom, and he had from that same 1952 show (because he'd only sold one) about six or seven of them, and they were so thickly painted that one particular one had a cerulean blue in it that I don't think had ever dried completely. Anyhow, he said, "If you want one you can have it for not much more than what you could have bought it for in 1952. You can have it for $1,000." And I said, "No, I'll give you $1,500." Anyhow, that went into the auction and the principal reason was because it's one that I had never been able to hang because of its size. Plus, it had been on tour anyhow and that went for $12,000. And then there was another Dubuffet that I had also bought from the Pierre Matisse Gallery for about $6,000 and that went for $13,000. That was in 1949. Now we'll come to the de Kooning, which I think is a rather interesting story. I wandered into the Saidenberg Gallery when she was still on 77th Street, and this was after I had bought the Picasso and the Juan Gris from her, and hanging in her back room was a 1949 de Kooning which was two standing women, and I said, "What the devil are you doing with this? This isn't your kind of picture at all." And she said as a matter of fact a friend of hers in Chicago had bought it about 1950, '51, and it's such an ugly picture that she never has liked it, and she just sent it to her a couple of weeks ago, and asked her to dispose of it. And I asked at what price. She said it was bought for $1,800 from the Sidney Janis Gallery, and she wanted $1,800 and ten percent. That's $2,000 and I said, "Fine, I'll buy it." I bought it for my older daughter, Susan, and it was only in her name. Well, in August of 1963, my daughter got married and she was not quite eighteen years old, and she married someone that was still going to the University of Pennsylvania. And when I decided to have this auction. I said, "Susan, I'm having this auction, and would you like me to include your de Kooning in the auction? I don't know exactly what it would bring, but surely about $20,000, but it will only be worth more if you don't sell it." And she said, "No, Daddy, we need the money now." So I put it in the auction, and it sold for $27,000, and it was bought by Marlborough for Norton Simon, who loaned it to the de Kooning show that was held at the Museum of Modern Art about two years ago. Apparently this was another one of the so-called -- for him -- contemporary paintings that he couldn't live with because he sold it at an auction last year for $45,000 at Parke-Bernet. Wasn't that something? And then there was a Giacometti that I bought from a gallery in Paris for $1,800 that was a portrait of his brother or something of that sort and apparently not a very good one. It was dated '47, and I put that into the auction because I had at that time another Giacometti that was very beautiful, so I felt as though this was surplus, and it went for $4,500. What is interesting is about two years ago a friend of mine from Miami Beach called me on the telephone, and he said, "I'm offered a Giacometti that the dealer tells me you had sold at the Parke-Bernet auction, and I want to know whether it's a legitimate painting or not." He described the picture and I said yes, and he said, "Fine, then I'll buy it." I said, "Incidentally, what are you paying for it?" He said, "The dealer wanted $20,000, but I think I'll be able to get it for $17,500." Subsequently I found out he did buy it, so that gives you a slight idea of what could have happened to some of these. Well, I think that fairly well covers it excepting a Tomias that I bought from Gallery de France. I think it was '56, I bought it in the year it was printed for about $500 or $600, and that went for $3,100. And there was a Lanskoy that -- as a matter of fact, I had about four or five Lanskoys which I had all bought from the Gallery Pierre Loeb, and this one probably cost me $200 or $300, and it was just too pretty. It was very like a candy box that went for $2,200. That's the end of the auction story. Now we can go on to other things. You might be interested to know that including the Monet the total at the auction was about a $1,200,000. In any event, from 1951 on, every trip that I made to Paris -- and that was usually about three times a year -- I would allow four or five days to do nothing but look at paintings, whereas in New York, and I'd come to work in the morning, and there would always be far too many things to make it possible for me to get out. And since I lived in Connecticut, I wasn't in the position of other people who were interested in art to spend Saturdays going around the market. As you note, most of my acquisitions were either from the New Gallery or Gerston of the Fine Arts Gallery. They'd call me on the telephone and say they had such and such a thing they thought I might be interested, and would I like to see it. And I'd make a date, even though their galleries would always close at five o'clock, to come and see it at six or six thirty or something of that sort. I was just too busy during the day to ever get off. In Paris, all of the contemporary paintings that I acquired from 1951 on were either bought from the Gallery Pierre Loeb, the Gallery de France, Maeght Gallery, and Kahnweiler in Paris.

