John Elderfield
John Elderfield
John Elderfield was Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 2003 to 2008. He is currently the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator at the Princeton University Art Museum and Lecturer in the Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology...
australia call japan mexico soviet traveled union
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 it be?
collection early van wish
The van Rysselberghe is very good, but that early part of our collection we don't wish to develop,
acquiring finding great hang monuments thrills
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.
hotel moved work
Ed moved into the hotel so he could work with us,
doubles pictures three
We had three pictures by Brice; now we have six. So this doubles our holdings.
add buying great monuments whenever
We have been buying a lot of contemporary art, but we add great monuments like this whenever we can.
context couple great images owned took
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.
both nobody notion older painting reached recognized truly
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 else shared.