Oral history interview with Leslie and Johanna Garfield, 2012 Dec. 18 and 20

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Leslie Garfield on 2012 December 18 and 20. Johanna Garfield participates in the second session of this interview. The interview took place at Garfield's home in New York. NY, and was conducted by Judith Olch Richards for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

Interview

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is Judith Richards interviewing Leslie Garfield in his apartment in New York City on December 18, 2012, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc one.

Good afternoon. I would like to start by asking you to talk about your family background, your parents, your grandparents, and any other relatives who perhaps had some kind of impact, looking back, on developing your interest in art or in collecting. So I guess you could start with your family background.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Alright, let's see. My mother immigrated from London as a little girl. She no doubt came from Eastern Europe before the family moved there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What was her name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Anna. A-N-N-A. That's her born name, and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And her last name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Weinert, W-E-I-N-E-R-T. And my father was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1898, and his family came from Eastern Europe.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what was his name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Born name was Jacob, J-A-C-O-B, but he was called Jack.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Garfield?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, it was originally Garfinkel, and that's a story that we can come to in time. And I think probably, becoming a collector, I would have to give credit to my father because I remember collecting programs from movie theaters, and then into American stamps. Yes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Before we get to the age of collecting, tell me exactly when and where you were born.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I was born in the Bronx. And I guess in those days there was a distinction between the West Bronx and the East Bronx.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is that divided by the Grand Concourse?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, we were west of the Grand Concourse, but I think it was sort of—I think in my parent's parlance, it was the Eastern European Jewish families, who were regarded as not as successful, actually more settled in the East Bronx than in the West Bronx.

And we had a number of relatives in the East Bronx. And in those days, it was not—it was probably like the equivalent of going up to Boston, although it wasn't that far. But, "Oh, they live in the East Bronx" would be—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's your exact birth date?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  My exactly birth date is March 23, 1932.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what was the address you were living at when you were a kid in the West Bronx?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I think we started out—one address I don't remember. But as a little boy we moved to 105 East 69th Street, which was between the Grand Concourse and Walton Avenue.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  East 169th?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  East 169th Street, which was three blocks north of 167th Street which had a Loews movie theater, and about three blocks south of 170th Street, which was a big shopping area between Jerome Avenue and the Grand Concourse.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What was your father's occupation?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, my father, by background, was an electrician. And he got involved in, first, renting a garage. His brother-in-law rented a garage as the street sloped down, and then they became partners and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Renting a garage? You mean, for cars to park?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  For cars to park in.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So he was running a parking—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was running a garage, was out of the house by 6:00 in the morning and came home often when I was asleep, even though the garage was only two blocks away from where we lived.

And he had a sister, Rose, who was married to Harry Balter, B-A-L-T-E-R. And my father and he ultimately became partners in buying a garage in Manhattan down on East 31st Street called the Red Ball Garage. It was between 3rd Avenue and Lexington Avenue, six stories, and they catered to a number of different hotels in the area.

I think my father's brother-in-law didn't want my father to be a partner. And I think my father needed, I'm generalizing now, $3,500. Maybe he had the balance or something. And some cousin, who was not wealthy, dug into his savings and lent my father the $3,500. And my father and his brother-in-law were partners, 50/50. And I think it ultimately led to a total separation among both families. We weren't talking to them. We didn't see them.

And they also then bought the garage across the street in the 30s called the Blue Sprocket. And it was at that time when they were buying the Red Ball Garage that their attorney told my father in advance that he didn't think the seller wanted to sell it to someone with a Jewish name, which was Garfinkel. And my father changed the name to Garfield.

And I remember how embarrassing it was to me when we went away, you know, off for summer vacation, I went back to public school and suddenly the teacher in the next class is calling out Leslie Garfield. And everyone's sort of looking around the room, "Who is Leslie Garfield?" And it was—the first couple of days were just terribly—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How old were you?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, I was probably—I don't know whether I was even 13. I was maybe in third or fourth grade, somewhere in there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So what school was that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, that was P.S. 64 which was on Walton Avenue. Both my sisters, who are older than I am—or were older, since one of them has died—went there. It was about three blocks from where we then lived, which was around the corner from 169th Street in an apartment house at 105 Clark Place.

The first address was 115 East 69th Street, and then we moved to this corner building, which I thought was quite swanky at the time. It had a doorman and an elevator. And it had these sunshades that were put up in the summertime on every apartment so you could keep the sun from hitting into the apartment. And I know we faced—the bedrooms all faced south in the front. There were three bedrooms.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did your mother do anything outside the home?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, my mother was a housekeeper.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did you ever go to museums or art galleries with your parents when you were young?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not with my parents, that I recall. Whether I went—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Or with school?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —with school—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Probably not in elementary school.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not really. I don't recall going.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did they have any artworks up on the walls?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, none. None at home.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you were that age, what did you think you would like to be when you grew up?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I thought an architect. I used to like to draw floor plans.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you were growing up, was there a particular thing you did during the summers?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, let's see. We used to, as a little boy, go down to Long Branch, New Jersey. My mother had an aunt who had a house down there in the town of Long Branch, an alley and a block from the main street. And I guess we rented some rooms there up on the second floor.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  For the whole summer?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. And my father would come down on Friday nights. And I remember we would go to the train station, and it was a big excitement waiting for the train from New York to come in, and my father would come down the steps. And I guess we had a car, and then we would drive back to the house. And it was repeated on Sunday night. We would all go to the train station with him and wave good-bye.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were saying earlier on that he collected—your father had a collection of something. Was it about this age, or was it later in your—I don't recall what you said he—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Mine certainly was a stamp collection. I got involved in collecting stamps and then—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But he had a—he was collecting something as well?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He wasn't, he was encouraging me. And then I know the war broke out, and I would go to the post office and buy these mint sheets of three-cent stamps, and he gave me money to buy them. You know, I might buy two or three at a time. Three cents, 50 stamps, there were large.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were about 12? Well, no, when the US—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Went into war.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean after Pearl Harbor?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Pearl Harbor, I remember—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were nine?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —that day very well. Going down to the corner candy store to get the newspaper and the headlines "Pearl Harbor Bombed" and, oh, my God. Went home and shouting, and we listened to the radio. And I remember we would—generally, my two sisters and I, on Sunday nights there were these series of programs, The Shadow, and this and that. And all three of us would be sitting on this metal kitchen table in the kitchen while my mother was preparing dinner, listening intently to—you know, from 5:30 to 6:00 The Shadow Knows, and then 6:30 to 7:00. 7:00, Jack Benny on Sunday nights went on. I don't remember who came after him. And then it was, you know, sort of getting ready for bed and school the next day.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you were ready to go to, I guess, middle school or high school—I don't know, did you have a middle school or did you just go from elementary to high school?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We had a junior high that one went to from—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And then were you picking which high school, or did you—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I applied to DeWitt Clinton. Both my sisters had gone to—my oldest sister went to Walton High School, which was an all-girls school at the time; my middle sister went to Taft High School, which was closer to our house, which was a co-ed school. And I went to DeWitt Clinton.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was that—that's still there right behind Bronx Science?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, DeWitt Clinton was up by on Mosholu Parkway. And I would take the subway on 170th Street, go up to Mosholu and walk the block or two to school. Went to summer school one summer up there so that I could accelerate a term early and finish in the June class as opposed to February.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Because you started school in February?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I must have started school in February. I don't know. But let's see—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  They let you start in February in those days?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, the Clinton, you went in—from junior high, you basically went in at the beginning of 10th grade. So I was there for 10th, 11th, and 12th, but one was able to accelerate or something. I was able to get out in June, so maybe I did start in February at 10th grade, you know, second year of high school.

And I worked on the school newspaper and was in the writing class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Were you still interested in architecture?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think basically I was, although I knew I was a terrible algebra student at the time and found it difficult. And I was glad—not glad, but my wife when I met her, she had a hard time in algebra. And the best person in algebra was probably our daughter-in-law and our two grandsons, who are whizzes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What was your favorite? What were your favorite areas of activities and study in high school?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Study was—I liked history, I liked English, I liked French. I would say those stood out. Biology was fine.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did they have any classes related to art?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, no, there were none. But we did go to theater in Mrs. Katz's fifth-level English class. She would get us tickets to Broadway plays and we would go down. I remember my sister, while I was still in high school, older sister, got tickets to Carmen at City Center. It was the first opera I had ever seen. And we were way up, but I loved it.  

And I was very good in—there was a period every week or every two weeks called music appreciation, where, like, the whole grade would come into the auditorium. Oh, now I'm going back to public school. And they would play classical music and explain it. And I always knew the music.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did you hear music at home?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I took piano lessons, I guess all three of us. That was—you know, when we went through this you took piano lessons. And then my teacher died, Mr. Schaeffer, and I didn't like the new teacher and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mr. Schaeffer was the new teacher?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, he was my original teacher.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, I thought you were at Mrs. Katz.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I had him for several years. Mrs. Katz was an English teacher in high school, who was such a remarkable woman. The first day we went into class, it was an honors English class, and there must have been, like, 40 people in the room. And she gave out cards to everyone, and you wrote your name down. Selma Katz. And then she came around and collected the cards, looked at you and went up the aisles, went up the aisles, put the book on her desk, closed it and went around the room and knew everyone's name with that one—this was the opening session of class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Photographic memory.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You knew this woman was—but she made English so interesting. And Shakespeare. And she was just a great, great teacher that, you know, influenced many of our lives, I'm sure of it. Selma Katz. Spry and witty and—God, what did we read with her? A Dissertation—Charles Lamb's—Upon Roast Pig. I don't know, everything became wonderful in her class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is there anything else about high school that you want to comment on before we move—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No. I became friends with someone, and he died about three years ago, and we were best of friends through life.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What was his name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Norman Marcus. He worked on the City Planning Commission—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  M-A-R-C-U-S?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  C-U-S. And he married a wonderful woman when they were both up at Yale Law School. And she is, I think, just retired as a professor of law at Fordham. And she was voted, you know, the best teacher by the law school.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's her name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Maria Marcus. She was a single child, came from Buffalo, New York, where her father was a professor up at Buffalo Law School. They had fled Austria. And a year later, he took the bar exam in New York State, and passed first in the state. Her father was brilliant, her mother was brilliant, and Maria was brilliant.

And you know, we used to double date. I would go down to New Haven to see them, and he would come up. I was at graduate school at Harvard at the time. You know, my wife, you know, will say "you have so many friends," but not of the closeness that I had with Norman.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, you knew each other since high school.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Since high school.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. Were you during high school thinking about what college you would like to go to, what you might want to major in?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I wasn't. In fact, I was—I ended up thinking that, you know, in the day and era that—I was in the class of '49 in high school. It may be hard for you to imagine or even realize that there was absolute discrimination against Jewish—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, I know, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —public school students. For example, the year before in the class of '48, four fellows from DeWitt Clinton got into Dartmouth. And DeWitt Clinton High School, after their freshman year there, was given an award as the public school sending the most of the outstanding students. In my class, not one person got into Dartmouth. I'm not saying I absolutely should have been taken in, but—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  There's a quota.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, there was a quota system. And at Harvard, I think one person got in. And again, I'm not saying that, you know, I absolutely should have been—but I applied to a number of schools, including, I remember—no, that would come—now, that would be a year later.

What I was going to say is that when I was out at the University of Wisconsin—now I'm jumping around—I thought, "Well, you know, I'm happy here, but maybe I should be in an Eastern school." And so I applied to—I got into the University of Pennsylvania as a transfer student. I didn't get into Cornell, and I was put on the waiting list at Williams College.

Well, Williams College might have had one Jewish student, because I've met someone subsequently in life, and I was on the waiting list. And here, in those days, college generally started about, let's say, the 15th of September. It was the first week in September and I still hadn't heard from Williams. And I wrote a letter. It wasn't the most tactful letter. It doesn't matter, I said, you know, "Am I accepted or not?" basically. And within a day: "We're sorry, there's no room."

But until I wrote that letter, I didn't know what was—I thought, "Well, maybe they forgot about me, it's September already." And I subsequently heard from someone in that class that he was so miserable up there, he was the only Jew. And the next year, some Jewish person came in from some private school in Brooklyn and pledged a fraternity, and they were all Christian, and he committed suicide.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were—what you're saying, basically, is that when you were thinking of colleges, you had this issue of discrimination in front of you, coloring your choices and the results.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And we didn't really have any guidance advice. I mean, no one was saying go to the University of Wisconsin at the time, because at the time I decided—NYU had an uptown campus, I think it was all-male and supposedly was better than downtown, and I thought—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what about CUNY? Did you consider that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I didn't.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, so many great—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I know. But there was no one that you went and spoke to, like—and I don't even know what percentage of us went to college, but certainly the brighter people did.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Were finances an issue in terms of deciding to go to college?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, no, they weren't.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That was one less thing to worry about.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So why did you end up in Wisconsin?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So I was going out to NYU in the fall, and that summer we were not down in Long Branch, we were at a hotel called the Berkeley Carteret in Asbury Park.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The Berkeley what?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Carteret—C-A-R-T-E-R-E-T. It was an elegant, red-brick building, you know, facing the ocean. I think we were there for three or four weeks.

And this friend Norman Marcus came down to spend a weekend. And I don't know, we started talking, and he said, "Why aren't you going, you know, out of town? Why are you going to NYU?" He was going to Columbia that fall. And he said, "Your sister Elaine spent a summer out at the University of Wisconsin. I hear it's a good school. Why don't you, you know, apply?" I said, "Norman, it's July," or whatever it was.

And I wrote away, and they had a program called Integrated Liberal Studies, which was—basically it took in about 225 students, and by your second year—it was in the liberal arts school—you had basically met all your requirements for graduation in terms of science, whatever, and you were basically free to take and study whatever you wanted to. And I thought, "Oh, this looks wonderful."

And I applied to the ILS program, we called it, and got in. And it was, like, wonderful that I was going out to Wisconsin. And in those days, you got your suitcase and you got on the train and you met other people who were on the same train. And, you know, first it went to Chicago. I wasn't in a sleeper or anything like that.

And I met someone on that train going out who also was a lifetime friend by the name of Gerry Katz.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Gerry with a J?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  With a G. Now, Gerald Katz had gone to Stuyvesant High School, was, like, I don't know, 12th in his class, applied to all these schools that he really should have gotten into, got into nowhere. Nowhere! And you know, his regents in math were, you know, 95s. And he went to NYU his first year, and suddenly here he is on the train going out to the University of Wisconsin. He was, like, the first person I met. And we ultimately roomed in the same building, kind of, and he was a lifelong friend.

And he wrote musical shows out there, and this and that. He applied to Harvard for both law school and English. He really wanted to go into the English department, and his mother basically said, "I don't want you going into the English department, I want you to go to law school there." And he—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This was English for graduate students?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This was English, the M.A. program.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Because she thought he couldn't make a living?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, because—yeah, I think that was part of it. It was—and this was a guy who lived across the park in—not the El Dorado, the one on—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  San Remo?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not the San Remo, the one in between on 79th to 80th, the whole block, with the two towers there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And his father had been in textiles and owned apartment houses in the Bronx. He was—a very comfortable family he came from, but the mother thought that he should go to law school. And he went there. And then his second year and my first year, I went up to Harvard in the China program.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Wait, wait, let's finish.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, I'm jumping around. Okay.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Let's finish [laughs] Wisconsin.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm sorry.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you had a great—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So we'll finish Wisconsin.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds like you had a great experience.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So it was great. It was wonderful. I met people, I had wonderful teachers.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what was your major? What did it end up to be?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I ended up—I mean, I could have been called either a history or a French major because I had taken enough courses in those subjects.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And when you were doing that, were you thinking that that was going to lead to a particular career?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, in those days, I spent time in the library on campus in the back stacks, looking at old New Yorker magazines, and this and that. And I came across a book review called Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. And it just hit me. And I then went and borrowed the book, and I then decided that I was going to become a sinologist. I was going to study Chinese.

So by my senior year at Wisconsin, I took a course in Chinese art. Why? Because, I don't know, suddenly I have all this free time, you know, I can take anything I want. And I had applied to schools for graduate programs in Chinese, and I, you know, got into Johns Hopkins and Harvard and Stanford.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were an excellent student then.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, you know, I don't—I was a good student. You know, I was a good student.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, those must have been top programs.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, they were. But who was applying for Chinese studies?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This is in 1953. So I got in everywhere. And I remember—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That was very clever. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So I decided I would—in those days, both Cornell and Yale alternated each summer with a 12-week intensive course in Chinese. And I thought it would be advantageous to start Chinese, and I went up to Cornell.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is before you graduated?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This is before I graduated. I was never there after graduation.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The summer between junior and senior year?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, this was the summer between senior year at Wisconsin, which I never stayed for graduation because of this, and the fall semester at Harvard in the M.A. program.