PC: I'm curious about what times of the year did you go to Paris?

LA: I went three times a year -- in January, in April, and in July.

PC: So it was all the first half of the year?

LA: All the first half of the year.

PC: All pretty much during the art season except July.

LA: It's rather different in Paris. Whereas the American Galleries, most of them, shut up pretty tight in July and August, it's a very active period in France because there are so many visitors from America and other countries. They have exhibitions all through the summer.

PC: Did you find that dealing with the French galleries was very different from dealing with the American galleries?

LA: Well, I sort of built up a relationship with almost all of the French galleries that I dealt with. The only difference was that in American galleries, you got a bill and you sent an American check. Whereas in Paris, it was a rather different situation until the early sixties when it was stabilized, and they would take an American check for the full amount. But even through the fifties, you had to pay them a certain amount in francs or traveler's checks and the balance to someone you never heard of, a check made out to someone you'd never heard of, which of course then would come back from a Swiss bank. After the auction, I had a devil of time with some of the things I sold that I had bought in France because I had no way of showing exactly what my costs were because if I bought something from Gallery A, the IRS was not interested in a check that was made out to Mr. so and so, who had nothing to do with the bill I got. As a matter of fact, I would have two bills as well. I would be given one bill for the amount of francs that I paid, which I had to show to customs when I left France. Then I would be mailed another bill for what my actual cost was, which would be mailed to me here in New York, and not on one of their bill heads even. Written out in pencil, you know, that sort of thing. Well, you can well imagine the trouble that went on with the Internal Revenue because they just didn't understand any of that sort of thing and in many cases, because I was unable to prove exactly what I paid for something, I would have to give them, at their insistence, a figure that was lower than my actual cost and pay this capital gains.

PC: That's incredible.

LA: Well, I think that a lot of people have had that experience, plus the fact, you must realize, that when I was acquiring these things there was no thought in my mind of their being an investment or of ever selling them. So I probably was fairly careless about records. You throw things away; otherwise, you have to have a warehouse just for your files. That's the fate of a great many of the things that I had bought in from France from 1948 on. And I certainly found that in writing to the galleries -- since I couldn't even remember the exact dates that I had bought certain things -- I couldn't get any cooperation from them. They said terribly sorry, but we don't have any of those records any more. Of course, they never had the records because otherwise their records would be examined by the Internal Revenue Service of France, and well, that was just one of those things. In the meantime in America, we had met just by chance in someone's house about 1950, I guess, Bill Lieberman who was then curator of prints and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art and unofficially also curator of collectors. We saw each other fairly often, socially again, only in the evening. And whenever I would come back from Paris, he would want to know what I had acquired, and he also would be informed of anything that I acquired here. In fact, I believe he introduced me originally to Gene Thaw of the New Gallery. And one of the paintings that I bought from Pierre Loeb about 1953 or '4 was a Torres Garcia pictograph, which I had hanging in my apartment. At that time, our children were growing up in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and this is another reason why I couldn't take time from my business. I was commuting, but I wasn't very happy about commuting, and my wife wasn't very happy about my being in New York all week so . . . . [BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO]

PC: Side four.

LA: . . . . so, we arrived at a compromise. I would come into New York on Monday morning and stay in town Monday night and go back to the country Tuesday evening and stay in the country on Wednesday and not come to New York at all, then come in Thursday morning and stay in town Thursday night and go home for the weekend on Friday. So I had two nights a week free and I saw Bill Lieberman fairly often and got quite friendly with Gene Thaw and a few other people.

PC: How did you meet Guson? Was that around the same time?

