…ite over Red.” When you find yourself looking to make out shapes or signs, stop: Accept the emptiness, listen to the silence. This is a painting free of representation. There is only color, humming above the canvas. But perhaps there is someone else who catches your eye, a stranger that other folks seem to overlook (and you can’t imagine why). What about Vija Celmins’s “Barrier,” for instance? Or “Theophrastus’ Garden” by Terry Winters? If you fi…

…ith the encouragement of Albert Elsen, a Stanford faculty member and a specialist on the sculptor Auguste Rodin, the Andersons began to study and collect in depth. The pattern gained momentum as they developed friendships with artists whose work they admired, among them Diebenkorn, Kelly, Guston, Frank Stella, Vija Celmins and Terry Winters. Over the next two decades, the affluence of the Andersons was enhanced not only by the sale of Saga to the…

…ilding, designed by Richard Olcott, contains works by 86 artists, the fruit of nearly 50 years of collecting and the product of self-education on the part of Harry and Mary Anderson. A 1964 visit to Paris’s museums inspired the couple to begin collecting. “We started off very naively,” 92-year-old Harry Anderson told A.i.A., “thinking that art was somebody we would play golf with.” Bowled over by the aesthetic experi…

…ins. “When an amazing thing comes on the market, (art collectors in the area) can’t always get on a plane and go to New York to see them. So now that really amazing thing will come to them.” And there is certainly evidence of an increasing appetite for contemporary and modern art in the suburbs. Art Silicon Valley/San Francisco, which highlights postwar and modern works, is returning to San Mateo in October for its fifth annual edition; over the…