So I went up to Cornell, lived alone in the international house, this big building. It was sort of scary. And I was, you know, reading War and Peace that summer. I should have been, you know, totally immersed in Chinese. Because I think it was six hours a day, and Saturday morning. And, you know, every hour a different person would come into the room. There were only four of us up there. Two of them were CIA agents and one was a Reverend, Harold, and myself.

And I'll never forget, the end of the term came and we all were called in for five minutes with Professor Shadick to get our grades.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you remember what Shadick's first name was?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, Harold, H-A-R-O-L-D. He was a Chinese scholar. Shadick, I think it was S-H-A-D-D-I-C-K [sic].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  A gray-haired man, I think his father may have been a missionary in China. So he became a sinologist. He was sort of one of these wonderful human beings. And so I went in and said, "Nice to see you." And he said, "Here's your report card." I said, "89?" I said, "Not a 90?" He said, "No, 89." He said, "Mr. Garfield, what are you concerned about? You're going to Harvard and, you know, you're going to have a wonderful life and this is your grade."

It was like—I never even asked the other people what their grades were. Maybe we were scheduled a half-hour at a time, but that was the end of school. And then I went up to Cambridge, I don't know, a couple of days later.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You said briefly that you took a Chinese painting course in Wisconsin.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, my senior year at Wisconsin.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was that interesting to you?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I found it fascinating. It was a huge lecture room and there weren't more than 25 people in the class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were working from slides. Did they have a collection?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Working from slides, no collection.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  No, there was no—yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  But it may have been a yearlong course. I don't remember whether it was two—I think it may have been two semesters.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was that your first art history course?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was my first art history class. It obviously had to have an influence on me. I remember the studying, you know, memorizing these names of these Chinese artists and their style.

And I had some habit in college, I don't know how it happened, where I basically could reduce the year's studies in some kind of liberal arts course, whether it was a history course or what, into a paragraph of words, and each word broke down and each letter broke down into different subjects for me.

And I remember studying and studying and studying, and walked into the room with no fear whatsoever and, you know, it doesn't matter whether it was an A or whatever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It was a good system. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was a good system, which I could never do again.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Remind me now, what did you go to Harvard to study?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, in those days there was—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And you pictured getting a master's, not a Ph.D.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. No, you started with a masters. The program I entered was a master's in Chinese studies. It was limited to about 24 students. They also had a master's in Russian studies, again limited. There was a girl from Wisconsin who went to that program. And I think Professor Reischauer, who is the Japanese scholar, had a program M.A. in Japanese studies.

So I was in this China program, as we called it, and I entered it in September of 1953. And again, as I said before, each hour would be in a different room, but the focus was on the language and on the history, economics, et cetera. You wrote papers.

And again, through that program, I still have a good friend who showed up at my 80th birthday party, who was from England and had gone to Oxford and went through the China program, the Ph.D. program, went back to England, ran for Parliament on the Labor Party, and then came back to Harvard as a professor of government. He's still teaching.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And his name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Roderick MacFarquhar. He came to our wedding, we—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Tell me his last name again?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  M-A-C-capital F-A-R-Q-U-H-A-R. His father had been knighted. He may have been—Sir Alexander. He may have been the British high commissioner of India at one segment of his life.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The name is familiar.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And his wife was Berenice, who was just the most wonderful lady. I remember one weekend up at Harvard, we—it was July, it was independence day in France. What was that, July 14th?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Bastille Day? Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Bastille Day.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Fourteenth.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And we all went to this bar in downtown Boston. And Berenice and I with our shoes off were dancing on top of a car and just—she was that kind of a woman. She was young no matter what her age. You would go to her house for a dinner party and you would say, "Oh, my God." Berenice would say, "With all the traveling we have done in our lives, I have in my freezer a dinner for 28 people at all times."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I don't know, it's just a wonderful family. And Rod married Emily Cohen, who was a Wellesley graduate.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Cohen, K-O-H-N?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  C-O-H—Emily Cohen, C-O-H-E-N. She met Rod in Formosa learning Chinese, and she had gone to Wellesley. And they met, they married. She was an economist for—she was a writer for the London Economist. Hillary Clinton was in her—I think was at her funeral. She was a classmate at Wellesley. And Emily was brilliant, brilliant. Well, so was Rod. I mean, you don't become a professor of government—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. So as you were in this one-year master's program at Harvard—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, actually, it was a two-year program. What happened up there—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And you started it thinking—what would you do with it?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I thought I would become a professor of Chinese at that time. That was my initial impulse. What happened was—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you enjoyed the idea of having an academic life.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I did at that—I absolutely did and thought, you know, the idea of going into academic life was to contribute something. So that was also, believe me, in my thought.

What happened was I got a notice that I was drafted while I was up there. And in those days, no one got—so that would have been the fall of '53. And in January I had to report to Fort Dix. And so I hadn't—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean after only one semester?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I hadn't even finished the semester. But I was given credit because it was, like, the last month of the semester was coming up, or the last two or three weeks. And I was given the marks, whatever they were at that time, and then went to Fort Dix and was in an infantry—the war in Korea was going on at that time.

And I was scheduled to—in about the third week, I was scheduled to go for an interview or a weekend down at Fort Holabird, to go to CIA school. But I got sick and was in the hospital. It could never be rescheduled again. That was the time that you were scheduled to go, and my father had got involved in calling up someone, I don't know what.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  He wanted you to do that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, it was the idea that I didn't have the opportunity to do it. You know, he even called on the basis of tests and blah blah. And, yeah, he knew the war was going on in Korea and who knew what—you know, working for the CIA, whatever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. Was there a possibility of going to Officer Training School?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No. Yeah, but that I didn't want, because that was a third year.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I left something else out about that: I also could have signed up to go to language school at Monterey. But again, it was giving up another year. In other words, both for officer school, the China program, I would have had to—and I just hated the Army. I mean, Fort Dix in those days in January, it was murderous.

And fortunately, after about—let's see, I went through the first eight weeks, and then the company was going back for another eight weeks of basic training, 16 weeks. And somehow, three of us got called out and basically were given office jobs. So the second eight weeks, although we slept just as though we were with everyone else in the company and we fell out at 6 o'clock, whatever it was, and they went to their grenades and this and that, and we went to these offices and, you know, basically worked, you know, until 5 o'clock and that was the end of it.

So everyone who finished that second eight weeks, aside from we three and maybe a couple of other cases, all were sent to Korea. And so here I am having every weekend off, going back to New York with these two other guys.

And then after about seven or eight months, my name started coming down on what was called a monthly manifest list where, you know, you are being sent to Iceland, you are being sent to such-and-such next month. And the captain in charge of this company that I was working with was able to get me off.

And then about three months later, I came on the manifest to go to Europe. And Captain Holmes said, you know, "Mr. Garfield, I think, you know, I've done what I could for three months and gotten you off the list, but I think, you know, I hear you're going to Europe and I think you should just go." And that was the end.

So I got—the first place was Heidelberg and that was sort of an orientation. And again, the guy who interviewed me—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What—what do you call it—division, battalion?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I was in 1st Division. I ended up in 1st Division intelligence. And there was a guy who interviewed me who had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate and saw my record and blah blah. And I was basically—cutting it short, was sent to Würzburg, which was 1st Division headquarters. And I was assigned to this G-2 unit. Well, G-2 stood for intelligence.

And I had this—I was very lucky, don't get me wrong. I had this job where all I had to do was set up different passwords for the different companies scattered within this division each week. Between you and me, it could have been done in one day, but I had five days to do this.

And there were, I think, about seven of us assigned to this G-2 unit, and a certain number, let's say three or four or half, had to be on base every weekend. Fortunately for me, these other people wanted to be on base. There was drinking, dance, you know, going into town. So I was off every weekend.

And what had happened just before I was sent over to Europe is I got a letter from another high school friend who was in Germany, Norman Friedman, whom I saw for a while. F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N. And he said, "Regardless of what they tell you, even though you're a private, you are allowed to take your car to Germany at the government's expense."

So I got some papers and I drove my car—I'll never forget this, going—I think it was, like, in Hoboken or something—to some Army base. And I showed the guy my papers, and he looks at me and he said, "You're a private, what are you here for?" And I said there's such-and-such, and I think I had the papers with me that as a private you can have your car sent over. He said, "Wait a minute." And he comes back and within two minutes he's back: "Okay, let's process it." So I had a car sent over, that I had in New York. I was given four days to go up to Hamburg to get it, and then I had my car permanently at base.

And I met the librarian there, who gave me and another friend German lessons. And then I was invited to her house in Würzburg and met her husband who was a professor at the University of Würzburg. They both spoke English.

And one of the first trips with them that we took is we drove down to Munich to go to the museum. We went for a weekend. We got there early in the morning. Maybe we drove earlier, I don't remember. And there was a gallery opened on the street. And I looked in the window and saw all these black-and-white German Expressionist prints. And I went inside and it was, like, a revelation. It was "I woke up" kind of thing, I loved it. I just kept walking around and around.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Around and around the shop?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  In the shop, by the way. I asked the price of a print—I'll get into that—and I was told it was $50. Well, $50 was a lot of money. And so we went to the museum and we did whatever we did that weekend. And I got back to the base and started thinking about that print and that I really liked it, and that if I went back to Munich on my next—I don't know, like, I was going or could have gone back a month later—and I said, "If that's still in that shop I'm going to buy it."

And my heart was beating. I walked in and it was on the same easel and I bought it: $50. They wrapped it in a cylinder box for me. And when I got back to the base, I sent it home to my parents.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what was it exactly?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'll show it to you.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And for the record? [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was an illustration by Erich Heckel for Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. And I think the name is called Gegner, G-E-G-E-N-E-R [sic].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And the date, do you remember?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. The date is—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You could fill it in later.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'll tell you right now because I literally have it hanging here.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And what print medium is it?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's a black-and-white.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Etching?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Print, it's not an etching.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Engraving?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I have etchings here. This is—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  An engraving?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's an engraving.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I'll pause it.

[Audio break.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then through this couple, I met a German artist, never heard of him, in a bar or whatever one night, by the name of Dieter Stein, D-I-E-T-E-R, S-T-E-I-N. And I think I went to his studio. It's a watercolor. I liked it and I bought it, and that's hanging out there. I think it was $200, whatever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  At this point, you said, when you were with the librarian and her husband, you went to Munich and went to a museum, were you going to museums in New York at that point or in Boston when you were at Harvard? Were you a museumgoer? [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Certainly not at Harvard. I mean, I don't mean to say I didn't go into the Fogg Museum, but it wasn't—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, that's—but did you go to the Met in New York at that point, or MoMA?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I had to have, at some point, yeah. But if it was steady recollections, I don't recall it. I mean, now my life is so organized with this museum and that museum and this and that, you know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. But back then, okay. So going back to—you said you met this artist Dieter Stein?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And I bought that one watercolor. I liked it and I still like it. I mean, I wouldn't have it hanging if I didn't like it. I never bought anything else of his again.

I did—well, I guess that would be—after the Army I did start buying German black-and-white prints, whether it was in New York City at the old Savoy Art Gallery or Dorothea Carus or what—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How do you spell Carus?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  C-A-R-U-S. She had a gallery on the second floor on 71st and Madison. By that time, I was into art.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Going back to Germany for a second: How long were you there in Würzburg?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I was in Würzburg for maybe about seven or eight months. Because in those days, I was supposed to be over there for three months more, but Harvard started again in September. So if you were going back to school, you could get out of the Army 90 days earlier.

And I literally—well, one decision that I made as far as school went, when I was over in Germany, is—whether through dissatisfaction, whatever—I knew I would never go back to Chinese studies. I had already lost a year-and-a-half in terms of the language. And I thought that I could never do anything original.

And yet, I still had the GI Bill, all of my credits. All of my credits that semester were transferable. So I decided to go back and just get a straight history degree at Harvard. So I was able even to get time off for that, because I spent—from September through May, I spent the equivalent of a year more at Harvard and got my master's degree in history.

Again, I—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What year did you get that degree?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I got my degree in May of '56. So I had the B.A. in '53, the M.A. in '56. And I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I really had no idea. And I remember when I went back to Harvard, I went in to see someone who had been a professor, just for advice, in the China program—Harold—oh, God, alright.

And I learned that you could go down to the Veterans' Administration in Boston and take a series of aptitude tests to sort of direct you in a direction where you have interests that you may not be cognizant of. And it turned out that my interests were advertising, the ministry, and real estate.

I then knew that teaching wasn't for me. And advertising was a very popular field in those days. Because subsequently—I'll get into it—I went for an M.B.A. So I left Harvard before graduation. Through my brother-in-law I got a job—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Wait a second.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm sorry.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So we didn't talk about your getting married. Your brother-in-law from your sister?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, I'm not married.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay, your brother-in-law, your sister.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, my brother-in-law, my sister, right.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay, good. Okay.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  His law firm represented a privately held ore, O-R-E, corporation called, I think, Franz, F-R-A-N-Z, Lissauer, L-I-S-S-A-U-E-R, Associates. It was—you know, he was one of these equivalents of a billionaire, but not a billionaire. He had, like, 25 overseas trading offices in ores that were being shipped basically—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean, like, coal ore?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Steel, all kinds of metals. All kinds of metals. And they would be shipped from one headquarters to another headquarters because that headquarters had buyers for I-bars or I-beams or whatever. And I was sent up to the Montreal office. It was run by one man. I'll think of his name, something Rosenblatt. And I met some young people through my brother-in-law, who knew a partner at another law firm and some young guys. And we—I was invited to share a ski house that winter.

And suddenly, I decided while I was up there that I had my own internal problems, which I'll get to. I was getting into the office at 8:00 in the morning and working until 12:00 at night. I just became—you know, going over these lists.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is at Lissauer?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This is in the Montreal—yeah. The name of the company was Associated Metals and Minerals. Franz Lissauer was the president and the owner. I mean, I assumed the guys like Rosenthal and these people in all these cities over the world had a percentage interest in what their particular office sold and bought, because everyone was very wealthy in that firm. And you know, I was going down to count, you know, steel beams on boats and docks.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] Why you went to Harvard.          

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was—that's another story, why did I go to Harvard, when I come to a later part of my life.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I was very unhappy. And I really wanted to come back to New York and see a psychiatrist. And I told the guy in the New York office that I didn't—not that I wanted to see a psychiatrist, but I wanted to see a doctor. And I remember Lissauer got on the phone with me and he said, "You know, it's perfectly—it's not perfectly—you can come home for up to three weeks, but then I want you back at the office."

So I came down, and I don't know who referred me—let me think this through, I don't want to jump ahead—yeah, to a psychiatrist by the name of Saul Kaplan, lived at 11 East 68th Street, his office.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Kaplan with a C or a K?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  With a K. I'll have to check that. And I came back to New York and I realized I didn't want to go back and I wasn't going back to Canada. And, you know, they were upset, blah blah. I went back, got my stuff, and came home. And in those days, I got a job immediately with another trading corporation, because I had some interest and knowledge. And in those days, you could start Columbia Business School in February, so that would have been February of '57.

And so I was living up at Columbia and, again, met a longtime friend. We were both looking for dorm rooms. You know, I didn't want to live at home. I would come down, I think, once a week to see Dr. Kaplan, and I would take the bus from Columbia and get off in those days on 5th Avenue. I would go to a bar on 69th and Madison, on the southwest corner, have a Scotch, and then walk around the corner to Dr. Kaplan's.

And he was a Freudian analyst. What did I know? I knew nothing because he never said a word to me.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And you would go in one door and the other patient would leave his office—

[END OF TRACK garfie12_1of2_sd_track01.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —through another door, so you never saw each other, ostensibly.

So I saw him. And after—I must have gone close to two years, and one day I went into the office and I was lying on the couch and he was behind me at his desk. I always had these doubts, you know, "Is he doing the crossword puzzle? What's he doing there?"

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I said, "You know, I want you to know, in fairness, that in a month I'm leaving." And that was it. And he didn't say, "Okay," and left the office. Maybe I came back two more times, and that was the end of it.

I then was finishing Columbia Business School. That would have been—I got my degree in June of '58 because I got some credits for my master's at Harvard. And there was a little 3x5 card on the bulletin board at business school: "Trainee to learn the real estate business, salary $35 a week plus draw."

