Great Collectors: The (Art) World According to Hubert Neumann

How many collectors talk the way I talk? I'm not what some of these other people are. And I don't know about great collector. Let the world decide that after I'm dead. My name is Hubert Newman. I was born in 1931. I would say that early on I came aware of the fact that I really loved to collect stuff. So I collected baseball cards, matchbooks, stamps. Actually, I still have those collections in some closet here. My father started off loving art that he couldn't afford. So he loved Van Gogh, and he loved Gauguin. My father was a wonderful, intuitive human being I loved dearly. And we would sit around in this apartment of his and argue about art. And that began in conjunction with my schooling to be the beginnings of my father taking over our serious collecting of the art. Basically, the reason we pick a work of art is that we don't understand it. And if I don't understand it, that's magic. I really am most interested in the pieces in this collection that people really dislike intensely. When I get a young group here of graduate students, I always ask them that question. What do they like and what do they really dislike? I get a picture of where their head's at. I think one of the most important dimensions to what we're talking about is how do you go about choosing a work of art? When you're confronted with a new work, you make a choice. How is this going to stand up with what I live with on a daily basis? We have hundreds of works on paper of Picasso. My father and I came to the conclusion that at that point in time, he was the Mozart of the art world. And we felt that the works on paper, and particularly the prints, nobody on earth had made anything like that. It's an exciting thing to be involved with that in your lifetime, while you're alive. It's like when you commit to love something, you have that love for the rest of your life. Whatever it is, whether it's another human being, whether it's a work of art, or a work of music. Why do you like it? They can't say. It's part of their essence. It's something that you can't teach people. They either have it or they don't have it.