…g” “Lucifer” (1947), a capstone of the Anderson Collection and the last great work of its kind in private hands, might fetch more than $100 million were it to go on the block in today’s overheated auction market. Opening up their home Over the years, Hunk and Moo have welcomed countless visitors into their unpretentious home, built in the late 1960s, to view and study their art. By all accounts, the visitors were uniformly…

…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 course of its three days, the event has drawn more than 10,000 visitors. Spencer Finch’s light sculpture Betelgeus…

…a “gift for the generations” and also noted with great pride that the Anderson would play a key role in the remarkable and ongoing “Stanford Arts Initiative.” If you think Stanford is just a tech-incubator with a football stadium, think again: the opening of the Anderson makes the Stanford campus a genuine arts destination. “Overnight,” says Christopher Knight of the LA Times, “the Anderson Collection cat…

…supplied many colleges (including Stanford) and for which they moved from the East Coast to the West. However, in the early 1960s, before their daughter was born, the Andersons traveled to Paris and had a life-changing visit to the Louvre. ‘Something came over us,’ Hunk later recalled. ‘We felt, for the first time, the beauty and excitement of the world of art; and had to be a part of it.’ Moo enrolled in Stanford to study art history under Alb…

…p with Bill through Al Elsen. They were classmates together at Columbia.” He adds, “Bill [Rubin] was interested in selling off his collection. There was a question of ethics here, in selling works that could have gone to the museum, but he always said that he had offered them to the museum first.” Anderson gestures toward the splashy black and white “Figure 8,” 1952, by Franz Kline and “Pink and White Over Red,…

…ection overall: It is a visceral, aesthetic experience, which sweeps you off your feet no matter your background in art or art history. None of this is academic. But the Anderson Collection feels inexhaustible. Every room is a new theme, including California Light and Space, Funk, Hard-Edge Painting and Post-Minimalism. You pity the tourists, who come with cameras and visit only once. They are overwhelmed (delightfully so), scrambling to decode e…

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

…criticize such artworks a lot, not understanding the value placed on artists like Rothko. But seeing such pieces in a museum in front of you feels very different than looking at images online after Googling the artist. These large canvases and colors, though they are just large patterns, weigh on you, and that weight was calming. It almost had an aura that transcended my mind from my real life, making me not ponder about the events of my daily li…