For our 1992 retrospective of Matisse, I'd traveled from Japan to Australia to Mexico to the Soviet Union and could not find this painting. So this summer, when the call came, I said, 'How could it be?

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I had completely forgotten about the painting.

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We have been buying a lot of contemporary art, but we add great monuments like this whenever we can.

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It's great. For a curator, the two great thrills are, first, finding and acquiring real monuments of art. The other part is being able to hang them.

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When they were both older artists, they had reached a kind of eminence and recognized that they were truly pre-eminent in their generations, and they had experiences, they had a notion of painting which nobody else shared.

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We also took images of what we already owned so he could see them in context with his collection, ... It was a great couple of days. He had really thought about things.

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[Meanwhile, the Modern is planning to mount an exhibition of the gift in the summer of 2006.] We wanted to do it A.S.A.P., ... but it takes time to unload the boat and to absorb big gifts into our collection.

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After this series, he really stopped painting.

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Ed moved into the hotel so he could work with us.

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