Meanwhile, everyone in the class—and this was sort of late. It was easily April by then. And in those days, the big fields were advertising and banking, at least at Columbia class of '58. And so I go up to meet a firm called Nehring, N-E-H-R-I-N-G, Brothers. It's up on 181st and Wadsworth Avenue. And I walk in the office and I meet this guy, Herbert Griffenhagen, G-R-I-F-F-E-N-H-A-G-E-N. German background, was a Columbia College graduate, and was so impressed that someone from the business school is coming to apply for a job. And we sat down and talked and basically he told me what the job was. And he said, "I can teach you a lot about real estate and I think you're the person to take this job." So I took the job.

And you talk about your M.A. My job basically was canvasing, canvasing, canvasing. I was given, quote-unquote, a "territory." And let's say my territory, to start with, was from 145th Street to 181st Street in Manhattan, any building 50 feet wider. And then I was given a territory in the Bronx as well, any apartment, you know, 50 feet or wider.

And then what you would do is write down the details of the property—you would go through maps—and then write down the owner's name and address. All these cards were then separated by where these owners lived. You were expected to basically go to these neighborhoods and ring doorbells. They did not want you making phone calls. They wanted you out of the office by 10:00 in the morning. They didn't want to see your face until 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon.

And so you just took the subway to the nearest stop where you were going to start and walk block by block, wherever you had them in order, and you would ring the doorbell, and they would yell down, either "Who is it?"—and, you know, "It's Leslie Garfield from Nehring Brothers." They would either hang up on you, most of the time, or sometimes they would—you know, if they lived in a private house you might be invited in, but nothing would come. And other times you could start talking, and, "Yes, I do want to sell." This was a recognized name in those days.

You would go back and talk to Mr. Griffenhagen. He would say, "Well, here the most important thing is the price," or "Here the most important thing is they have to take back a mortgage," or "Here they want too much interest." But you could never call these people back. You had to go and visit them again and work on one thing at a time. After it was pretty well in order to be sold, I guess then you could use the phone occasionally, but they didn't want to see your face.

And what was happening is that one day I was up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. And there was a foreign movie theater. This was between the Grand Concourse and Jerome Avenue. And it was raining and I said to myself, my God, you've got three degrees, it's raining, here you are pushing doorbells, and I just went into this foreign movie theater for whatever it was.

I guess I needed to say that to myself. And I continued and I was successful. I was bringing in listings that basically that office was selling to, in a sense, middlemen, people whom they had sold properties to in the past. So they would get that first commission and I would get, like, 25 percent. And then they would get the exclusive from that person to sell it again to the ultimate retailer who was going to hold onto it. So they were making two sales out of every—where I was getting 25 percent of one sale. And I think the first year, I was, you know, responsible for maybe 10 sales. So I had proven myself.

And this same brother-in-law who was specializing in real estate called me up one day and said, "I have a property down on 29th Street." I got the information, brought it into the office, and they said, "We don't want you canvasing except your area." And it was at that point I said, "I'm going to leave."

Is that enough on this subject?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Sure. [Laughs.] So at what point did you meet your wife-to-be?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay. JoJo.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So it's kind of a two-question, at what point did you meet and at what point did you get back to buying art?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Good. Okay, I'll try to answer it. I was glad I had not transferred and I went back my second year to Madison. In those days, they had the equivalent of open houses at the girls' dormitories. Not at sororities, but at independent dormitories. And I met someone there who was in one of my classes from the year before. And I don't know, she said, "There's a girl here." JoJo had spent her first year at Barnard and she transferred out to Wisconsin, because, in those days, anyone who live within 35 miles of New York could not live at Barnard in the dormitory. And JoJo was commuting from Hewlett, and she had an aunt who lived in Wisconsin. End of story. So she came out there her sophomore year. And so I met JoJo—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's her proper name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Her proper name is Johanna Rosengarten. That's her maiden name, R-O-S-E-N-G-A-R-T-E-N.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is her family from Philadelphia, the Rosengartens?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No. There's another Rosengarten from Philadelphia. Sadie Lansing Rosengarten.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Different one, okay.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's different. And Siddie [ph], I think, is her name. That Rosengarten is not a Jewish Rosengarten.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And JoJo's parents are Jewish. So I met Jo and she was fun. I know I occasionally saw her on campus. And maybe a few weeks later, there was some ice on a sidewalk, it was a sunny afternoon, and she was walking up the hill and slipped and landed. And I just happened to be walking down and I said something like, "Ah, a goddess, a veritable goddess," and JoJo started laughing. And we became friends.

We didn't get married until 10 years later, by the way. Now—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean she didn't go with you to Harvard or, of course, to Germany or to Columbia?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I met her—no, no. I had finished.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What did she do when she graduated?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, JoJo didn't graduate from Wisconsin. She had some medical problems and came east and went to a place called Chestnut Lodge down in Rockville, Maryland and was there for a while. I visited her there several times.

She then went to George Washington and finished her bachelor's degree there. And then before we were—well, I don't know when she got her degree from NYU in teaching. We didn't get married until September of 1960. And Jo was confused and I was confused. I mean, I won't go into details.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But when you finally did get married, where did you live?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay. I was living in New York. What was I doing? I think I was living at that particular time in my parent's apartment, because I remember bringing JoJo up there at one point and showing her my bedroom. And she saw all these black-and-white German Expressionist pictures.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, so you kept collecting? There were quite a few of them beyond the Heckel that you started with?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. I have, like, 75. I mean, I've got—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So while you were in Germany for that just brief period of time, you bought all those?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think when I came back from Germany, I started collecting.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You had enough money to be able to buy—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, you know, in those days, I told you that those first $50 and $200, I mean, I was able to—I mean, I had no expenses except myself before we were married.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, you made it as a priority to spend your money on buying these. They were all prints, right?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Most of them.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And were they all woodcuts, like the Heckel, or were they a variety?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, no. Total variety now.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Anyway, so she came to your bedroom [laughs] and saw all these—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Black-and-white. And she was—I won't say floored, but, "So this is a guy who's interested in me," you know, with these black-and-white—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Over that 10 years since she met you—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We were not married.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But I mean, she didn't know that you had this interest.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, not to—you know, I may have told her, but you can't fathom it until you see it, kind of thing.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So your question was?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Where were you living when you were married?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh. So when we got married, the first thing, JoJo's parents maintained a rental apartment in a duplex on Gramercy Park that they would use in the winter. And they generally didn't come in from the island until maybe November or whatever. So they basically said, "You can live there."

I know what happened. At the wedding—excuse me—an aunt of JoJo's, Rose, owned an apartment at 860 5th Avenue, which she never used. She never used. It was totally furnished. And she came up to me at the wedding and said, "Darlings, you know, where are you going to live?" And I think we mentioned that we had the use of the Gramercy Park apartment. She said, "Well, I have this apartment." Turned out it was at 860 5th Avenue. She said, "I never use it and you two can move in and just pay the maintenance." I don't even know if she wanted us to pay the maintenance.

Turned out it was an 18th floor corner terrace. She had been the original buyer. And it had a living room—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  From, like, the '20s or something?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, from, like, 1945. It's one of those white-brick buildings on 68th and 5th.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Isn't that older than—I mean, newer than the '40s? Aren't the white-brick buildings from the '60s?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, well, maybe you're right.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But then that's just when you were married.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That would be. We were married in '60, so it certainly was in the '50s, it was built. And it turned out it was a corner facing 5th Avenue. The bedroom was right on the corner, the living room was facing 5th Avenue with a door going out to the terrace. All the apartments below had balconies, but this was the first, 18C, with a terrace. It had a dining area, a kitchen on 68th Street, and a bath-and-a-half, and a foyer.

And so here we are at 860 5th. This woman was really eccentric. I think she may have been Phi Beta when she went to college and, you know, you plug the—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  She may have been what?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Phi Beta Kappa.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, mm-hmm. [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, you plug it in and then you pull it around the wall, and when you see that chair, then you plug it—she gave very exacting details of everything in the apartment. It's not that she bothered us ever. So at any rate, we lived there, I guess, for X months.

And JoJo became pregnant. And in those days, one would always buy the Sunday Times on Saturday night. And we had it, and were going through the real estate section. And in those days I was working at a firm called Pease & Elliman, a real estate firm down on—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How do you spell Pease?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  P-E-A-S-E.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And Elliman as in—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And Elliman.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, the original.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And why did I end up there? This is interesting. When I was leaving the uptown firm and looking for a midtown firm, my first appointment was at—I had a list of real estate firms—was at Douglas Elliman. And in those days, they had the ground floor. It was a one-story building on 49th Street, either across from Saks 5th Avenue, or something like that.

And I went in and the person—there were all these desks, and the person who interviewed me was a Mr. McHugh, M-C-capital H-U-G-H. Basically what he said to me: "This is a restricted firm," we don't have any Jewish people—he didn't say this—he said, "I think you would be happier going up to 56th Street to Pease & Elliman." That's just how it was left. And I made an appointment at Pease & Elliman and was hired. You know, it was mixed, you know, it was Jewish and non-Jewish. But Douglas Elliman was absolutely restricted. And that's where I worked.

And so at any rate, there was an ad in the Sunday Times for some broker downstairs—I was on the second floor—was advertising a six-room apartment on Park Avenue with a 80s—with a maintenance of, I don't know, $189 a month, doorman building. We went and looked at it, and we bought it. When I say we bought it, JoJo's parents bought it as a gift to us. And when my parents looked at it, they said they thought the apartment was too dark. I mean, JoJo and I had made up our minds, you know, "we're buying it" kind of thing.

And that's where we lived. And we had three children in a row.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Boys, girls?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The first one, Clare, is a girl, and then two boys. Clare now is 50, Jed is 49, and Cory is 48.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Wow, you were very efficient. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We were pushing, I remember when we lived at 1070, three in a carriage to Central Park. And I think that when I brought JoJo home with child number two, and Clare, I guess, was standing in front of the door with the nanny or whatever, and it's almost, like, she didn't quite panic, but she wasn't very happy seeing the new baby. But that's what happened.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you—in those years in the '60s, were you still collecting? And what was Jo's—what did she bring—did she bring art interest to your marriage?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Jo brought interest, absolutely. And we can get to it further. But for the first 15 years of collecting, basically, I only collected black-and-white German Expressionists.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So from 1954 to around 1970, '69? It would be 15 years.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, let's see, we got married, maybe a couple of years shorter than that, maybe 11 or 12.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  '54 to '66.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Alright, '66. We got involved with a group of print collectors at the Museum of Modern Art. Riva Castleman was the print curator, wonderful woman. And for the first time in my life, the first person I was enamored with is—one Saturday morning the group went to visit Hiroshi's studio. He did all the screen prints for Jasper John's Gemini. And we went to his studio down in, I don't know, I guess you call it SoHo now, and I saw all these Jasper Johns, particularly the double flag. And I thought, "Oh, these are incredible!"

And we went up to—I spoke to Hiroshi, I said, where does one find these prints? And he gave me the name—I'll think of her name, a woman in Houston. I have it written down somewhere. And then he gave me the name of Brooke Alexander in New York. And that was on a Saturday morning. And I called Brooke up the next week and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So this is the late '60s.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This print is '68. And I think it was dated and it had already been done. So I would say probably '66, '67, kind of. So 15 years probably includes years when I wasn't married. Because I remember when we were married and one summer renting, in the early stages, renting a house up in Scarsdale because I didn't want to commute, and this big package coming from some German auction gallery and it was filled with Schmidt-Rottluffs and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What year was that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Schmidt-Rottluffs.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  No, what year was it you were saying?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, everything seriously is dated. I have the most incredible records. In fact, Janice Oresman said, "Leslie, what are you going to do with the records?" I said, "What do you—" She said those records should go to the archives. And this just happened the other night. I mean, Janice and I have talked a long time, but don't think of giving them to any museum.

So where were we?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You said you had a big package from a German auction house. And I was wondering—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, and it was filled with German—so I would say that was probably the summer around '66-ish, sort of.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were still buying black-and-white prints from Germany.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And they would just send you catalogues?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I would get catalogues and condition reports. And in those days, I wasn't sophisticated enough to be bidding by phone, as I recall. You know, you would leave—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did they even do that then?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Maybe they didn't. Maybe they didn't, and that's why I said—I don't know when they started that. But now I never bid in person. I always—you know, I get detailed reports. Certainly in England I know all the curators at the auction houses. I not only get them, but I speak to them personally, I go into the catalogue, and one of them will say, "Don't buy that because of this condition." I spend a lot of time—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you were—this is the '60s when you were buying from an auction house in Germany. Was that—since you were buying German prints, was that the primary source of what you were buying: auction houses, galleries, in Germany? And did you decide which artists? How did you decide which artists you wanted to buy?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  From artists that I had seen pictures of. I mean, there are certain German artists I have no works whatsoever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Why is that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Maybe initially it was cost, maybe—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  At that point, did you set out to learn everything you could about those artists or read books?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, absolutely. I took German lessons at Goethe House.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were a student.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This library here is indispensable. In fact, anyone who collects, and I've now been put on a symposium with Dick Solomon out at Tandem Press for two days. This is the first time I've having expenses paid to talk, you know, I mean, to fly out and tell. And Jo's going to come along. Paula said, "No, Leslie, we cannot pay for JoJo on this trip." But you know, they—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you said you went Goethe House, you took German lessons, you read. You started a little library at that point?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I have more than a little library.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But I mean then, then.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, oh, yes. But I—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were really getting deeply involved in learning about these artists and their work.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Of course, absolutely.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And did you—what was the reason that you focused on prints at that point?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think prints were less expensive than oils. You know, I think German oils might have been $2,500. And, you know, when I'm telling you $50 the first time, I thought that was a lot of money. Certainly on my GI salary, you know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. So you got married, you were living on Park Avenue, you had three kids.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And then you said you got involved in this print collectors group at MoMA, and saw the Jasper Johns. And this is the late '60s.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So I called up Brooke and I told them that I was interested in acquiring this print. He said, "I can get it, I would like to meet you, why don't you come to my gallery?" And I went over there, and he had a show of Richard Bosman. And it was that wonderful period, Man Overboard, you know, the polar bears. They were, to me, somewhat akin to the German Expressionist works that I was collecting. There was something edgy about them, but wonderful.

And Richard became a good friend. And I've collected a lot of Richard Bosmans. And Brooke told me what the cost would be. He knew of one, and he called me about, I'm generalizing, two months later, and said, "Leslie, it's Brooke, I have that print you want." I went over there and bought it. And that was number one.

And by then I knew that the second one I wanted was Target. And I told him right then—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Johns?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Johns. And he got me Target.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So the first one was the flag?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The flag, the Double Flag. In fact, I recently lent it to Bill Goldston who was putting on a show of Johns multiples in São Paulo this summer. So this was a little—I've known Bill, you know, a long time. So I get this phone call: "Leslie, this is Bill and I'm trying to locate a couple of works for a show I'm putting on in São Paulo." I mean, it was already scheduled.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  In a museum?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At the—I have the catalogues here.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Sure.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At any rate, he said, "Do you know of where I could find a mint condition Double Flag?" I said, "Yes, I do, Bill." He said, "You do?" I said, "Yes, I own it." "You do?!" I mean, this was all put up, you have to know this.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] I was going to say.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And "would you?" and blah blah. So that was going. Then he said, "And would you know who owns a mint edition of the"—oh, it's eight of these black-and-white etchings.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The numerals.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The what?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The numerals?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not the murals.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Numeral.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not the numerals, the—oh, God. And he said, "I want one that hasn't been hung, or, you know, in mint condition." I'll tell you what it is in a minute, I'll think of it. And I said, "Yes, I have that." "You do?" So I lent those, too. And right now the Double Flag is out. Bill said, "Leslie, what can I, you know, do for you, besides a discount at ULAE?" And I think he mentioned maybe, "Would you like a new frame for the Johns," which was a standard wooden? I said, "Yes." He said, "Do you know what you want?" I said "Yes, I have a print here at home." It's not a print, it's a watercolor, that Bark did, it's in metal. He said, "I love metal."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is Jared Bark.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. Called up the guy. They picked it up, I haven't gotten it back yet, but—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Aluminum or is it—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's that British print on the—it's very heavy.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Steel?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It might be steel. But it's gorgeous. And I told him what color I wanted, you know, it to be painted. And it will be, so it ties in. I don't know whether it's the gray in the flag or whatever. It's—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was there a moment when you said, "I'm changing the direction, I'm not collecting German Expressionist prints anymore, I'm focusing on contemporary American"?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I never said no, but I just kept going. In other words, am I actively looking for German Expressionists? Actively would be when I get these catalogues, because of other works in there. I mean, I recently acquired a number more of Dieter Roths, for example.

