Art Acquisition Quotes

Art dealing is when you're doing it as a business.

My wife was the first art collector in the family, and I didn't become interested until around 1973. The first important artwork we bought was a Van Gogh drawing of two peasant houses in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

I hate when dealers talk to me. I love dealers - they're some of our favorite people in the art world. But I hate if they do a sales pitch on me. I can't stand it.

The first piece I ever collected was a Roy Lichtenstein: a sculpture called 'Surrealist Head II'. There was a waiting list. I remember Steve Martin wanted one, and I wanted one. I got the 'Surrealist Head', and I was thrilled.

Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.

The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material.

In the art world, Monet means money.

The art world is a jungle echoing to the calls of vicious jealousies and ruthless combat between dealers and collectors; but I have been walking in the jungles of business all my life, and fighting tooth and nail for pictures comes as a form of relaxation to me.

There are at least 50 cities in the world that would have liked to obtain the Getty Collection.

I'm still around artists. I don't have anymore wall space. And I don't have the money to collect anymore, the prices are outrageous.

When you're buying paintings, it feels grown up.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I started collecting in the late 1990s. My first purchase was from an auction, a scroll by Dong Qichang, from the early 16th century, the late Ming Dynasty.

Only when you are moved by a painting should you buy it. Being moved is what collecting is all about.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

I came to Paris with four écus in my pocket, and I’d have fought with anybody who told me I was in no condition to buy the Louvre.

If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I'd go for the Pollock every time.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

It was easier to sell a painting that was not for sale.

I'd mortgage any house for art.

At one point Trudeau mentioned to me that the National Gallery wanted to buy a masterpiece by the great Italian painter Lotto, and it needed a million dollars from the Treasury Board. "Is that Lotto-Quebec or Lotto-Canada?" I joked, but I got the message, and the National Gallery got the painting.

Art, like real estate, is half science, half gut. We go to a lot of art fairs. We have two full-time art experts who help me make all the decisions about how to build the corporate and personal collection and what we put in our developments. We don't let interior designers pick art for us.

I think the collectors have made an enormous contribution, not only to the market but to painters themselves... These people that buy, that set standards, make everyone else itch to emulate.

I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

I've been collecting photos for a long time, I mean since I started making money. But what you have had to go through to find a good photo is like a needle in the haystack sometimes. You'll drive from one gallery to the next gallery to the next gallery. It's not an easy process. It's a very ancient model that just hasn't caught up with the times.