LA: I just wandered into the gallery, or it may be that Bill Lieberman recommended that I get to know him. In other words, he felt that those were two galleries that had from time to time extremely good things and that they were two people that he felt were strictly on the level. I believe that's, to the best of my recollection, how I got to know him as well. In any event, I was having dinner in my apartment in New York, which was a town house at 108 East 38th, and the Torres Garcia was hanging in the living room and Bill said, "Are you particularly fond of that painting?" And I said, "Well, I don't think it wears too well." And he said, "Well, would you like to give it to the Museum of Modern Art?" And I said, "Fine." I think I had paid $800 or nine $900 for it, and this must have been about 1956, this evening I'm referring to, and so I gave it to the Museum of Modern Art and I believe I got an appraisal of about $18,000. I think that particular picture is probably worth about $20,000 today.

PC: Well, was Lieberman very obvious in his activity of keeping track of your acquisitions, with an eye for the museum?

LA: I think he was, with everyone that he had heard about that was a collector. That's why I stated before that he was known as the curator of the collectors. And I believe that he was responsible for the Museum getting a great many acquisitions. And I understand that as curator for prints and drawings he did an outstanding job. I think earlier I had mentioned about the Renoir that I gave to the Museum of Modern Art.

PC: Right. But you told me about that off the tape.

LA: Well, at a Parke-Bernet auction about, I guess, 1949, I bought a Renoir still life which, when I first became involved in contemporary art after '51, I found extremely dull. It was a very dull painting of apples and lemons and that sort of thing. And I decided to dispose of it and I asked Bill Liebermann about desposing of it and he said, "Well, give it to me and I'll see how much I can get for it." And then after that he called me and said, "You know, if you can afford to take a tax deduction . . ." (because I think I had paid about $2,000 or $2,500 for it) ". . . I think it ought to be worth about $15,000." Well, I'll not go into details, but in any event, he sold it for $5,000, and I gave it to the Museum of Modern Art and got a deduction of $5,000 with the understanding that the funds were to be used to establish a Larry Aldrich fund in the print department. And I continued to add a modest amount of $250 a year to the print fund to keep it alive and that continued until about two years ago. In 1964, he gave me a list of the prints that had been acquired up to that point from my fund, and I don't know how many hundred prints were on it. Did I mention about the Redon drawings?

PC: Not on the tape.

LA: Well, one day Mr. Lieberman called me and said that he was in trouble, that there was a famous Redon drawing, that he had purchased on his own without authorization for the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum had been very irritated about it and they didn't have the money to pay for it. This was several months after he had bought it -- you know, it takes a long time before things go through an acquisition committee, which may not meet in the summer and so on -- and he asked me if I would do him a favor and buy this drawing which was from Gene Thaw of the New Gallery, and the cost was $4,000, and let the Museum of Modern Art have it as a promised gift without actually making the gift. Well, I later found out that this particular drawing had become the cause of a rift between Bill Lieberman and Gene Thaw, a rift which incidentally I straightened out some time later personally, because he naturally hadn't told Gene Thaw when he had bought it for the museum that there was any question about it, and several months had gone by without Gene getting paid for it. And finally he had gotten irritated and written a letter to Alfred Barr, and Mr. Barr had been very upset with Mr. Lieberman and that's how in desperation Bill called me and I bought the painting and I gave it to the museum. Quite a number of years later it went through the Art Dealer's Association at a $10,000 figure. We haven't spoken of the kind of paintings that I bought in Paris in the contemporary field. Would that be of interest?

PC: Yes, because the only ones you've really mentioned so far were those first few in January of '51.

LA: I sort of have to do a little investigating to recall.

PC: I'm curious about one thing. Was your wife involved with the collecting? Did she have an interest in it?

