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.

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

I had completely forgotten about the painting,

After this series, he really stopped painting.

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.

[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 big gifts into our collection.