Daniel Edelman: On Living With Modern Art

What I do remember. My father, who worked with Henry—they had a business together. When we had school holidays, sometimes we would accompany my father to work, and if he had an appointment with Henry in the city we would go together and have lunch with him. And I distinctly remember one of the offices of Eastern Cold Storage—I don’t know which one it was—that Henry’s office was a very dark paneled room. It had windows, but it did not feel as if any light came in the windows—and all of the Cézanne watercolors were on those walls of his own room. As a lot of things with Henry, I don’t know whether he knew enough to put them in a dark room to protect them or whether those were the things he wanted around him. He probably spent more time in that office than anywhere else in his life. Those may have been his favorite works, or he may have actually known that that would protect them from damage from light, because to this day they are some of the most bright and brilliant of the watercolors in existence. They were kept in almost museum standards, whether he knew or not that that was what he was doing.