LA: No, but my wife continued to paint, but not on a steady basis. And as a matter of fact, she has a great deal of talent and could really be quite good if she were to stick with it, but, you know, raising the children and taking care of me, there's a slight interference. She did have an exhibition in 1962, I believe. Actually after our children were grown, we were in New York a good bit of the time, and she started to work at the Art Students League. In fact, she was on their Board of Control, I believe it's called, for several years, and she was doing excellent work. Really working hard two days a week, and she had an exhibition at the East Hampton Gallery, which received quite favorable notices. In fact, there were twenty some odd paintings in the exhibition, and they sold eight or nine of them. But she never really proceeded very much and has painted sporadically. She was, of course, very interested in what I was buying and I think to a certain extent she was nervous about the fact that not having had any real background in art history or anything else, I was casually using our funds in this manner. But there were other things on her mind; it wasn't vital. She never was with me in New York because as I mentioned, all of my acquisitions were made after five thirty when on the Monday night or Thursday night I was in New York. But she was with me the first acquisition in 1948 in Paris, and she was with me on several Paris trips where we acquired contemporary things. Would you like now to know of some of the European or would you like to have lunch?

PC: Well, whatever you like.

LA: Well, I think I can go through that fairly quickly. Ruvich was one that I acquired four of. I think I mentioned earlier my experience in the gallery in Rome.

PC: Oh yes, closing the door.

LA: Well, I think I either got one or two from them, and then I got two more from Gallery de France, although I've given away one of them, I still have three. Pierre Alechinsky, which was from the Gallery de France. I'm just going to tell you now about the Europeans I bought at the time. Francis Dufour, which I got from the Gallery Pierre Loeb.

PC: These were all acquisitions in the early fifties?

LA: These were all acquisitions in France in the fifties that I'm going to tell you about now. A Robert Lapoujade, which also came from Gallery Pierre Loeb.

PC: How did you find Gallery de France because you seem to have bought a number of things from them over the years?

LA: Well, they were not very far from the Ritz Hotel where I stayed, and I knew of them as one of the outstanding galleries for contemporary art. As a matter of fact, I bought a great many things from them. The Dubuffet that I've mentioned from Cordier. I bought -- oh this may be of interest to you -- I bought a 1959 prior to the Beard series called Tract Gidot from Cordelier. This was in January of '59 and two guoache drawings of the Beard series that were about thirty inches high and about nine or ten inches wide. I paid $300 each for those two and $3,000 for the Dubuffet Tract Gidot, which is a fairly large picture. I was not able to take the two Beard series home because there was a Beard series exhibition that was going to take place in, I believe in May, and he wanted those kept for the exhibition. That year, I didn't go back to Paris again until July, and after the exhibition they were to go to my commissionaire, who would hold them until I came to Paris again in July. As a result of buying these three, he made a definite promise to me that I would have one of the Beard series paintings -- I just saw some slides, but nothing else. Well, when I got back to Paris in 1959, the Beard series was already known about here. I'd been sent a catalog because the two collage drawings I bought were in the catalog, and when I got to Paris, I immediately went to the Cordier Gallery and I was told that Mr. Cordier was in Switzerland and I said, "Well, I'm Larry Aldrich, and there was a Beard painting that was supposedly set aside for me." The girl said, "Yes, as a matter of fact Mr. Cordier has two of them set aside for you. He let me know that you were expected in July." One was about six by six and the other was about five by five. And she said the price was $15,000 for the five by five and $20,000 for the six by six. Well, I knew that all the Beard series paintings in the exhibition were between $5000 and $6,000, so I was rather indignant and said, "When is Mr. Cordier coming back?" and she said, "Oh, I don't think he's going to be back until some time in August." So I said, "Well you just tell him for me that I think he's a stinker, and I'm never coming in this gallery again."

PC: Why do you think he did that?

