Peter Brant & Tom Eccles: “Great Collectors and Their Ideas No. 8”

ArtReview presents an interview with Peter Brant by Tom Eccles:
Great Collectors and Their Ideas No. 8.

“My interest in art really began with my father when I was about twelve or thirteen years old. At an early age it was sports that I really did well, but my dad, who was from Europe and spoke 13 languages, was more intellectually inclined. He was interested in art, loved to go to museums and would take me to places like the Frick. He and I were very close, and art was where we joined forces. During his lifetime he collected Rococo paintings but was not very interested in modern art. He was really more interested in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century, and I was with him when he was purchasing some of his pictures. We went to a lot of museums together: he took me to Europe, and brought me to see the Louvre and the Prado. So I learned a lot about art at that time, especially the Old Masters, and especially eighteenth-century English and French painting. Then at fifteen or sixteen years old I became very interested in Impressionist painting, and that was my idea at the time of breaking into the modern. But I never really studied art history.” – Peter Brant

This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of ArtReview