I've never said no, so, if anything, I buy new works that I suddenly like and that I didn't like—I mean, quite frankly, we have over 6,000, and we're now packing a certain amount to go to Crozier. We can—you'll see it next week or, you know, Thursday, whatever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah. When you started collecting the Jasper Johns and then Richard Bosman, were you at that moment thinking about the contemporary print field and who's working, and looking at a wide number of artists?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I never thought in terms of contemporary. I thought in terms of what I suddenly was exposed to in light.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But you thought about, "Well, these are living artists."

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I never said to myself,  oh, these are living—I mean, sure, has Jasper Johns been here? Yeah. You know, I mean, not that he's that friendly or anything, but I never thought of—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You didn't get thinking about "this is the art of my time"?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, I am consciously acquiring works that even last year I might not have bought, but that I feel I have to be moving with the times and buying contemporary, where I don't even know the artist's work. I recently bought a woman by the name of Kind [ph]. She's a professor of art up at the University of Vermont. I can't think of her gallery. I'm very much involved with the International Print Center here. She did 24 prints for us to sell, but each one has slabs of original paint.

When I was down there two weeks ago—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  At the Print Center?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At the Print Center. They were in a room and I just sort of peripherally glanced at them. And I was looking at all the things that were coming up for sale. Then I went to a board meeting. Today is—what—today is—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Tuesday.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —Tuesday, I'm sorry. God. I went to an IPCNY board meeting and they were talking about raising money, you know, and apparently some of these works had been sold, about seven at that time of the 24. This was last Monday night.

I came home, got the whole series on the screen, eliminated those with a dot that had been sold, I then eliminated what I didn't like that much, and then I focused on what I liked. And I ended up buying four of them.

Why? We recently had a Hanukkah party for our children. I gave each one of them one of them, and I kept one for myself. And they all liked them. In other words, I bought this artist. It's not because—I liked her work and that's it. And that's what you do.

You know, Janice Oresman and I in the past have gone to different, you know, fairs and illustrated books and whatever. And I bought works that had I not—you know, that you just see and buy. It doesn't matter that you—the artist has nothing to do with it. It's: "Do I really like this?"

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is this the area that you continued in during the '70s? Or when did—because I know from what I read that it wasn't until the early '80s that you were looking at the Provincetown printers. And when were the British printmakers—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The British came after the Provincetown.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay, so in the '70s then, after the major focus on Germany Expressionism, was it basically, mainly American printmakers that you were looking at most, thinking about?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Mostly American, I would say.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:   Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And was there a particular print medium that you were drawn to, lithography, etching? Or did that really not matter?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, that was secondary. I mean, whether it was an etching or a monoprint, it was just I either liked this artist or I don't. And if I like it—I mean, like, my daughter this weekend when she came in, she said, "You know, Dad, if you're doing anything with any works," she said, "I remember seeing a Feininger that I once liked in your collection." And I said, "Well, look in this book." And you know, there were eight or nine of them I've gotten. I said, "But there are two etchings hanging out in the hall, could one of them be the one you like?" And again, those two are hanging there. She said, "Yes, I think it's this one." Well, I'm going to give her both of them, you know. I mean, I've enjoyed them all this time. You know, let's face it. You give it to a museum and it's, you know, never hung. So nothing is totally crystallized in our minds completely. We have ideas and, you know, it's going to be beneficial to all. And I'm not talking about in a money way, but in terms of institutions.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, we'll talk about that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  In the '70s when you were married, and your wife's interests, you were both together in this print collectors groups at MoMA.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds like you had been only purchasing black-and-white before.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Just for that period.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds like you were open to any kind of work.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I was open to seeing new things. Absolutely, absolutely.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And color. Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Were you, at that point, you and Johanna, did you have an agreement about how you would decide on buying something? Did it have to be a joint decision?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Never that formalized. But I remember going to Brooke Alexander, not being able to make up my mind on a couple of Johns, bringing them—Brooke said, "I'll send them up." I said—I think we had a couple of kids who were away at school—and he said, "You can keep them, you know, for the month and then you'll let me know."

And of course, I showed them to Jo. And she said—and this is the only time she did it—she said, "You can buy them, but I don't want to see them, and you can't put them in the closet." And I think she knew inwardly afterwards that this was not the approach to take.

And generally, I don't say "should I or shouldn't I." Generally, at this point, we agree. If anything, I don't agree certain times with her, and I say to her "I wouldn't buy it," you know, if she wants to buy it.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Has this evolved, beginning in the '60s and '70s? It sounds like you were mainly, mostly doing the collecting, you were the one who was really—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, but it was JoJo who saw the first Provincetown print and got me going.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But before that, you were mainly—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, mainly.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And showing her the works and hoping that she would like them.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. And she always did. I mean, there is not anything here or even stuck away in a drawer that Jo said no.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was she meanwhile collecting other things? Or, obviously, she had three kids. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, JoJo has been collecting houses, three kids, she's written a couple of books.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, she's an active journalist and writer.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And she's very active at the Literary Committee at the National Arts Club. She was on the Art Committee at the Cos Club.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Cosmopolitan.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Jo can hold her own. I mean it. You know, she's not just someone to sit on a committee. She has things to say.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah. When you were involved with the group at MoMA, at that point in the '70s, do you recall if you met other individuals or couples who then you shared your collecting enthusiasm with and your even maybe gallery-going? Was there a kind of social/colleague kind of situation?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No one had the drive that I had. No one had the passion that I had.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you were at MoMA in this group, this was a monthly meeting or—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That was close to a monthly, aside from the summer or visiting an artist's studio. You know, I've been on the Print Acquisitions Committee at MoMA for over 26 years at this point.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So from the '80s. When you were starting to get in this group at MoMA in the '70s, was part of the excitement of being part of that because you were—there was an educational element, that you learned a lot about printmaking processes?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No question. Not only learning printmaking processes, seeing other artists' works, and that's important.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  They brought you behind the scenes, they took you through the collection.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, yes. And there were some very serious, you know—Ruth Bowman was there and Harry Kahn, Phil Strauss was in that group. Lynn, of course, has dropped out. Oh, what's his name? Lionel Epstein was part of that group. And then, of course, when he moved to Washington, he dropped out. It was an interesting group of people.

And talking about people, Linda Janovic and myself teamed up and ran a five-year drive to set up an endowment fund in honor of Riva. And it came in at over $2 million. And now the sitting, you know—it's about up to two-million-nine now. And only the income is spent. I mean, that was a lot of fun. It was, you know, going—it wasn't the going after the money. Yeah, I guess that had something to do with it. It was building something up that was going to be perpetual.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The collection or the fund?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was building the collection up and honoring someone whom we all—listen, she's a difficult person, or was, and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Riva.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. I like doing something. I mean, that's why I serve on all these committees. I also feel I have something to say.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So getting to the early '80s—is when you said Jo introduced you to the Provincetown printers. Tell me the story about how that started.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And of course, so you're spending most of your time looking at contemporary prints at that point. Most of your time, not all. And this is then looking at a generation or two earlier.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I just bought another Provincetown, a Lazzell, two months ago. I mean, I'm still—things that I'm interested in, I'm still pursuing if I feel it's good enough. With Blanche Lazzell, I felt—and then I'll jump back—that if I didn't buy it or collect it, this would never be known as an ervra [ph] of Blanche Lazzell.

I wanted it to be the most significant collection as an honor not to my eyesight, but to this artist whom we all admire. I mean, you know, and I was buying them, I set the market. I was the one who flew down to West Virginia and visited her relatives.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I read about that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm the one who gave them what I thought were the retail price. I didn't come down there to—don't know what expression you want to use—but I wasn't coming down there to take advantage of anyone. And the proof in the pudding is, in one series prints that I got, I went down one year and visited some other relative, and then he said this other relative wanted to meet me, and they came over and took me to their house. And this person said to me at the airport, you know, "What would you pay for these? I'm not selling them now." And I told him.

A year later, I get a phone call, it was around Christmas: "It's so-and-so, do you remember me?" I said yes. He said, "When I met you I knew that if I ever did anything I was going to do it with you. Several auction houses have approached me about selling these works. And would you still stand by what you told me when you did?" I said, "Yes I would." He said, "They're yours, I'm sending them to you today." I said, "Wait, you don't have the money from me." He said, "I'm not worried."

And that's a story that should be told.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds very gratifying.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. So what is the story of Jo?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, with JoJo.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So Dave and Reba Williams were part of our group. One night we were invited to Dave's office to look at the prints. You know, we're all walking around. You know, there were hundreds of them. I think it was, like, a whole floor in this major 6th Avenue, whatever. And I'm walking with Jo and down some hallway, and there's a door open, and there's a print just on the table. And Jo said something like, "What do you think of this?" or something, she said, "I like it." I said, "So do I." I said, you know, "Who's it by?" We discovered it was a Provincetown print.

There were none hanging, by the way. This was just there, and they—or they told us it was a Provincetown. You know, somehow it was a Provincetown print.

So what came to my mind? I'll think of the artist in a minute. I had had a couple of art exhibitions at the Century Association, one a German Expressionist and maybe a Johns.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Are you a member of the Century—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. I knew Mervin Jules because he was on the same committee with me down there. And I called Jules up and I asked him about Provincetown art, you know, and Jules gave me the name of a dealer, let's say in Lambertville, who never answered the phone.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  New Jersey.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It could have been—and someone else, and that someone else answered the phone. His name will come to me. I'm sorry, suddenly this past year, I'm—and he lived in a very spacious loft down in the West Village. His name will come.

And I went down there and it was, like, "Oh, my God, look at these." And it was just, like, one after the other. I sort of said, "Could I, you know—give me some idea," and he gave me some idea. And I said, "Can I bring my wife down later this week to look at them?" He said sure. And I brought JoJo down, and I probably told her in advance, "Don't talk about price," whatever. And we looked, and she liked what she saw.  

And I know I was there alone when this all happened. Either we left together and I came back a third time, like the next day, and I said, "Could you take that off the wall?" He said, "Why do you want it off the wall?" I said, "Because want you to take the picture out of the frame." He said, "No one's ever asked me to do that." I said, "Well, I'd like to."

So we started, and he went, and everything I was interested in he unscrewed. And I then said, "How much, you know, would this be?" And he gave me a price. And there were a group of some. I said, "What about these four on this wall?" He gave me a better price, and I said, "Fine." And then we just went around the room. I knew once I was there, don't stop.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  These were all by Blanche Lazzell?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, they were different artists.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I can tell you through records exactly what it was I bought from him, and his name, which—he was the person from Provincetown who, with his partner, bought Hans Hofmann's house after he died. Does that ring a bell? Alright.

So I was down at his studio, and I called my office. Oh, I'm jumping a week ahead. The week before, JoJo and I were down on 57th Street. We walked into Pace Gallery, the second floor, and there was a Grace Martin Taylor there. And Jo said she liked it. I said, you know, "I don't know." I said, "You have your own money, you know, buy it then." And she said, "Oh." She didn't. So that was on a Saturday.

On a Tuesday, there was a meeting of the print group up at the Grolier Club because one of the members had that great Toulouse-Lautrec auction. And we're talking with Harvey and Francoise Rambach, and it was just over the summer, and, "What's new?" And Francoise with her big smile says, "We bought our first print this Saturday." "You did? What?" "Well, we were at Pace Gallery and we saw this." They bought the Grace Martin Taylor that JoJo liked.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And of course, that set JoJo off.

Oh, that's now the story starts. I said, "Jo, I'll follow up on this." So it was then that I called Mervin Jules. Jules told me. I went down that weekend, got them. I was coming back uptown. I called my office, they said that Sasha Schwartz, who knew we had lost that Grace Martin Taylor because we, you know, said that—and she had told us in advance that Matthew Marks had found a collection down in Provincetown. They had just come back from conservation, did I want to see them? I said, "I'm coming right now."

So I race up to, you know—take the subway back up.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is when Matthew Marks—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Was there, yes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  —was in his teens or 20s? [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, well, probably.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Twenties?    

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Probably just out of Bennington. And Sasha, like, put all 10 of these down on the desk. I said, "Sasha, can I call Jo and have her come down?" Fortunately, I got JoJo at home. I said, "Get in a cab and come on down." And I think we bought all of them or eight of the 10. And that was the beginning, and then there was no stopping. So I—okay.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you bought all of them?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I found out the name of a dealer. He lived on 55th and 1st Avenue. "Do you have any?" "Yes, I have three prints." Went to his studio. He would only let me buy one. I bought one, I brought it home. It was a Grace Martin Taylor. It's hanging somewhere here.

And as I was walking around the house, a label fell out from the brown paper, and it had Grace Martin Taylor, her address in West Virginia —

[END OF TRACK garfie12_1of2_sd_track02.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is Judith Richards interviewing Leslie Garfield with Johanna Garfield with us as well on December 20, 2012 in their home in New York City for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc two.

When we stopped yesterday, we were in the midst, I think, maybe toward the end, of talking about your collecting the Provincetown printmakers, and in particular Blanche Lazzell.

Is there anything else you wanted to add about that before we proceed to your next great adventure?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Can I tell her about the—[inaudible]?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  My spotting it, the way it got a whole—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, this is Johanna speaking.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes. We had gone down on a Museum of Modern Art print associates visit to the collection of Dave and Reba Williams. We went through the halls, and there was one door that was open, and I'm snooping, so I looked inside, and on a table was this print. It wasn't framed, but it was a charming little house and had wonderful colors, and something about it struck me immediately.

And I went and got Leslie and I said, "Look at this, this is wonderful." So I guess Reba or somebody told me that it was a Provincetown print and that this was a field they were becoming interested in. And I loved that particular print, which I later found out is called The White Cottage, I believe, I'm not quite sure.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  By whom?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Actually, it was not by Blanche Lazzell, it was by her cousin—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Grace Martin Taylor.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Grace Martin Taylor. There's a whole story involved with Grace.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I think we talked about her at some point yesterday.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I had written it down. But anyway, go on.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  When we visited her in—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Did we get into visiting her and how I found her?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  West Virginia?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then after weeks of calling her, suddenly the phone answers. And I said, "Is this Grace Martin Taylor?" And this voice said, "This is she, may I help you?" And I said, "This is Leslie Garfield calling from New York, and my wife and I have seen some of your work and we admire it greatly, and I was just wondering whether you had any works that you were interested in disposing of?"

I'm going to have to backtrack, I'm sorry. Before this incident occurred, I was given the name of another dealer—I think I mentioned this—who lived on 55th and 1st Avenue. I called him up about Provincetown prints and he said, yes, he had three of them. And he said, "I would be willing to sell you one, if you would like to come over you can," and I did.

And that particular print that I chose to buy that day was a wonderful Provincetown woodblock print.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And this is before you had purchased from Pace? We talked about that purchase from Pace and—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  All this happened sort of within a week of—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Can I backtrack a minute? Once we saw this and found out who it was by, then Leslie, ever the detective, decided we would try to find out where the source might be. And the first man you called was somebody you knew from Provincetown. He was an artist also, right?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, that was Mervin Jules.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, Mervin Jules.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, you mentioned him.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. Alright, so I'm only saying this because somehow it came to our attention—oh, it was through Mervin Jules that we went down to this fellow—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Warren Cresswell.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Warren Cresswell, who lived in the Village somewhere and had a lot of framed Blanche Lazzell and some Grace Martin Taylor, I think, prints.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That is Warren Cresswell?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Cresswell.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Cresswell, C-R-E-S-S-W-E-L-L, I think.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And so—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He's the person who bought Hans Hofmann's house in Provincetown after he died. This is Warren with his partner.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  So Warren had some wonderful prints, which we did—Leslie when he opened the bag, examined the condition, we bought quite a few. But we still hadn't seen this one. And you know that Provincetown prints are pretty—not many of them were made.

We still hadn't tracked that down. And then somebody told us that Pace had some. And we went to the gallery and there were three there, and one of them was the one I had been looking for. And Sasha who worked there, I don't know if you know her at Pace—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Sasha Schwartz.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, she said, "Well, these are fine but, you know, we're getting in some better ones, don't take these." And foolishly we didn't. [Laughs.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is this when you were telling me yesterday or day before about rushing down there, asking Johanna to join you and buying those?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That came within—yeah. Because in between, I told you, we had gone to a show put on by—what's the couple with the Toulouse-Lautrecs?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  You don't mean Francoise and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Rambach?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —Harvey Rambach?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, I know who it is. It was—yeah, I stopped there. [Laughs.] I know who it was. It was that woman with the very short—Schimmel.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The Schimmels. Did you know them? They had one of the world's great Toulouse-Lautrec poster.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What were their first names?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Herb and Ruth, right?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes, Herb and Ruth Schimmel, S-C-H-I-M-M-E-L, Schimmel.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And the exhibition was at the Grolier Club where Herb was a member. And we bumped into the Rambachs there.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That isn't—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay. This isn't going to work, is it? With both of—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It's fine, it's fine.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Okay.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Don't worry.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, actually, alright—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's the nature of remembering something 40 years ago. 40? 20, 30?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  More, yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. But I just want to say that—okay, so we don't buy that print, so we're waiting to see what others. Meanwhile, we met the Rambachs. I guess it was there. I thought it was actually at their house, but anyway. So we met them at the Schimmels. And as usual, Leslie always asks people, "What have you been collecting lately?" And they said, "Oh, we just got this charming, printed Pace."