LA: Because everybody and his brother, including Matisse, was dealing here in America. The Museum of Modern Art had gotten somebody to buy one for the Museum and those pictures were really very fantastic, and I don't think he's done anything as good since. As a matter of fact, I think they were really the beginning of his world-wide fame and so naturally the dealer was going to . . . And then Est?ve. I bought two Est?ves from this gallery in Paris. I own five Hartungs all bought from the Gallery de France, and I'll tell you a rather amusing story about that if we get into it later. Frochez, I bought several of his from Pierre Loeb. In fact I bought three or four of them. I bought three or four Lankoys from Pierre Loeb. I bought La Picque from the same gallery that I bought Est?ve from. I have two of those and that's it. Lapoujade I have a few of. Macris, I have two or four of that I bought from the Gallery Pierre. Marfaing, I have four of those that I bought from Gallery Claude Bernard.

PC: You generally bought a number of pictures at a time, didn't you?

LA: Not necessarily at the same time, but I might on the next trip if I saw another one that I liked. Sometimes I'd buy more than one to begin with.

PC: I mean you might buy three or four paintings by three or four different artists at one time.

LA: Yes, oh, I was a quantity buyer. Marotta, an Italian I got in Rome. Andre Masson, I had five of his. I still have three that I got from the Kahnweiler. Matta, I got from the Gallery de France, Natajais from Pierre Loeb, a Francoise Boulen, who is Chilean, from Pierre Loeb's brother. Marion Kratinos from Gallery de France. Sergio Romiti from the Gallery in Rome, Obelisk. Soulages, I have three of his that I got from the Gallery de France. Tapies, I bought that in a gallery, Raoul Ubac from Maeght.

PC: It's interesting that you knew these people from all over. I mean they're not just French painters, they're Mediterranean or South American.

LA: Oh, yes. Paris of course was the mecca then as the art center, whereas New York was giving it a big fight. We'll go into that later. And I think I mentioned to you earlier that I had acquired finally twenty-four Zao Wau-kis, which I still have. Out of twenty-two I still have sixteen. Gelais, I have three of his that are from the Gallery de France. I was one of their best customers. Well, did I speak of Lanskoy?

PC: Yes.

LA: Well, that came from Gallery Pierre. And Lapoujade, I have several of his that came from Gallery Pierre.

PC: You know, I was just remembering. Wasn't the family that owns Gallery de France in the fabric business too?

LA: No.

PC: Or is that a relative of theirs or something?

LA: No, not that I know of. There are two partners, and there is one who doesn't speak English, and he's sort of in the background. Miriam Prevo really runs the Gallery de France. and she's extremely talented to put it mildly. And then Soulages, I have three Soulages, which I got from the Gallery de France too.

PC: Do they range all through the fifties?

LA: Those ranged all through the fifties, yes and no. All the way up to '62, '63. We go to lunch now. Maybe we'll come back and we'll discuss the American scene. [INTERRUPTION]

LA: To continue with the contemporary artists that I bought in Europe, Talplot was another artist that I got from the Gallery Maeght, and in 1955, I attended what was supposed to be the premier exhibition of C?sar at the Gallery Crusivalt. I saw was what was called a "chicken" of found materials with a long neck, and it was on a raised sort of tin or metal or steel thing, and I was interested in it, and it was valued at $300 or $400, and I said I liked it and I would buy it, but I didn't see any signature anywhere on it of the artist. So they said, come back in an hour, and before I left they telephoned C?sar, and when I came back an hour later, he marched in and with a pen knife he scratched out his name and the title and the year, 1955. After that, in 1960, I bought a much larger one called the Guardsmen, it's also of found materials. An American by the name of Sam Francis, oddly enough, I bought in '57. I guess it was from the Gallery Pierre in Paris. I don't exactly know how he happened to have it. I have a catalog from the show that I loaned it to, and I probably can give you the date of it.

PC: I think Francis was living in Paris at the that time.

LA: He was living in Paris at that time.

PC: That was, you said, a gouache, right?

LA: It is a gouache, it's . . . damn it, it doesn't even have the date on it. There's a reproduction in this catalog, but it doesn't have the date. Now possibly, if we see the listing of the artist, because this is an exhibition called contemporary paintings collected since 1951 by Larry Aldrich. It was just a small sample, and it was at the Cranach Art Museum a the University of Illinois in Champagne. That was February 16th to March 22nd of 1964. A, B, C, D, E, F, 1958, so I guess that's the year I bought it.

