Daniel Edelman: On collecting

Not a lot of us know very much about his life as a collector. I think he kept that to himself. [Even] Rose did a fair amount of traveling with Henry at times in their life, but he also did a lot on his own. His relationships with dealers, with friends of artists, were private, in a way. I could never find anybody who went to an auction with him. I think my father may have once been dragged along to an auction but doesn’t have a great memory of it. The auction environment was not what interested Henry. I don’t think he wanted to be in the room with the people competing for art. Rose has said that the harder something was to get, the more he valued it. She was talking about her, but I think that applied to art. I think if something, a piece, was unavailable, he wanted it that much more. And I don’t think he was guided by commercial value. I don’t think he was guided by other people’s opinions. He had advisors around him. He worked with some experts. He had friends with the American Archives who gave him advice. But I think he went after the things that were hard to get and that other people did not necessarily want. When you look at some of the works . . His most exciting purchase was the Van Gogh by far. I am not sure that means that it was his favorite image in the collection, but the fact that it was a rediscovered Van Gogh and that he got in there because of connections he had before anybody else did, and he was able to buy it before the other Van Gogh collectors even knew about it—that was his pride. It was the hunt and the purchase and the process as much as what he ended up buying.