LESLIE GARFIELD:  They never collected a print until then. This couple in their apartment had, like, 12 Marsden Hartley oils of the most incredible artistry. I mean, they were—you know they were damn good Marsden Hartleys scattered—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And Burchfield, they had quite a few of Charles Burchfield. But anyway, it turns out that when they described it, I realized that was the one. It was like an arrow—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, you mentioned that yesterday. Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —in my heart. And I said, "Oh, my God, we'll never get it again." And so that's what led us to—anyway, we did go back to Pace, we did buy a few, but that one was not one of them.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We bought them all, as I recall, Jo.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. But we didn't buy that one.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. You know, I could ask at this point, you're talking with such excitement about this piece: What was it about prints themselves, do you think, in recollection, or even you knew then, that excited you so in terms of anything else you could have collected? Like, you could have collected books, illustrated books, obviously other forms of—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Paintings.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  —art, paintings, sculpture. What was it about the print medium?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  From the beginning and continuing, this steady passion.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  From the beginning, it was just—you know, with the German Expressionists it was one's id, ego. It was just a sudden awakening in the brain of something that excited you.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  An epiphany.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Sort of.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And of course, you hit on something where the work at that time, the newest imagery was, at that point, in that place, done through printmaking so much. I mean, it was extremely strong at that point in time. But when you moved to other areas, you maintained that interest.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Interest.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, you know, when you thought about American art and British art.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, let's face it, the German Expressionists, for a good part of their period, were much better as printmakers than as, you know, artists with oils. They were tepid. They were pallid. They didn't have the bite that the prints had.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Except maybe Beckmann, you know.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And when you go to the Provincetown woodblock prints, what excited us was the white lines between every image. I mean, these were hand-carved blocks of which, you know, we have so many because of Jo's interest in them. And they're beautiful. And you really cannot or should not—or, you should reinterpret what is a print. Because in terms of Provincetown, every print is different from every other one that's carved from the same block, because they were done one at a time, the colors or the paints that they may have had in the studio were different than she had four weeks before. And people were buying not necessarily the print, although she certainly exhibited them, but she had all of her blocks there with the original colors, somewhat faded, but you knew what the artist had done.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  A sample of each.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And you know, sometimes you'll look at—and I've tried acquiring them—the same block in different colors than the one before. Not all the colors are different, but somehow the shades are different and they're—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, we could show you some actually.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, we could show you that.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When you—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  As far as I'm concerned, when I met Leslie, to go back when my interest in prints, and Les, first showed—we had known each other a long time, but I had no idea he was that interested in prints. Because he had been away, he had been in Germany and I had been in Washington.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Anyway, when he first showed me that room with these black-and-white images [laughs] I did not fall in love with him. I mean, I was polite, I think, and said they were interesting. And for a long time, even after we got married, I never really fell in love with them. There are some now that I'm extremely fond of. But it was really only when we got branching into, I guess, more colorful, pretty kinds of—it makes me sound like a dumb, blonde, you know, woman—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —but more appealing to me, were much more appealing to me.

And I guess the next field we got—actually, we went through a little brief fling with Mexican prints, too, because we had a friend who lived in Mexico. And we had some things by Leticia Tarragó. And who was that other one?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How do you—what is her last name? Tarragó?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  T-A-R-R-A-G-Ó. And there was an Israeli artist who lived in Mexico called Moshe Gat.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  G-A-T.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And we had quite a few of those. It was just sort of a—you know, like, you go to a place and you fall in love with the thing. And it's not that we don't still like them, but they are not hanging prominently around here. And then—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How did it—I'm sorry.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, I was just going to say, I think that what led us into the color was walking down at the Weyhe Gallery, going downstairs to look at some things Les was interested in.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Which gallery?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Weyhe, W-E-Y-H-E.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  W-E-Y-H-E.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was, for many years, on Lexington Avenue. He was a bookseller, and on the second floor they had prints.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And I was drawn to a print by the wife of that famous man. Oh, God, it was really beautiful. I gave it to my son and—anyway, this very colorful—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  A Frasconi, the wood carver.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Frasconi. It was his wife, his wife, Mrs. Frasconi.

[They laugh.]

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And she had some stuff hanging there in the gallery. And I wasn't paying attention to what Leslie was looking at. I was—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I had brought Jo down to look at a folio of Max Beckmann's Day and Dream series done by Curt Valentin in about the 1940s. I think it was a small edition, relatively, you know, '45 or so. And I had been in the bookstore earlier in the week, and went up to the second floor and met the woman there who ran it, and I said, "Do you have any German Expressionist prints here?" She said, "I think there's a folio done of Max Beckmann prints some time ago, and I think we have a copy of it, let me go back and look."

And she came out and brought this out, this Day and Dream with a wonderful self-portrait of the artist in there. And I asked her how much the cost was, and she said it was $600 for the folio. I said, "Could I pay for it over time?" And she said yes, you know, that's fine. I think I made the first payment and then I realized I really didn't have to buy it over time and I just paid the full amount. But we had it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Could we go back to my discovery? We went down to the basement to look at this and my eye was caught by this Frasconi print, which was some children sledding down a hill. It's really lovely. And I wasn't even paying that much attention to the Beckmann because I liked this thing. [Laughs.] And sure enough, we did buy the Beckmann, but we also bought the Frasconi. And so that was tied in with the—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The Frasconis.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. Yes, I said we bought the Frasconi.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We bought, like, six of them.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Plus others, yes, yeah. Quite a few.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS: When and how did your involvement, your interest in the British printmakers, between the wars, start? It's called the Grosvenor School. How did that begin?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, you have to realize in history that the Provincetown woodblock printmakers, which were mostly women, were up in Provincetown because World War I broke out. Normally they might have been in Paris studying at the Académie Julian or just traveling through Europe, and they couldn't go there. And, like, in the summer of 1916, there were a number of these women artists who gravitated to this literary art colony where in 1916 not only was Eugene O'Neill living there in the summer, but Marsden Hartley as well, plus others. I mean, the Provincetown Playhouse—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Harry Hoffman.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —was putting on plays and it was, you know, sort of a vibrant, early Woodstock, one of the first real art colonies that developed.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Provincetown.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, Provincetown I'm referring to. And so that existed between about 1914 into the '40s, into World War II. And simultaneously in England was this whole movement of artists, starting primarily with black-and-white, you know, influenced by the Italian Futurists and the Russian Constructivists.

Primarily, it started out in black-and-white. And then by the end of the war, this Grosvenor School, which was a school in London, I believe—you know, Cyril Power taught there and Sybil—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Sybil Andrews.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Sybil Andrews was there. Ethel Spowers, the Australian, went there.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Claude Flight.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And basically, they were experimenting with linoleum blocks, not wooden, and—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  They were trying to capture the spirit of the modern age with somehow showing the speed, how pulse was the force of the new—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And they were aware of the Italians?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, definitely.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  In fact, in the first manifesto, about 1906, there's praise of the Italian—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Marinetti?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Marinetti. And who else? Boccioni. So from a historical point of view, here are these two different art movements developing and going on and we just love them both.

So it was natural to, you know, once you start studying a period or looking into it, with the Provincetown, this was natural, you start hearing about different artists. And we just went on, I wouldn't say a rampage, but—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —we basically are responsible for where the British art dealers are today. No one was collecting what we were buying. There was no market for them. I told some people in advance about the show was going to go to the MFA, you know, where I'm involved.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The show that was in 2008, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This is—yeah, the British show.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Rhythms of Modern Life, yes.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  1914 -1939.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right, yeah. And suddenly, prices started creeping up, but it was done sort of gingerly. I mean, it wasn't—it didn't happen overnight. And then suddenly, once that show opened, I mean, if you went to the New York City print fair—like, that show opened in '08—in '09, '10, '11, '12, there were, like, every London dealer was featuring just the Grosvenor School. The prices I can't believe.

And I don't—you know, just as the United States has had this, you know, incredible stock market and hedge fund billionaires, it happened in England. And they were British funds. And there were one or two collectors there who are now pursuing—you know, it used to be whenever I would lose something I would sort of kid with whoever the friend was on the phone at the auction gallery, "Was this to the trade?" was the expression. "No, Leslie, it's this new"—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  A competitor. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, yes. And the prices have been—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  "Astronomical" is the word they're using these days.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Astronomical, even from last year to this year. I don't know how much of them are selling, but the fact that they're asking. And if you're at the print fair, I mean, several of them only had the Grosvenor School artists. I mean, wonderful examples of them, but—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you feel that actually you were there first and you learned so much and you looked—do you feel that you actually got the best examples that are available?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We got the best that was available, yes. I mean—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But now the prices are up, more people are selling, and they're revealing things you didn't know about?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, but, you know, in a sense, we are responsible for the Provincetown School and we're responsible for the British Grosvenor School. There is no doubt. I mean, it's not—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  For the popularity of them.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The popularity and the way it's going. I mean, the Old Print Shop had, what, a Blanche Lazzell this year for $180,000. I mean—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  We used to buy them and we used to buy the wood, the blocks they were made from, for, like, $200 or $2,000, whatever it was. $2,000 [laughs], I guess. But it seemed like I liked that the blocks were even more interesting than the prints.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, having it together is incredible.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  They were under—they cost less, the prints maybe cost $3,000 and the blocks would cost $1,500 to $2,000.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So at this point you're seeing the prices go up, but actually you feel content that you have a body of work that is complete enough you don't have to keep working in the same field?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm not—no, no, no, no, no.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Leslie never stops. I mean, nothing is complete.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm not chasing them the way I was before.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I've done it, I know what I've got, I know what I've given to museums. And sure, occasionally something will come along. But I'm not chasing it. I mean, maybe, if anything, I would regret that I gave them away so early to the museums.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  You know, he doesn't have to chase them or we don't have to chase them, because a lot of dealers know that that's what we have collected in the past, so they'll come to us and say, "We've got something, a Sybil Andrews you should look at," or a—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is there a dealer in New York who deals in this that you've bought from?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You're talking about what now?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The Grosvenor.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The Grosvenor School. I would say—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Mary.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, there's Mary Ryan.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:   Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Susan Teller, do you buy anything from—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Susan Teller doesn't have British. She has American.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, that's right. Yeah, the Provincetown.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, she has no Provincetown whatsoever. It's sort of—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  She's got a lot of the '30s.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  She never got in, or was never collecting them, when they should have been collected. Like, Marty Diamond was the person who really set the market here in New York. And it was from Marty that we bought most of our early—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That's right. Yeah, we should—he deserves a place in history.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —works. But the interesting thing—I don't know whether I had mentioned this. I'll find out the name of that dealer who had the three prints, and I bought one, I brought it home, and somehow there was a crack in the back where the brown paper had been put. And a little slip fell out with the name Grace Martin Taylor—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, you told me that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —with her address in Charleston, West Virginia.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  She was asking about the British dealers.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Were there dealers in New York who were selling—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The British dealers, let me think, who did we buy from? Well, we must have bought some from Mary Ryan.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, let me rephrase that a bit. It sounds from the comments you've made that you've bought works from dealers, through auction, in any way. There isn't a particular avenue that you favor or avoid.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, when you look back on it, the most fun—we took, or I did, and Jo came on one or two—was going down to West Virginia where, you know, Blanche Lazzell was one of 12 children. Blanche really wanted to leave her work to brothers and sisters. And a lot of the work that I was able to track down came directly from the family. So I had sort of first digs. And I told you that story where someone called me a year later and they had been visited, and we—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But also, you have to—Blanche Lazzell was related to Grace Martin Taylor and she taught Grace Martin Taylor. That's why there's such a similar feeling in a lot of Grace's work.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Let me ask you kind of a general question: Do you think that you have an eye for the area that you collect in? And if so, how did you develop it? And what part does that play in the whole range of skills you need to have to achieve the goals that you've achieved as a collector? I mean, I assume you've talked to your library, you do research, you do look.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  In different ways I think we both have an eye. Because Leslie is the one, you know, interested. And usually if one of us likes something, the other one likes that field anyway. I mean, we have—definitely there were some pictures, some prints we have that one of us loved and the other one didn't, including the Jasper Johns that I discouraged Leslie [laughs] from buying, and which later shot up in value.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Decoy.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, that was one of the—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Decoy was the—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, Decoy.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But anyway, but most of the time we—and it seems like he has discovered fields. Like, right now Leslie is in a Hodgkin phase.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Howard Hodgkin.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And I am not crazy about him. So that's one place where we differ. But I would say it was me with the Provincetown, we were both with the—Leslie with German Expressionist. Me, I'm only saying the initial interest in the Provincetown, and Leslie and both of us with the British Modernism.

I would say Johns started with you, Leslie. God, yeah. I love Johns now, I'm crazy about him. In fact [laughs], he came to the house once, we had a dinner party, and I was so awed by him. And Leslie said, "Well, we have to have—Johns has to sit next to you, you know, the guest of honor next to the hostess." And I said, "My God, what do I talk to him about?" I couldn't imagine bringing up any ordinary subject.

And it was actually awkward for a while, and then somehow he picked up a little and asked me what I did, and I said I was writing a book about cousins, which I was. And he kind of lit up and said, oh, he had lots of cousins and he loved him and was very interested in him. And he invited me over to interview him for the book, and he is in fact in the book.

But it took me a while to get to love Johns, but now I think he's genius. I think he's kind of a Shakespeare of the print world.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It's exceptional for collectors to be working in an area ahead of museums, you know, and you said you made the market. What do you think was especially exciting and has driven you to do that several times, to be collecting in a field where you were really a kind of a pioneer as a collector, at least—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's what your eye tells you.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, I don't think you start out thinking, "Gee"—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You don't start.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But there wasn't anything particularly exciting about being able to discover something that other collectors hadn't discovered?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I never thought of it that way.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Or unveiling works for a public, or making visible an artist who might have disappeared except for your efforts? So you're working on behalf of the artist in that case, in a way.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. I think so.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, it dawned on me now that when we were collecting Provincetown woodblock prints and I was just buying and buying, there were two things. Certainly, I came across Lazzell prints that were not as good, in my eye, as other works. But I knew if I didn't bring them into our collection, there would be a dispersal of this artist's works and no one would ever have the opportunity to, like, see the development of an artist. And I was conscious when I bought them. I mean, they were good, don't get me wrong.

You know, Blanche kept an extraordinary diary. In fact, one of the first things I did was go to the Archives of American Art, here in New York, and spent a number of days going back and reading everything I could that she had written. And I ended up being able to photocopy her diary of her prints. In other words, I can show you, like, print number one was done in 1918, done in Woodstock, New York, the image is such-and-such, number one. She would say who she sold it to at, let's say, at $5. And if it was an edition of two, she would have number two and the person, then you would go on to the second print. But she left marvelous records. But there was a time—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Hold on, let me—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh.

[Audio break.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you said you—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  There was a period in my life that I said, you know, "What makes you think your eye is better than all these other people out there?" I really mean it.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Who hadn't collected this work.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Who hadn't collected it.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Who hadn't seen anything special in it.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And I was just still going, you know. I didn't stop. I didn't stop, I just kept going. And I guess it wasn't until, you know, these shows developed that—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Until the curatorial interest came along.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, that's right, and sort of, in a sense, validated what I had given them on a plate, let's say. Because it wasn't, you know—what I was—by then, I had the major collections. Like right now, I think I probably, or I have been told that I have the best Richard Hamilton collection outside of some museum in Switzerland—of prints, of prints. And that's why the Museum of Modern Art—and we'll get into that.