PC: It's interesting, with your younger artists, you seem to have almost acquired them the year they were made or the following year.

LA: I just happened to be there, that's all. I have a whole bunch of catalogs in front of me that I'll have to refer to for information on when and how.

PC: Yeah, right. Well, we've been talking mainly about acquisitions of European artists in the early fifties and through the fifties. Did the Americans start at the same time, or did that start somewhat later?

LA: Well, we'll get into that next. I wanted to see if I could complete the European part of the story first. Other European sculptors that I bought and still have are Reg Butler and Paolozzi. Two of his that were found material. One is Monkey and the Nut and the other is Black Magic or something of that sort. These catalogs are very helpful in assisting me to arrive at the date. Well, there was a Kolbe sculpture by Georg Kolbe of 1926, that I also bought fromFine Arts Gallery. Then among the Italians I never mentioned that I bought originally in 1952 from the Gallery Obelisk, were Bruno Caruso, Christiano, Fabiani, Marcello Muzzini, Mario Rousseau. Those were all fairly small pictures.

LA: Which catalog is that?

LA: This is one that we'll come to. An exhibition that took place in 1959. Lynn Chadwick was another sculptor that I bought in England. I can't even remember the gallery at the moment. Then there was a woman figure by Moore, Dietrich, a German, and I bought that in a -- I was just walking along the street in a gallery in Paris in 1958, and a 1957 date on it.

PC: Did you have trouble shipping these works of art back to this country in the fifties, or was it easy?

LA: No, there was a shipper always that the gallery arranged for and of course it had to come through customs, and things that were small I would very often carry with me on the plane, but there was never any problems. The only problem was when my customs agent here would get them. They would have to be examined in a storehouse or warehouse by the art division of the customs. And they always had to have a representative present, because quite frequently they were so careless -- the men working on the piers or in the warehouses -- in the process of opening these crates. And you know, French crates were made out of a kind of wood that seems to split very easily with nails that are needed for crates that we do here -- they're rarely ever screwed in -- that they get sort of impatient. Unless you watch very carefully, it's very easy for them to damage something that was shipped from Europe.

PC: When did you acquire the little Giacometti that you had just mentioned?

LA: The little Giacometti I acquired at the same time from the Pierre Matisse Gallery as when I bought the Dubuffet, Olympia, Corps de Dame, and also a 1948 Dubuffet gouache, and in the middle of a glass fronted case, he had this small Giacometti on a marble plinth. Naturally, you don't exactly accept the price that the dealer says he wants to sell something to you for. There's a bargaining period that goes back and forth. In the process of the bargaining period, I said, "I'll take these two, provided that you throw in that little Giacometti throw-away that you have in the case." And he said, "Throw-away, nothing. There are only three of these, and I have two, and Giacometti has the third one." And I guess this must have been somewhere about 1959 or '60, and so I said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do, we'll make the deal and I'll give you $250 for that Giacometti sculpture." And we did. I understand recently that Cluade Bernard approached Matisse and offered him $5,000 for the one that Mrs. Matisse has, and Matisse told him he couldn't sell it to him for fifty because it belongs to Mrs. Matisse.

PC: Well, in buying things in France, was there more bargaining than here, or did it vary depending on what you were buying and what galleries?

LA: Well, I really honestly don't know how to handle that. Because each case was a separate matter. And it was not a matter only of bargaining, but it was a matter of what my ability was to pay, plus the fact of how much it was worth to me. And there were a great many instances of my making an offer for something and it being rejected and my not buying it. As a matter of fact, I think both in New York galleries at the time, and in Paris galleries, I had established a reputation that you don't ask a high fee with an intention of coming down or anything of that sort, because my procedure or methods were slightly different. I would make an offer, and it would either be yes or no. If they said no, there were no hard feelings. In other words, if I made an offer, and they came back with a counteroffer, the answer was strictly no, no matter how much I wanted it. So they stopped trying to fool around with me at that time. Well, I think we've covered the European scene sufficiently. Would you like me to move on now to America?

