…Kooning. The treasure of the collection, unquestionably is “Lucifer,” by many people’s lights the outstanding drip painting still in private hands, an absolutely beautiful painting, which would make any museum’s collection sing.” Hunk says, “We think the collection deserves dedicated space and they have provided us not just with a gallery but with a dedicated building. It’s great.” An additional mo…

…gallery in San Francisco. With 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 onl…

…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…

…over her bed. The Andersons felt that art was meant to be shared. At first they opened their home to art tours, then they started to loan art works most notably to the San Francisco Museum of Art and eventually they established the Anderson Collection at Stanford where admission is free (in the short film one can watch the artworks leaving their home). The Ground floor features a space for temporary exhibitions. When I visited there was an exhib…

…eir acquisitions. Four years later, the walls of their 1905 Craftsman are decorated with contemporary works from the likes of John Chiara, Gabriel Orozco, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra and Hiroshi Sugimoto. “We started buying a few pieces, learning a little bit more and discovering some more artists,” Allison Rose says. “It just kind of snowballed into this love of learning more about art, and it’s totally addictive.” The Roses are just the sort of S…