So you just do what your eye tells you to do or you—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Richard Brown Baker was the same way. He's just a—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was a good friend.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Was he, in a way, a mentor in terms of collecting?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, no. But we admired—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Kind of a comrade. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —what we were doing.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you feel that you have an interest in museum education in the field of prints? I mean, when you were on the committee at MoMA and maybe other involvements, have you taken an interest in considering how to educate the public about printmaking as well, in general, and specifically about the kind of prints you love?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At the Print Acquisitions at MoMA, for example, there are about—between 15 and 20 show up. You know, it's Glenn Lowry, Aggie Gund, former, and generally the curators have pretty firm ideas of what they want to buy. And they make good arguments. Sometimes I don't like what they're doing, but I say to myself, "You have to be au courant with the new things that are happening all over the world in terms of art." And it's not that I necessarily like it, but I don't vote against it. I mean, I may not put my hand up, but enough people do.

The only time something happened was in Riva Castleman's day, I think there was a black-and-white Warhol execution, prison execution that—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Electric Chair.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —Electric Chair—that came from Leo Castelli, and the price was $50,000 at the time. And I remember three of us: myself, Lionel Epstein—who was a great collector, or his wife was, but she had the money, he had the eye—and Nelson Blitz. And it's interesting that all three of us were strong German, you know, Expressionist, and Nelson has one of the great Munch collections in the world. And we all voted against it.

I mean, the other 10 or 12 people voted for it, and that was—and we sort of looked at each other, you know, as "what do they know." And they bought it. And I think the same one came up before our new committee a couple of years ago. And some Japanese museum was willing to buy. We had two of them then, but one of them had a larger white swath of paint on it, and a Japanese museum was willing to pay then, like two-and-a-half million—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  For the print.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —which sounded—well, it had some hand coloring on it—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —which sounded so crazy. And Glenn Lowry was there, and it was explained, you know, that the museum would use the money to buy other prints. And someone had the balls on the committee to say, "Why don't we keep both of them? They're both a little different." And everyone started talking, and then we were adjourned for the summer.

And it was brought up, you know, at the first October meeting in the fall, we would go over this issue again about whether to—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Deaccession?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Deaccession. And it was decided, I guess Glenn and other trustees must have decided "let's hold onto it" kind of thing.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Which print was this?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was the Electric Chair.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Another version of the Electric Chair.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Another version.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Which one?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The Electric Chair, the Warhol.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, with incredible providence coming directly from Leo.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, yeah, yeah, right. Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Have there been, speaking of difficult prints, have there been any controversial moments in terms of when your works, the collection has been shown, or in any other time when you have felt that there were interesting issues of disagreement among the parties?   

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Between us or the art world?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  With the art world, that related—I mean, your prints don't necessarily provoke anger. But there might have been some—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, you know, one thing with this guy who was a critic at the Times, it was Ken Johnson, he was the only one who gave the British Modernism show—was it? Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think so.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes, a bad review. I mean, he described it as something that was kind of good for children's books. Something crazy. We've got the review somewhere, but it was very upsetting.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was one of these—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  In other words, he felt there were illustrational?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  He still is a critic at the Times.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How did you feel about that kind of comment? Did it affect you?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I thought he was—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I thought he didn't know what he was talking about.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Did I have any rage for him? No. Who cares? And all the others—you know, when you know what you've got and, you know, it's going to the Met and has been a show, that kind of thing, who cares what this guy says?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, what about—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. But you know, it's a—you know, it's nice to have it praised, better to have it praised than not.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. You know, over the years as your collection has grown and you've gotten the recognition that you have through these exhibitions and publications, how have you felt about that kind of visibility as collectors? Are there pros and cons to that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I sort of want to close up a little.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, Leslie is definitely more protective.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So in a way, have you ever thought of making the loans anonymous? I mean, maybe you have.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Not loans, but I do not—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So that it doesn't say on the wall label that it's your collection?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I don't let any art groups come up here. I mean, it's ridiculous.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, you have, Leslie.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And now—I didn't finish my sentence.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Okay. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The only groups I'll have up—and I'm glad to have them—is, you know, what's her name who was down at—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Anne Coffin?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Anne—well, and co-chair of that group even. But you know—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Ross Shapiro [ph], with—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Huh? Curators of museums who want to bring a print department in here, it's fine. I mean, who was the—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So people who you know have a particular interest in and knowledge of the prints.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Interest in what we collect.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So they could really understand.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I remember, I can't think of her name, a wonderful print curator down in Texas. Do you remember who I mean?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Vaguely.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  She retired, it seems, young, a couple of years ago. What was the—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What city or museum?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think it was—what was her name?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  You don't mean Berta Walker? No.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, no, no.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You'll think of it.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Like, we've had Wellesley College print people come in. We've had the Cos Club—well, that's because Jo is a member—come in.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  You had a show at the Century.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Century we had a show.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, in all these ways, the collection has become better and better known.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And then there was an article written in American Art—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Art & Antiques?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Art & Antiques, right. [Laughs.] Sorry, by James Panero.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah, very nice article. So it sounds like on the scale there might be some drawbacks because you might feel invaded [laughs], but basically it's gratifying to have people know. It's more positive than negative. Otherwise you would lend anonymously.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I think it is for Leslie, I think, even though—it's very interesting. He's more private.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Like we just lent that Double Flag to São Paulo museum, but it's an anonymous, in a South American country, you know. I wouldn't have my name on it, or our name on it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, once Leslie decides we're going to have a group over—well, we both are pretty—you know, we will talk the way we do now [laughs], constantly interrupting each other. But I don't know why, I don't particularly like having groups over, even if they're interested in prints. I guess that's just—it has nothing to do with prints, it has to do with me and being uncomfortable.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Have you, either of you, kept a journal of your collecting activities, a diary?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I haven't.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, I know you showed me you have very thorough records.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I—you know, occasionally I'll do two yellow pages of some incidents that might have happened that day. But I remember Richard Brown Baker stating that every day, spend 15 minutes—was it the next morning? I'm just trying to think what the sequence was. But he spent 15 minutes writing down in his diary—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  His journals.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —every day. Not once a week, but every day.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  They were fascinating.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And Jo became the literary executrix of his—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Memoirs, journals.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —journals.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you—this is more going back to where it began. Over the years you said that you learned about printmaking techniques as a member of the MoMA group. Did you ever want to do a print yourself?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We did.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  We did. We went up to an island—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Vinalhaven, I suggested it.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Robert Indiana.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, mm-hmm [affirmative].

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And who was the woman dealer up there?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, gosh. She had—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  She was a dealer in New York. She had a home up there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I know who you mean.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Anyway, she had a—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was just wonderful.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Because we were out there in the motel on Vinalhaven just where, you know, the motorboat came in. And we sort of were doing something, you know, going to Indiana's studio—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you remember what year this was?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, I could find out.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What decade? [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, I could, because we have some copies of the prints, I noticed, that we made—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That we made.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —on the trip.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Before you took that trip, were you looking for an opportunity to make a print and that's why you took the trip?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. Sure.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That was part of the trip, we were actually make a print in the studio.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  To make a print, that's what the whole object of it was. Robert Indiana, we did see him, but that was just a kind of nice side thing.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What about a place in New York to make a print? There wasn't an opportunity that you—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I took a course, come to think of it, once. I made a print—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, yes, at MoMA we took—and I made a print.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, well, you—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That was the first year we were married.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I did a woodblock, which is up at the farm, and you did one.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And I had one we hung in the downstairs—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Also a woodblock?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  What?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Also a woodcut or a woodblock?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, that wasn't. It was—mine was a collage with watercolor and with mesh and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So it wasn't a print?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It wasn't actually a print.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It wasn't actually a print. No, no.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I can't think of his name, the artist, but—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The teacher you mean, artist who taught?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, the teacher. I just last week got a bulletin from the MFA, from the School of Art, and they have a class, a three-week class in Venice. And I said to Jo—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  In making prints?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, in art. In other words, you would be drawing or—not specifically prints. But you know who gave classes there?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  In making it or visiting?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, in doing the art there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Sketching maybe.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Okay.      

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And also sketching.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I would like that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Who is the woman we know and her husband, John and—the printmaker who you saw at Will Barnett's memorial service a couple of weeks ago. You know.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, Claire Romano.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Claire Romano and John for years, I think it was through the school on 23rd Street.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Pratt.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Doesn't Claire Romano—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Is she at Pratt?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I'm not sure.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  They taught classes in Venice in the summer.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And they're wonderful artists themselves.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I think that's Pratt has the Venice campus. Maybe SVA does also.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, I—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  They are very wonderful printmakers.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  They are both very good. Have you seen their work? It's really good.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you have the occasion to make those prints.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Uh-huh [affirmative].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That was a while ago. It's not something that you wanted to keep doing?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  No, I would have if I thought I was really good at it [laughs], but I decided I wasn't.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  If there were a specific class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I think I could be good at collage, but I don't think I could be good at printmaking.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm sure there are classes in collage.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, I've done collage.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. It sounds like there's a whole range of elements in the process of collecting prints that are gratifying, exciting. I mean, obviously, the research, the discovery. Can you sort of talk about what it is that you enjoy about collecting in the area that you collect and how those things are fulfilling? And in a way, as a kind of advice to a prospective collector.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, what Les said before is to follow, you know, what you really like. I think if I wasn't married to Les and I were collecting on my own, I would have collected some of the same things, but I think I would have collected a lot of work of the '30s. I like that WPA, you know, Lazowick and that whole school.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Martin Lewis.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, Martin Lewis. I think—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is that something you might do in the future?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Probably not. I mean, it's—I feel like our collections are so extensive in the areas that we have that—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So that's a kind of discipline that you—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds like an element of wisdom about collecting is the exercising discipline.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Exactly.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  To me it certainly is. I mean, I'm attracted to a lot of things that Leslie will just walk by, he's not interested in them. There was one thing I really wanted, which was a Martin Lewis print called Which Way? It shows this old-fashioned car with the lights and snow. And finally, I persuaded Leslie to get it for me for my birthday. So we do have a few things that don't fit in. Now, we have the Gross. Did you tell her about the Gross, the watercolor?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, I looked at that. I remember looking at that.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. But that was an anomaly in terms of the print collecting.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. So what would be the most important advice you would give to a prospective collector, or maybe you even had the occasion to speak to a group of prospective collectors about—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  He's going to be. 

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [laughs]—over the years about collecting? So what are your words of wisdom about—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I have to give that thought because both Dick Solomon and I are on a two-day panel out in Madison, Wisconsin at the end of—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Is he coming, too? That's great.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, Dick's—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I didn't know that.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, look at as much art as you can, go to museums as much as you can, join museum print groups—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Groups.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —and meet other people who you may expose to artists that you like and they may expose you.

I remember we had an actual ritual on Saturdays at a certain five-year period in our lives where one Saturday would be spent going down just to Madison Avenue and 57th Street, another Saturday would be doing 57th Street east and west. You know, it's a limited number of blocks, and I think the other two was going down to SoHo. I mean, you just couldn't possibly cover all of them in one day, I certainly couldn't.

And it was done every Saturday. I mean, that's how we spent our—you know, there was a babysitter at home and that's what we would do. And it was fun. You would go, you know, sometimes you would go with people, like—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, we went to that nice place for lunch.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —Harry Kahn and Phil Strauss.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Gosh, those were great days.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Harry Kahn?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. He lived with Ruth Bowman until he died—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  After his wife—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —after his own wife—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —well, his wife had Alzheimer's.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  She didn't die—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. Ruth Bowman is no longer around, right?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, she is. I bumped into Ruth.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  She is? Oh.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, I think she's around.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  About a month ago, somewhere, I said, "Ruth, where have you been?"

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  She's a brilliant woman. Brilliant.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was on 3rd Avenue. And she said I'm still in Manhattan House. They had been legally trying to throw her out on the basis of income. And she finally—not finally—but she won the case. And she said to me she had a boyfriend after Harry died and, you know, he was easily in his 90s and still is around.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Isn't he still alive?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He is still alive.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Named George, he's wonderful.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And she said George is still taking care of me. And she was being—she was in a wheelchair, by the way, and being wheeled by—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you remember George's last name?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, gosh.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  God, no.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Alright. We can figure that out.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I can look on my computer and see if I have it on my computer.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's been your attitude to selling prints, to refining, you might say, the collection through sales?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, we certainly, in terms of estate planning, have talked. It doesn't work. What I think our plans are now is to do something with three museums in terms of some gifts. And then I think what we're talking about is—and this hasn't been straightened out legally—whether we have to give the balance to a foundation who then can sell it, or we have to put up for sale what we want to go into a foundation. And my accountant, as of two weeks ago, didn't know. But we're talking with, quote-unquote, an "expert," and finding out what the best thing to do is.

What we would like to do is set up some kind of restricted endowment funds at a couple of museums in terms of the print department, what they can do and can't do and use the income. And we would like to give the initial gift in our lifetime in honor of the curator who we want to honor. And I'm afraid we're not—we just haven't—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Let me say, a lot of people say—I mean, even people close to me, they don't understand that this is really a labor of love, Leslie particularly. And I certainly didn't even think of it, but other people have said, "Don't you ever sell anything?" And the point is no, [laughs] we don't. We never sell anything, and that's because if we buy it we really like it and don't want to, even sometimes if we have one or two copies of something.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, and some people feel they made a mistake or they want to change directions so they sell things to refine or to improve.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, I know. But yeah, no.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We've never—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  We have never sold one—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We've never said to each other, "Why, you know, do we have this art?" It just doesn't happen because if you're constantly acquiring work, you're expanding your mind, and it's challenging.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And your drawer space. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And your drawer space. In fact, we're not going into the other apartment, although I haven't gone in yet today, but we had art movers taking—Heather had created large cartons of material which were going to be taken out and packed professionally, brought down to the warehouse today. Heather's going to go down tomorrow before she takes off, to make sure everything is there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's Heather's last name?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Hess.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Hess, H-E-S-S.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  When did it start, if it wasn't always, being the Johanna and Leslie Garfield collection? Was it always that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was automatically, you know.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I mean, I don't think—there was never any question. What's mine is yours and that's it. I mean, that's—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I mean, I would never claim—I mean, Leslie is definitely the driver. And you know, I would say he's the one whose major passion got this started. I certainly joined in willingly, but he's the pawn mover.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is there an exhibition yet to be done, you think, on any part of your collection or where your collection would be a major part of a subject that hasn't and you think should be tacked?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, probably the Richard Hamilton is going to come next, one way or another.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes, yeah, yeah. Did you tell her about how you got started on Hamilton?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, I did tell you.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's right, that's right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, when we were in a British Museum?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Through Steven Koppel.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, yes, yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  But what I didn't tell you is the difficulties with Glenn Lowry.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, maybe you should.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And so—

[Audio break.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, I thought you were erasing what I said.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I can't do that. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, we can cross it out if it's one sentence.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That's not on there, Les.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think it might be interesting to have a show—forget the name of the artist, but just, you know, prints from our collection—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Of one person.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —from all different—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, excuse me—

[Audio break.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were talking about Richard Hamilton prints and you think that would make a show that should be done. Yeah, yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Let's talk about, before we get back to the art, some practical considerations. You mentioned to me as an aside about having a database or having a collection really recorded. Is that something that you've always done? Is this recent that you've had —

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, this has been since whoever we started with, it was—I think we started with young girls from MoMA, for extra money or something—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That's right.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —they would come in one day or something a week and do things. But at some point, maybe Caro, who was with us for 11 years, started—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Who was that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  A woman by the name of Caro.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Her name was Caro Tavelli.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Caro?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Caro, C-A-R-O. Tavelli, middle name, T-A-V-E-L-L-I.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Dash Abar.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Dash Abar, A-B-A-R.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That's her married name. She was with us for about 11 years. And I would think probably in her era is when she caught up, and now everything in the collection has been photographed, purchase receipts are in there, loans that were made are in there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How do you deal with loan requests? Is that something that you—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It depends on who it is. I see on the Collections Committee agenda, like, the MFA is going to have a show, I think, in 2015 of Jasper Johns' works on paper. I assume I'll be asked to lend. If I'm not, that's fine. You know, I'm not going to go up and say, "Do you need any Johns" or anything?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Are you concerned about the light exposure on these works?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, always.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Constantly.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And you make sure that the loan forums had the low light levels.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Absolutely. The museums—absolutely, absolutely.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. And also, even in the apartment, I guess, Leslie pointed out that we've tried to carve out little, dark places.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, tell me about that. The steps you've taken to protect the works.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, the windows are all double glazed and then we have two sets of shades here where you just press a button. This is just sort of keeping sunshine out and the other one just comes all the way down and the room is dark.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It really blocks out the light.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It blocks out the light.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And if we go away, we always lower those.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We always lower it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But I didn't want to live in darkness, like we did in the house.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  So basically we tried to put the—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  If you'll notice, there are no color prints, like, on this wall or that one.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Notice there is—yeah. Black-and-white doesn't fade, I guess, at all.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Anyway, so we have those where they can get some light. But we try to keep everything in the darkness really, you know, as dark as—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, that's why we built those hallways.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes. Oh, yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And that's why the German Expressionist gallery, which I call it, that one over there, is also completely enclosed.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes. No natural light can get in there. Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah. And you talked about, you have a—

[Doorbell rings.]