PC: Right.

LA: Well, I mentioned that because of the fact that I went to Paris as often as I did -- and in the course of the needs of my fashion business -- and allowed time to look at things. And it was not that I was not conscious and aware of the ferment that was going on in America. I certainly was thoroughly familiar with the achievements and status of people like Jackson Pollock and Kline and Clyfford Still, and quite a few others. But when I was in New York, between my children growing up and my spending Wednesdays in the country and not being in New York weekends, I just simply never got around to New York. About 1957, my children were sufficiently grown up that my wife could spend more time with me in New York, and I decided that the only way that I could get around to see the New York galleries was if I just didn't come into my office on one specific day. And so every two weeks I just didn't come in on Wednesday, and I would use that day to go to the galleries. I also at that point decided that if I were going to start buying the works of American artists, since I was not building in my own mind any kind of a historical collection and because my funds were not so unlimited that it didn't make any difference what price I paid for something, I decided that there wasn't any fun in it for me to follow a path that had already been well trod by someone else, because when an artist first comes on the scene, the dealer has to have some confidence in the work and then he has to find someone, a collector, to buy one and a second one and so on. And the people that I mentioned that achieved prominence through abstract expressionism in 1957 were already 10, 15, 20, $30,000 names. And since I never collected on the basis of "see my fabulous collection," that didn't cut any ice with me. And anyhow, at that point I was far beyond having space in which to hang anything. I had my apartment in New York, a hotel apartment, and it did have a dining room and I had taken up half of the dining room to build a cabinet that could hold sculpture on top and could take about a hundred paintings that were up to forty-eight by forty-eight in dimension. Besides my offices and showroom here at 530 Seventh Avenue, we have a large cutting room on West 39th Street, and I took an area there and built -- of course there are high ceilings -- a bin that could take paintings up to eight feet by eight feet and that can hold about a hundred and fifty paintings. And so to me, it would be far more interesting to find new Americans. At that time, I was not going to any galleries. I would not go to any studios because of something I hadn't mentioned. Earlier in 1949, my commissionaire in Paris said would I come with her to the studio of an artist who did a lot of ballet dancers and things of that sort. Well, I did go with her to one of the poorest parts of Paris, and there he was with his wife and two children, in a cold water flat with no toilet and so on, and while his paintings didn't interest me, I just couldn't leave without buying something, and so I bought a picture for $300 and had it shipped home and immediately gave it away as a gift. So I realized that it was not a wise thing for me to attempt to go to artists' studios because I was too soft-hearted, and I knew that I just couldn't possibly walk into a studio and go out without buying anything. So I closed off that avenue and instead sought to go to the galleries who were interested in finding new young artists to show. I particularly was interested in following up first one-man exhibitions, and those would usually be listed in the Sunday section of the Times. My first acquisition in 1957 on that basis was a Grace Hartigan from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (Johnny Myers), who was then in the East 60's. I had, before that, bought the work of an American artist. I had gone to see an exhibition one evening to see a painting that I bought at Mr. Gerston's, and he had a David Smith, Parrot Circle. It was iron that had been painted, but it had been allowed to rust and whiten, and I think this was about '57 because I believe it was created in '55, and I don't know that he was handling David Smith as a dealer at the time or not.

PC: I can't remember off-hand.

