Lloyd Cotsen's collections

my first collections were matchbook covers which my mother forced me to abandon as I was picking them up out of the gutters and bringing them home my father was an avid collector he collected Chinese bronze mirrors, Asian baskets, folk art, craft illustrated children's books, Noah's arks, lots of textiles The Cotsen collection had about 15,000 objects it was his joy when I was in the Navy I got stationed overseas in the Pacific and I had $200 a month to spend and I ended up buying Chinese bronzes so that started it at Princeton after undergraduate he applied to to graduate school in architecture, he did one year there he ended up going to business school and in the middle of business school he decided he wanted to go to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens he worked as an architect archaeologist I was drawing stones drawing stones is not the greatest exciting thing in the world a stone is a stone is a stone but the challenge to me was thinking how were these people living what were they doing in this building I looked and said there has to be a staircase there or there has to be holes for some posts nobody else was doing it after they found it they then thought about it and I was thinking before and so it was a whole different game hunt for me six weeks every summer for many, many years he had an archaeological dig in Greece that really made a big impression on him, changed him for life he had all these interests I mean whether it was Greece, archaeology certainly the Japanese baskets I grew up they were on our stairway in our small house he and his wife encountered this kind of squished looking awkward basket, they found it very charming so they bought it and then he started learning about Japanese bamboo baskets and became kind of an expert he also ended up collecting not just old baskets but modern baskets Japanese baskets take a material and vary the texture, vary the discipline and carry it to an extreme not a lot of Japanese at the time really appreciated them so he started the Cotsen Prize for bamboo baskets and it was very prestigious because here is a foreigner doing a prize for Japanese artists my father was a singular collector so whether it was baskets and then that sort of ended and he moved on he is well known for the Neutrogena collection of folk art and I think that it embodies this playfulness in his collecting the Neutrogena collection I started because I moved out of a big house so I took all the stuff out and hung it down in Neutrogena shared it with the people there but they didn't necessarily like it in the beginning but I was a dictator and they had no choice I happen to be interested in what I call no name art so I don't really care who the artist was what I'm really interested is how somebody used something and would leave a particular vision and then he went into textiles all around the office he had Kuba cloth, Japanese kimonos he loved to shop for these garments I've always been interested in texture because I like to touch things so most of the things I've collected reflect back of interest later in life he decided to collect fragment textiles nothing was larger than 24 by14 in fact he said nothing bigger than about this and we kind of measured that distance between his palms with all of his collections he really enjoyed putting them together but there was always this next stage where he would enjoy sharing them with everyone else the Japanese bamboo baskets were donated to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco the fragment textiles went to the Textile Museum at George Washington University the folk art collection was donated to the Museum of international Folk Art in Santa Fe the illustrated children's books went to Princeton and of course the Noah's ark collection what better place for that than the Skirball so his involvement with the art that he collected was complete everybody should be like Lloyd Cotsen