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anything anyone had ever seen or thought of before. This interested me. I thought in the late '50s that after all they were doing these things now and probably the prices would remain fairly low for a long time and I didn't do much about it because the pictures were very large and impossible to hang in this house. Finally I realized that the prices were rising, that the world was prosperous, that they were even being purchased by some far-seeing Italians and English people and that it was the first time that a contemporary American had any interest or any market in another country. This was a warning signal to me.

By the time I got around to buying things, the prices were already quite high for most of them. However, about 1961 I went with Bernard Rice, who was a friend of , Stein and Gottlieb and many other contemporary American painters--he is treasurer of our foundation and my accountant and adviser for a long time. He's been a collector for a long time. He conceived the idea that most painters didn't know what to do with their money and that he would try to show the painters how to keep some of their money and not be so profligate with their funds. He gave them the idea that they should let people pay over a term of years so that they wouldn't have to pay