LA: I don't remember either, but there was this one piece that did appeal to me, and I bought it at that time for, I don't know, $1,100 or $1,200. This was probably '56 -- it was shortly after the piece was created. In any event, the first painting I bought was a Grace Hartigan from the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, and at some opening at the Museum of Modern Art (I'd by this time become both a contributor and a member and went to most of their exhibitions), I was introduced to Grace Hartigan, who's very tall and very, very attractive, but didn't look anywhere near as attractive as she could have looked. I don't know how we happened to get in conversation, but she knew that I had bought this painting, and I think Johnny Myers must have told her that I was in the fashion business. She pulled me to one side said, "You know, I've been working for a long time and living in poverty really." She said, "I have a couple of dollars now and do you think I could get some clothes wholesale?" And I said, "Why of course." And we made a date for her to come up and when she came up she was so eager and there were so many things that she wanted that she said, "Gosh, I'm just unable to pay for these." And so I proposed that we swap. She had told me that she had a lot of things in her studio that had been out to various other shows. As I said, she really had not had very much success because this was a sizable picture that I had bought for about a $1,000. Incidentally, I had decided that I was going to try and keep all of my American purchases under $1,000, or if there was something that really -- you know -- I might go as high as $1,200, but the idea was to try and keep them under $1000. Anyhow, I let her take anything that she wanted, and then I went down to her studio one night and selected several things in exchange for clothes, and we did that for quite some time. I think that I must own about twenty Grace Hartigans at this point. Some of them as far back as 1946. I think that's the earliest one. That's a collage that in lieu of what happened in the pop art scene in 1960 is quite interesting because there are cut-outs from magazines of Campbell's soup ad and several other things. In any event, we became fairly close friends. In fact, one of the few artists in America that I ever did become friendly with. It's very difficult for me to remember exactly what contemporary people I bought in rotation or anything of that sort. But I do remember that in 1958 I bought a Robert Goodnough, The Frontiersman, and apparently that was one that the Whitney wanted in the Annual of 1958. I loaned it to the Whitney for that purpose and for the first time set foot in the Whitney when I attended that opening in 1958. Anyhow, it was still in 1957, Grace Hartigan told me about an artist that she knew that she felt was good by the name of David Budd, and I told her that I would not go to the studio of any artist, while the artist was there, and she said, "Well, I'll arrange to get the keys." So we had dinner together one night and went down to his studio, and I selected two paintings which I bought and still have that were created in '56, '57. I'm going to try to deal all over the lot, I think that you're interested in knowing about my current Artist of the Year program, and I'm going to sort of tell you how it came about.

PC: Well, that started just about that time didn't it?

LA: In 1958. Betty Parsons who was in a different location then on 57th Street, opened another gallery next door for the purpose of carrying new artists.

PC: Oh, that was her Section #11 or something.

LA: Something like that, yes. And I got an announcement of the David Budd show, and I attended it, and David Budd was there and he came up and introduced himself to me. These were all under glass, and they were about sixteen or eighteen by twenty, something of that sort -- inches, I refer to now. And they were very, very pretty, and he came up to me and said, "You know, my wife has a great figure, and Grace Hartigan looks like a different person since she's been getting clothes from you, and it's going to be my wife's birthday, and I would like to buy some clothes for her, but frankly, I haven't got the money." And so I said, "All right, you come and see me." So he came up to see me and got two or three dresses in exchange for which I took about eighteen or twenty of these things that I gave away to important customers for Christmas. Of course, my customers by this time certainly all knew about my interest in art. They had seen plenty of it in my offices and showrooms, and the reaction, the letters that I got from them were very favorable to put it mildly. Still, it was not the beginning of any program.

PC: Was this the first time you'd given away so many pictures to people like that?

LA: Yes, excepting the first ten. I had by this time given those away, and they were scattered everywhere. There were only three of them that went to one person who still has them that I see occasionally in their living room. As I said, I hadn't even thought of any program. Sometime in 1959, I was at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Bob Goodnough walked in, whom I'd never met before, and I guess it was the middle of '59 or something of that sort. And he had six or eight small paintings with him that were the series of 1959, and I also bought a large 1959, which you see is currently hanging in my showroom. And apparently Art News was giving him the cover for their January 1960 issue, and he had done about forty paintings from which Art News was to select one for the cover. And they were all about sixteen by sixteen or eighteen by eighteen, and I said, "What are you going to do with the rest of them?" Johnny Myers was present at the time, and he said, "I guess I'll have to try and sell them." Not that his work was so avidly being bought or anything of that nature at that time. I think the first o