At first I couldn’t figure out which Matisse he was talking about.

We also took images of what we already owned so he could see them in context with his collection, … It was a great couple of days. He had really thought about things.

The motivation for this [exhibit] was that Picasso once said that he, Picasso, had looked at Matisse’s work more carefully than anyone else, and he had a sense that Matisse had looked at his work...

It’s great. For a curator, the two great thrills are, first, finding and acquiring real monuments of art. The other part is being able to hang them.

For our 1992 retrospective of Matisse, I’d traveled from Japan to Australia to Mexico to the Soviet Union and could not find this painting. So this summer, when the call came, I said, ‘How could...

I had completely forgotten about the painting,

Ed moved into the hotel so he could work with us,

The van Rysselberghe is very good, but that early part of our collection we don’t wish to develop,

We had three pictures by Brice; now we have six. So this doubles our holdings.

[Matisse’s aim in leaving the face blank was] to encourage you to look all over the surface of the painting, … He realized we are biologically constructed to focus on faces more than anything. So...

[Meanwhile, the Modern is planning to mount an exhibition of the gift in the summer of 2006.] We wanted to do it A.S.A.P., … but it takes time to unload the boat and to absorb...

When they were both older artists, they had reached a kind of eminence and recognized that they were truly pre-eminent in their generations, and they had experiences, they had a notion of painting which nobody...

We have been buying a lot of contemporary art, but we add great monuments like this whenever we can.

After this series, he really stopped painting.