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Is that our door?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, let me—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Should I pause it?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Alright.

[Audio break.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Sorry, go on.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  No, you were asking before about what are some of the great things about it. Besides the art itself, is meeting some of the artists and dealers, you know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, now, meeting artists, that happens, of course, when you're collecting the work of living artists, which you have done for a period of time. And you're saying that one of the interesting, fulfilling aspects of that is meeting the artists. Have you been able to do that? Which artists have you had the chance to meet?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, yeah, I would we—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, Richard Bosman certainly. Richard went through a difficult period in terms of his work. You know, when I started collecting it in the '70s, it was sort of this cartoonish work. You know, his father was an Australian sea captain, so it was natural for him to have these images of captains on boats and—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Falling off boats.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Falling off boats. They weren't really cartoonish so much as dark. I mean, they reminded me of the German Expressionists.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  They had a spite in them, I think.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, we don't know them really well, but we do know Jasper Johns and, God, who else, Les? I was just thinking of somebody else we've met.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did you meet Richard Hamilton?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Hamilton, yes, we did. Very briefly we did meet him.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, we met him.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And we met Howard Hodgkin, briefly—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Has meeting the artists had an impact on how you feel about the work?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I can't say.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I think with you it did, with Hodgkin. I could be wrong, but I don't know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Say that again?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I felt that Leslie was—the fact that there was a Hodgkin show at Cristea and meeting him all kind of led to maybe more interest than he would have had. I don't know.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, Alan invited us because we were already collecting Hodgkin.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I know.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It wasn't that I saw Hodgkin at a dinner and—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, I thought we didn't have much until then. We did not have much, I know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Had you been—with all the contemporary artists that you've talked about, they also do paintings. Had you been a fan and interested viewer of the paintings before you discovered the prints?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That's a hard question to answer. I mean, we certainly love, I love—

[END OF TRACK garfie12_2of2_sd_track01.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —Gerhard Richter show, the one we saw in London. We don't have any Richter prints. I mean, have I been looking for them? No. Do I know what he—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Well, for example, Howard Hodgkin has a huge body of paintings going back decades. Had you been looking at the paintings and thought about even—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I liked his work. It's almost like there was a vacuum. I mean, no one in England—these Hodgkin works were coming up at auctions with a certain regularity, and not necessarily the same ones. And I liked what I was looking at, and the prices seemed low to me. And I bought a number of them that I liked.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But wait a minute, she's asking about—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  What?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Have you liked his paintings, other media that he's worked in.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Some of them I do, and some I don't.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I mean, it's—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I didn't buy Johns because I liked his paintings. I liked his prints.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Has your relationship with buying—your attitude toward buying from galleries, versus auction houses, changed over the years?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think it's changed in the sense of an awareness that when you're buying at an auction you're often competing against a dealer. So the auction, to me, is generally the best price to buy prints.

For example, if ULAE and Bill Goldston is holding, you know, Jasper Johns prints at prices that they have been able to get or whatever, they often come up at auction at lower prices. And that, to me, is indicative that the public, you know, is not out collecting Johns.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The weakness in the market.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You certainly see weakness in artists and you say to yourself, you know, "They're just not selling."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. You've mentioned a couple of times your relationship with MoMA and MFA. Let's talk about your relationship with museums. And I know there's some significant ones, particularly the MFA in Boston. How did that—you don't live in Boston [laughs], you went to school in Boston. How did that relationship—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Develop?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  —develop and become so important?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Okay, I'll tell you. Barbara Shapiro, who was a curator up there for 25 years, was a friend of Mary Ryan's. And she would bring people from Boston when Print Fair was down to Mary Ryan's gallery and this one's gallery—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Go to collections.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —et cetera, and private collections. And I got a phone call from Mary that—I mean, Mary is a special dealer. She's just a wonderful—I mean, we both adore her. And I'll never forget the day she told me she was getting from an estate some Edna Boies Hopkins, she was a Provincetown artist. And she would call me when they came in. These were the days when she was on Columbus Avenue. We made an appointment and I went over there on a sunny Saturday morning. And she locked the door and put some newspapers down on the floor and starts putting out all these Edna Boies Hopkins.

And to me, at that particular moment, they were just wonderful. And she said, "Leslie, I can only sell you, and I will sell you, you know, let's say, six of 15 because I've got other collectors and I've got museums." And just seeing these all on the floor and just choosing.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But anyway, Mary is the one who told Barbara that she might be interested in looking at our collection of Provincetown prints.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. And she said, "Would I let them come and look at, you know, the whole print group?" You know, about 20 people that were coming in for the weekend. And of course I said fine. And they came, and Barbara loved the Provincetown—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Was enchanted with it.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —woodblock prints.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Had she known about them?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I think very little.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I mean, since Provincetown—Boston is the closest big city.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I know.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  If a big museum were to collect them—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It wasn't a big thing there at all.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And we had a collection. I mean, you could look at a group of works and not one work or anything.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It was kind of a revelation to her.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  She fell in love with them.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So then the next thing is she asked if—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  You suggested to Malcolm.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, if Cliff Ackley could look at them. And I think Cliff came down, maybe with Malcolm. It wasn't three separate visits. And Malcolm point blank—you know, he had obviously spoken to Barbara and Barbara knew—"Would you like to have a show?"

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is Malcolm Rogers.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, Malcolm Rogers. And so we had the—we said yes, and the show went up there. And I was asked to—after the show or before, I don't remember, I was asked if I would become an overseer of the—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Which is what?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's under the board. The board of trustees—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It's like a warden.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —comes top, and then overseers.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is it an advisory group or a funding group? [Laughs.] You never know.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think it's more of an advisory group.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I don't—I'm not on that board, so I can't say.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I mean, as an overseer, I've never been asked. You know, I may be a patron of the museum at a certain level. But at any rate, I was asked to be an overseer, which was—and then I was put on the most prestigious committee that—you know, both trustees and overseers. Basically it's a committee that has to approve any purchase of any work over $25,000, which means not that you get a sheet of paper and, you know, "will you approve this?" But the curator from that department comes in at that meeting, makes their pitch and will answer any questions from us seated around the U-shaped table. And then they go outside and wait, and we vote yes or no.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It's a collections committee.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So it may be that it could be oriental rug, it could be an American Shaker piece, it could be an American colonial piece, it could be a light fixture, it could be a musical instrument. So anything over $25,000. And then to deaccession, it has to have a value of, let's say, over $15,000 that we vote upon.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And I've been on that—Malcolm—and the committee changes. I'm sure if I were to study why—maybe one-third. So in other words, if you're a trustee, like, you're put on this committee for three years and then you're shifted to another committee to learn what's going on there, so that you get to know more about the museum. And then there are people who are just considered very knowledgeable about certain subjects and prints.

There was a fellow who finally retired, John Axelrod, who gave a large part of his collection and just put on it again for another three years. You get a 25 percent discount on books up there, on anything in the gift shop, which is fun. And Jo is always looking for clip-on earrings, and the first thing I do is go. You know, I try to get up—I used to go up the night before the meeting, it's sort of ritualistic, and I would have dinner with Cliff Ackley. I mean, drinks first.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's his position?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Cliff is chief curator of prints, drawings, and photography.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm. [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then the meeting is the third Wednesday of every month, and it starts at—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's quite often, a monthly meeting?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, it's only six meetings a year. So it's—like, I think our first meeting this year was October. November, I didn't go up, and it's the first meeting I've missed in, like, seven or eight years. And then I think the next one comes in February again.

And you know, you try different things, you know, to take the Acela—see, I want to get up there, if I'm going for the day, at least to see the exhibits that I haven't seen. And now when I don't have dinner with Cliff, I meet him for lunch at the museum and we—well, I first go into the print room and we talk. And then we meet early for lunch at 11:30, and then 12:30 the meeting. And then it ends 3:00 to 3:30, so I've already made a reservation on a plane. I jump in a cab and—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Do you also go look at the other print collections in Boston, the Boston area?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, the last other thing I looked at—yeah, once, and that was really a year ago before it closed. I didn't go specifically for prints because the Fogg was closed, the print department, that day, but the museum was open so at least one could walk around. I don't avail myself of it. I mean, generally, it's not that this is the only thing in my life in the sense that, you know, "Well, I've got Tuesday"—you know, all these other days in New York. You're busy every day.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. Are there any—well, before I ask that question—you also have an involvement with the museum at the University of Wisconsin. Could you talk about that?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Sure. I went to the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I met JoJo out there when she transferred from Barnard her sophomore year.        

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  We talked about that yesterday.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then 10 years later—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —we got married. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We got married in—let's see, I went out there in—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It was 1960 we were married.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, and I went out there in the fall of '49 and met Jo in the fall of '50. And we were married in '60, so it was 10 years since we originally met. And some years ago, maybe 15, Paul Drawings—do you remember Paul?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Paul Cummings.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was—Paul Cummings, excuse me.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Paul Cummings, sure, sure.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was a friend, and I was on the board of the Drawing Society. And it turned out that there was going to be a Theodore Roszak show, a drawing show, that had been shown here in New York and was going out to Madison. And we went out with Paul and, you know, about seven or eight of us from New York, and I met Russell and Paula.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Russell and Paula?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Russell Panczenko.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Panczenko.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He's the director of the museum, and Paula runs Tandem Press. Paula McCarthy. And in fact, this year she has been elected the president of the IFPDA, I think.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. And did you buy—and that Judy Pfaff I saw was done at Tandem.     

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, absolutely, absolutely at Tandem.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, they didn't even know we had gone to Wisconsin. We got to talking and they asked if they could come and see our collection when they were in the city. They're married, by the way, Paula and Russell. And, you know, we were talking and then suddenly it came out, you know—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Russell asked.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Somebody said—one of us said, you know, "We met there." And then they perked up and they got very interested. And then they began to think—right away they suggested that Leslie join the board.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] Yeah, finding that along with a passion for—I mean, it's a natural.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, before we jump away from that subject, there is another couple who met out there before us, and that is Jerry and Simona Chazen.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  C-H-A-Z-E-N.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Z-E-N. Do you know Jerry and Simona? Well, they are maybe—if I was in the class of '53, Jerry and Simona may have been in, let's say, the class of—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  '55 or '56, '57?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, no, no, JoJo. They're five or six years older than we are, so it's a younger class.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  They're older than you.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  They're older.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  If you can believe it. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And they met and married, and they've got an extraordinary collection, and are big—you know, Jerry gave the funding for the new museum.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It's called the Chazen Museum.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It's called the Chazen. But you have to know that the University of Wisconsin, it used to be called Elvehjem, E-L-V-E-H—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, I remember that. Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —J-E-M.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  He was a former governor.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Governor, who during his tenure the museum got funding from the state to open. So they went to the heirs of the Elvehjem family and said, "Look, this is what we're going to do or we would like to do with your permission." It's going to be called the Chazen Museum—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  "If you approve."

LESLIE GARFIELD:  "If you approve. But the Elvehjem building will be part of, you know, the Chazen Museum."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's tactful.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And they're very good friends, and they've given a major collection of art to the museum.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And you know, they've underwritten all kinds of things. And they're—I was going to say, I don't know how they got re-involved. They were not involved at the beginning when we were.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Somebody else got them interested.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What is their focus in collecting, or was?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I think still buying American contemporary art.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And a lot of glass.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  But all medium?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  They especially have a great interest in art.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oils and glass.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Glass. Glass sculptures and have a wonderful collection of that in New York.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were asked to join the board and you did?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Of all the boards I'm involved in, its decisions about art have already been made pretty much by Russell and, in terms of prints, the print curator.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, Drew Stevens.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Drew Stevens. It's not that we go out and look at things and, "What do you think of it?" "It's more, what would you call it, Jo?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  A typical trustee, fiduciary role?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The requirement is minimal. I mean, it has been.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I don't mean necessarily donating, although that's part of it. I mean overseeing and—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And supporting them in any way you can.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, we've been very—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I arranged a trip from MoMA one three-day weekend to go out to Madison. Of course, we stopped in Milwaukee—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  See some Frank Lloyd Wright stuff and—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —private collections.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  How often do they have board meetings?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Three times a year? Or is it twice a year?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Twice. Well, this year it's going to be three because you're going to that panel. But they have a meeting in the fall and they have a meeting in the spring.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  In the spring.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And we always go. I think maybe we've missed one, we were overseas somewhere. And I'm not on the board, but I'm unofficial, ex-officio [laughs], I don't know what you call it. I'm always at the meetings. And I don't get to vote, but I get to be fly on the wall and hear everything.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Nice.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And we're very fond of them as people.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We see them often, you know.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And I like all the—there's something about them.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah. So you're on this important committee at Boston and the board of Chazen.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And also on the committee—you are on the Collections Committee at the Museum of Modern Art.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, not the—I'm on the Print Acquisitions Committee.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, print—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm. [affirmative]. You also have funded an acquisitions fund, right? The Johanna and Leslie Garfield Fund for Print Purchases? Or is that in the past?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That's at Wisconsin?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Let's see—no.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I read something about that at MoMA.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No. At Wisconsin we gave them the print room now.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Print collection. It's not just one room.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  In the new Chazen, it's called the Leslie and Johanna, you know, Print Room, or something. And at Madison, because of being on the Print Committee—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean at MoMA?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At MoMA. Money accumulates at MoMA, and sometimes they just buy something with, you know, some of the—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean money accumulates from your annual dues?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. And Linda Janovic and I, when Riva was retiring, did a five-year drive, an endowment fund drive for the print department. And we actually collected at that time, like, just over $2 million. And now when you sit on the print acquisitions committee—which I have been on for 26 or so years—you see the endowment, the funds where the money is coming to purchase, how much money we can spend at that meeting. And there are some big trustees on that committee.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Influential trustees. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  People like Agnes Gund.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, not only Aggie Gund, but one of the Rockefeller wives is on it and—oh, you know, Kravis' wife, what's her name?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Marie-Josée.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, Marie-Josée, who's the president of the board.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Kravis.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Kravis sits on that committee. And you know, again, I'm sure it's like Boston in the sense that they put trustees on, you know, for, let's say, a three—and then they're on other committees. I mean, certainly someone like Kravis, you're talking about a billionaire there.

So at the Museum of Modern Art, we're also on the Contemporary Arts Council, which does give money, with our dues, to support exhibitions, for example. Or the Drawing Committee may put in a request to buy a certain drawing or group of drawings. Or the Print Committee might put in a PS-1. So that's what that group does.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, and also one of our main ways we got really more deeply into prints was through the Museum of Modern Art Print Associates Group.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Right, mm-hmm [affirmative].

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Which we joined way, way back.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Is that when you could rent prints? Is that what you're talking about?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  It was after. The renting was before.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Richard was part of that, Richard Brown Baker.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Okay, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, that's where we met him, in that group.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, but I meant—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I'm sorry, go on.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Richard wrote in his journals about borrowing prints.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, borrowing prints before then.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, yes, yes. Have there been any curators at any of these institutions or others that have been particularly influential to you in your collecting?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, yes. Steven—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, Steven. I thought we were—sorry—focusing on MoMA.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, any, any.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, in any? Steven Koppel.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Certainly with Richard Hamilton, there's no question about it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  What about—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And where is he, what institution is he—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He's at the British Museum. He's a scholar.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, he's a wonderful guy.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And when Anthony Griffiths retired about a year ago, Steven probably could have, had he wanted, as chief curator, done it, been appointed.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What was Anthony Griffins' [ph]—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Anthony Griffiths.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Griffiths.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He was the chief curator at the British Museum for a number of years.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Of prints.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Of prints. Chief curator of the print department.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  G-R-I-F-F-I-T-H-S. [. . . ]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So Steven deliberately didn't want it, because he felt it had become or was going to become much more of going after funds than doing research and writing monologues. And the interesting thing is that about seven or eight years ago, Steven met a critic for a newspaper, I think a movie critic. He was just in the museum looking and asked Steven a question, and Steven told him. They would meet from time to time. Steven would go around to—he was invited up to the apartment to see what prints he had. The guy had a very good eye.

