…0;We paid a record price for it at the time,” Hunk said, characteristically declining to talk figures, but they never regretted the extravagance. Hunk and Moo’s only child, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, 54, who goes by the nickname “Putter,” has become her parents’ most important collaborator in collecting. She grew up with “Lucifer” hanging over her bed. “One of the great things that’s happen…

…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 experience of great art but novices in connoisseurship, he added, “We had to go from minus 10 to plus 100.” Nai…

…school: abstract expressionists here, minimalists there, and so on. Moving from gallery to gallery, you can feel the Andersons developing their eyes as collectors: the abstract-expressionist work is spectacular—I was particularly taken with an Adolph Gottlieb, two Motherwells, and, happily, the red-orange Rothko I remembered from college—but there is also a sense of checking off names on a must-have list. The choices from there become a bit less…

…n Silicon Valley. Then you come to the driveway of a ranch house that stands pretty much as it was when built in the 1960s by Harry and Mary Margaret Anderson. From the unpretentious exterior, few would guess that inside the house a single painting in their collection is worth as much as one or even two of those neighboring estates. This is the home of people who not only live with art, they live for it, searching for “the best of the best,…