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anything by her until about five years ago, and I bought three painters--one a tiny flower, a morning glory, and one of a large autumn leaf and one a cottonwood landscape. The latter I've loaned to Mr. David Bell, the head of AID in Washington, as he particularly likes the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and I had no place to hang them.

About five years ago I decided to take some action about the contemporary American by collecting contemporary American painters.

Did you hope that this would stimulate interest in them by adding to your own personal collection?

Well, no, I didn't think especially that. I had been very successful in buying the outstanding and recognizing the outstanding French painters in the first half of the 20th century, and as I came to look around in the late '50s, I noticed that there were very few new painters in France and that there were a great many new abstract-expressionist painters or seemed to be in the United States. A man called Jackson Pollock had broken away completely from all formal conceptions of painting, and others--like de Koonig, Franz Klein and Gottlieb--were making paintings that were quite fresh and different from