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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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startled. “yes, I think we do,” he said.

He went to Paul Rosenberg himself where he had seen that Renoir, the “Girl in the Boat,” and all by himself the bought for $105,000 that picture and the Renoir pussy cats with the geranius. This was about 1944.

Now, I must say the price seemed fairly high at the time, but in light of present prices it was one of the great bargains of the world.

He bought a few other pictures then, not a great many, and he liked Matisse because Matisse is very colorful, so we bought a few by him in the early '40s. But it was in 1949 that he really got very lively and interested and bought quite a number of pictures.

I wanted him to have the pleasure of making a collection himself and not to be influenced just by what I wanted--I could have gone out and bought a lot of pictures very fast because I knew the market and knew what I felt was good and what I liked. I liked very colorful and well-composed pictures of the French Impressionists of the 19th Century and the first-half of the 20th Century, and I found that the Americans on the whole were imitators of them. Albert got to be an enormous devotee. He had marvelous visual memory, a great sense of composition, as he had known a great deal about advertising copy layout and looked at layouts and composition all his life, and he became without any formal background a very good judge of good pictures. He knew a good picture intuitively, just as he could have told





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