And he died about four years ago and, because of Steven, left his entire print collection to the British Museum. And that show traveled, I think, to five other cities. And Steven sent us copies. It got rave reviews.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  What's the name of the collector?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I can't think—well, we can find that out for you.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Sure, sure.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then, you know, this all started when I said Steven doesn't want to, you know, go after money. About two years ago, some man came in. Steven had known of his father, and he was a wealthy many who had died, and the man basically said, "I would like to do something for the British Museum in honor of my father." And basically, they started talking about what might be an appropriate gift. And Steven came up with the Picasso folio. What's it called, with a hundred-some-odd prints? Let me think. Oh, God, this is terrible.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] That's okay. We can fill it in later.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And they discussed it and the guy—you know, he and Steven were in touch, and the day came where, through Marlborough-Gerson, Tara Reddy [ph] and some other person had alerted this wealthy British son to the printer of that catalogue where he had—since he died, it had just been in the family unopened. The whole folio, 106 prints.

So Steven and this guy—the guy chartered a plane or had his own—they flew over to Paris, went to the apartment, spent about four hours just going one by one. And it was a done deal. I think the figure was maybe a million-and-a-half pounds. But now the British Museum is one of very few European museums to have this folio, which was in perfect—it's like it was never opened since the guy did it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Wasn't it called the Vollard Suite?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  The Vollard Suite. Thank you, thank you.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, Vollard Suite.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  That's exactly it.

And so Steven did a catalogue. And there's now a group called the Vollard Society that gives the equivalent of £5,000 a year to buy new prints. And of course, what I was able to do, without any bragging, is—you know, I think I mentioned that I was on the McCrindle Foundation. Joe McCrindle was a good friend. And he left our orchestra a lot of money, and museums from all over the country. There were 2,000 works of art there.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Where?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  In Joe McCrindle's apartment, that had not been given away. He's a major benefactor to the National Gallery and the Getty and this, this, this.

So we had a meeting of, you know, deciding where funds were going to. And I asked for $100,000 to buy—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  This is the foundation board you're talking about.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  This is the foundation board. Steven had put on an American print show about five years ago.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  It was also very well-received.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  But it ended at Andy Warhol.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Pittsburgh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. In other words, 1960s.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, I'm sorry.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And these were all prints.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  The show, his show wasn't the 1960s.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  These are all prints from the beginning of the American print cycle, that Steven had acquired for the British. In other words, they were all owned by the British Museum.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I'm sorry, I'm not following the connection with the McCrindle Foundation.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  What I'm bringing in is that I was able to get, against most people on the board's decision—to get $100,000 gift to give to the British Museum to buy American prints from Andy Warhol up to the present, because in 1916 is going to be a continuation of this earlier print show that ended with Warhol.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You mean in 2016?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  2016 at the British Museum.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, I see. Now, what is the purpose of the McCrindle Foundation? Is it to buy art, to encourage looking at American art abroad?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, American art has nothing to do with it. It's, you know, 17th-century Dutch and 18th-century German, everything in the past. So the first person on the board—we're sitting around this table—says to me, "Leslie, Joe is not interested in American prints and certainly not modern ones. Why would we want to do it?" I said, "I'm telling you now that"— although we had given, I think, the equivalent of £300,000 to do a catalogue on an Italian 17th-century Carracci, C-A-R-R-A-C-C—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Annibale Carracci?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Whatever.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And I said, "Joe McCrindle's name will be better known in all of Britain for giving them funds to buy these contemporary prints, than who is ever going to know, aside from the British Museum for doing the catalogue, that, you know, 'Oh, Joe McCrindle did this catalogue?' It's like night and day."

So there are six of us, and so four sort of said they weren't in favor, and this other friend sort of put his hand up to me. So I got them the grant, and Steven was so excited by it. And I went around with him at the last Print Fair, we spent two days.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  In the Park Avenue Armory?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At the Park Avenue Armory from 12:00 to 6:00, and the next morning. It was just great walking around with him. But he was really looking not only at the show, but on potential—again, it's his eye. It's not what someone is telling him. It doesn't matter the name of the artist. And he acquired all kinds of wonderful things.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So it sounds like he has an independent spirit—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, he does.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  —that you admire and learn from.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Tremendously. And he's the guy who introduced us to the Richard Hamilton Ulysses series, which was done, I think, over a 13-year period. And you know, I'll never forget that day. I think I told you, you know, Steven was in the middle, and I was on the other side of him, and Jo was on the other, you know, hearing and just going Katrin [ph] to Katrin [ph], wall to wall. And, you know, by the third print he was showing us, Jo and I looked at each other and, like—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —we knew we were both thinking the same thing.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  You were mentioning the McCrindle Foundation. Do you have any other philanthropic affiliations that may or may not relate to your collection?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No. Jo, I don't have any—Jo?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  What?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm sorry.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I thought maybe—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I don't have any other philanthropic interests—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —you'd like something to snack on. What?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —besides the McCrindle Foundation? There's nothing else I'm involved with that gives money away.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  In terms of art?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah, we're talking about art.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Or that's a board or any other—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, I've been chairman of the New York Youth Symphony.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And we were just honored on the stage at Carnegie Hall a month ago.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, mm-hmm [affirmative].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  New York Youth Symphony, what brought you to that involvement?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Her mother was the founder.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  The founder, one of the three founders, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  One of the three founders. When we got married in 1960, it was—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  —just beginning.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Just beginning. And Jo's mother said, you know, she would like us to join the board.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, no, first she invited us up to hear them, because I was thinking, "Oh, kids 12 to 22, you know, it's going to be a little hard to hear."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Listen to. [Laughs.]

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But they were really good, so we joined the board. Leslie became president of the board and now he's chairman of the board.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's a big responsibility.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Raised a lot of money.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Mm-hmm [affirmative].

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And the interesting thing the way things tie in: We were at a benefit for Poets & Writers about eight, nine years ago. And we would go every year to this benefit. And a woman by the name of Mary Sharp Cronson—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yes, I know her.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Her brother was Peter Sharp. They owned a lot of real estate, including the Carlyle Hotel. And every year she would—the second-floor dining room was given basically to Poets & Writers, with all expenses paid.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  The second-floor dining room where?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  At the Carlyle Hotel. And Jo and I—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I'm a writer, that's how I got involved with Poets & Writers as well.

Right. So we're at the benefit that night, and I'm at one round table here and Jo was at another round table somewhere else. And the person on my left didn't show up. The woman on my right knew the man on her right, and so they spent the whole evening talking to each other. There was no one here. So occasionally I would shout across the table to so-and-so. You know, what are you going to shout, I mean, it was ridiculous.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So I drank a lot of Scotch that night. And I don't even think dessert had come and I just decided I've had it. So I walk—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  But, wait a minute, meanwhile—yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Let me tell it.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Okay, go ahead.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So I walk over to the table where JoJo is sitting and I said, "I want to just tell you I'm leaving, I'm having a terrible time, this woman's not talking to me." And she said, "Before you leave I want to introduce you to the man whom I've been sitting next to. And for the first half hour, we had nothing to say to each other."

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  I didn't say that to him them.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  But then I brought up music and this man's ear just—and they had a great conversation. And, "Leslie, this is Joe McCrindle." So we invited Joe to the next concert. And he came. Was he wheeled into the first one, or no?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  No, I think he was still walking.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He could still walk, and he came, and we were invited to his house for dinner occasionally. I said, "Would you like to join the board, after the concert?" He said "Yes, I would."

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] Quick action.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So Joe McCrindle is now a board member. I mean, at that date. And when Joe got ill, he was a major, major collector. From the time he—I think he bought his first book when he was 10 or something. His mother remarried a French count and moved to France and basically left Joe McCrindle, her son, with his grandmother who lived in a house on 5th Avenue here, that still stands. It's the building just south of the 79th Street corner. And between that building owned by a Russian group and the French consulate is another 25-foot wide, nondescript building.

Well, by background: Joe, when he lived there with his grandmother, in the telephone book it was listed, like, there were 10 servants. So this is the life that Joe grew up in.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  The telephone book?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. Apparently in those days, by telephone directories you could tell how many servants lived in the house. Don't ask me how.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Really?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  But they can tell you. And this one was the—you know, at any rate—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Maybe they had different phone numbers. [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  So Joe became very interested in art and passed the bar, never practiced law, had an apartment. He would go with whomever on a yacht every summer to—France would be the first stop, wherever they stopped, because his mother and stepfather lived there. And then the yacht would go, like, from there to whatever the resort is on the Atlantic Coast. Is it Biarritz, or is that on the—at any rate, the yacht—and they would be met by a chauffeur who would drive whoever was, I guess, the grandmother accompanying Joe from place to place. And that's how—so Joe—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's how he started collecting or becoming interested in art?

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yes.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He became interested in art probably. And he inherited lots and lots of money.    

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And collected lots of art.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And collected lots of art.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Did he leave it to a particular museum?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, that's the fascinating thing.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Well, some of it.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  A major—the National Gallery in Washington. His name is, like, right downstairs as one of the—the Morgan Library is very active with. Not the Met.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So he gave some things to those institutions.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  He gave a number of things while he was still alive to these institutions. The Getty, I mean—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  It sounds like he had a great collection.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Huge, huge, I mean, oils we're talking.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And Princeton, didn't he?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And Princeton and—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  He went to Princeton, didn't he?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  No, Joe went to Harvard and then to Yale Law School. One second. Yeah, Harvard first. And his grandmother didn't treat him very well, because the story that goes is that—oh, no, it was his mother who, when he said he wanted to go to law school after Harvard, she said, "You'll never get in, don't bother." I mean, this is—so he had not a very nice, familial relationship.

When he died, there were four major benefactors out of one part of the estate, which totaled, oh, that particular part was, let's say, about $6 million. And then four institutions, I think, maybe Manhattan School of Music, the New York Youth Symphony. Two were—what were the other two here? Not Harlem something or other? Two other arts organizations here. And we all got the equivalent of about a million-five. This all comes from Jo meeting Joe.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then so after Joe McCrindle died, there were about 2,000 drawings and prints in the equivalent of two maid's rooms, ceilings coming—you know, they had never been painted. This was at 91 Central Park West in a 14th floor, nine-room apartment facing the park. And each institution—there was a list of about 30 of them initially—got a copy of these 2,000-some-odd works. And they had about two months to make appointments with the man who was the president, John Rowe, of the foundation.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  John Rowe?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  John Rowe, R-O-W-E. And they could come in and look at what interested them, because on a certain date, like two to three months later, the group—and it turned out to maybe be 20 institutions—arrived at 10:00 in the morning. There was a silver pot with numbers inside and each one of the people around this long table in the dining room took, and whoever had number one was seated here, whoever pulled numbed two was here, and it went totally around.

Then they started with number one. I mean, there was so much to go through. You can—let's say the first couple of rounds were just two. And so this person chose and was marked down, this one, and it reached a point where someone was asking, "Don't you know that, you know, they all knew each other, that such-and-such museum had already chosen it?" And it went around like this, and then it was increased to three for each.

And then, you know, it kept increasing, because this was all going to be done in one day. I remember I was told that at the—when the Morgan Library had chosen seven particular things, that's all they want. In other words, they got—and of course, they had alternate, you know, in case someone had chosen ahead of them. But after they had what they wanted, that was fine, I think whether they stayed around or not, but they weren't bidding anymore.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Excuse me? Why don't you give me that envelope and I can finish that. I'll be listening here.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Alright.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Leslie's been crazy to get me these Christmas gifts for the building ready. And we're leaving early Friday to go to the country and I don't know—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  We are.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oops, hold on. Yes. So this round table continued the Morgan—  

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Until, you know, there may have been some Tchelitchevs [ph]. There were things left. And basically, you know, John said, you know, "Is there anyone here who"—I think a number of things went down to the New Orleans Museum of Art. And that was the end. And whatever was leftover may have gone to some secondary auction or whatever, and that was the end of it. This guy was an absolute philanthropist. I mean, he gave millions of dollars. And one museum got, I think, five Sargent watercolors.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  I wanted to ask you to talk about what you're collecting now, what you're looking at. And in addition, not only what you're looking at to collect, but what you're looking at just to enjoy.

In some ways, your collection is rather complete. But I think you're still finding things that you love and want to acquire.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah, I would say, as far as Les especially is concerned, it's never really complete because there's always something of interest coming up usually in one of the fields we're interested in, but sometimes another section of prints—you know, a new artist will come to our attention.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Uh-huh. [affirmative]. So, like, Howard Hodgkin is the most—is that the most recent, new—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  No. Well, there are some other people who are less well-known, other English artists, like Patrick Caulfield. I mean, he's pretty well-known.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Oh, uh-huh [affirmative]. And I know I saw the David Hockney.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Same generation.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah. We even have some Damien Hirsts.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Really? What Damien Hirsts?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Well, we've also—over the years, I've met Charles Booth-Clibborn, a British print publisher for Paragon Press. And he has put out different folios, often of artists I don't know, that they're just so well done or executed that you just buy the folio.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Are those mainly lithographs or—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Etchings.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Etchings.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Who's the one who did the kind of ax thing that we had, that Jed also has in his front hall? Jed is our son. I'm trying to think of these people that—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  So you were talking about—

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Paragon Press.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  —and other artists.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And other artists that we have certainly bought the portfolios of because I admire the work. But I have not gone and pursued buying individual prints. In other words, the folios are an object of beauty in themselves. And among them, as Jo mentioned, I think I have several Hume portfolios.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Gary Hume?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Gary Hume, Peter Doig. We've got some wonderful images of a 60-year-old British printer that I had never heard of, and I can't recall her name. But if I took out the folio, not even knowing the name and just saying, "Do you like this?" and "I'll tell you why I like it"—I think the only newish artist, and it's an artist whose work I had seen and heard his name, was Paolozzi.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Eduardo Paolozzi.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yeah. And about three years ago I saw an image and I liked it. And I bought it. About a year later or two years later, it was a print catalogue, but there was a collage in there by this artist—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Paolozzi.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  —that I really liked. And I called up the person at the auction gallery to talk about it. And he said, you know, "It's wonderful, Leslie, it doesn't belong in that print catalogue, it should have been in a drawing catalogue." And I just went ahead and bought it. And I don't think it's hanging yet, but—

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Ketai, did you ever buy any of his?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I have no Ketai.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  We have Peter Blake, he's a new interest.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, Peter Blake we've been buying. That's true.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  That got started by Mary Ryan really. And what about that other fellow who—you know, you bought his folio and you gave one to Clare, I think?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Oh, Tilson.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  I'm trying to think of his first name. About five or six years ago, I got pictures of a folio. I think his name is Joe, J-O-E, Tilson.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  That's right.

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And it was in a—I don't know, they were just wonderful. Che Guevara and this and that one. I think it was maybe called the Alphabet Series because it was an edition of 26. And it came in a wooden box, and I bought it. I hadn't seen all of the images in it. I didn't pay much money for it, and I bought it, and it came, and I remember Heather and I started looking at it because it had just come that day. And I liked each one better than the other one.

And a couple of weeks later, our daughter, Clare, came into town. And that still hadn't been put away and it was on the table. I think I may have even said, "Leave it out because Clare is coming." And I started showing it. I went through the whole. And I said, "Do you like it?" And she said, "Yes, I do." And I said to her, "Clare, the next time it comes up at auction, that set is for you."

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  And her husband.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And her husband. And literally about three, four months ago, it came up at some auction and I bought it. And I called her and told her, and I gave it to her.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Had the price gone up or down?

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Yes, it had gone up.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.]

LESLIE GARFIELD:  You know, it's always this thing that you're ahead of other people in what you're buying. I mean, now you see the name Tilson and it's not that prices have gone—but they were at a low-ish level, and I liked them. So what? You know, you buy what you like, and that's your life.

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  Right.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  And then, of course, the idea is to have other people see it, or give it to a museum. You know, the problem with giving things to museums, it's going to be shown that one time and then it's going in storage. Now, one time is fine if you have 10 Picassos that they don't own. But to give a museum or any group 6,000 prints is—you're making a big mistake. You're better off—and of course, it can't be done at one time—but over a period of time of selling them, putting them into some kind of art fund, and then doing something for art institutions all over, or certain institutions. But doing it in what I would consider an intelligent way where the incremental advances can be used to buy, you know, whether you're restricted to prints from 1941 on, or whatever.

You might initially invade the capital once, but that's the end of it. And, you know, let the institution buy what they want, but then that's it. It's a way of sort of continuing our life in death, that we are the people who did this, that, and the other thing, if society even still exists years from now. Who knows?

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  [Laughs.] Oh, that sounds like a wonderful plan. Yeah.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Thank you. [Laughs.]

JUDITH OLCH RICHARDS:  And thank you very much for the interview.

LESLIE GARFIELD:  Thank you for—

JOHANNA GARFIELD:  Oh, thank you.

[END OF TRACK garfie12_2of2_sd_track02.]

[END OF INTERVIEW.]