Collectors and Artists with Close Ties to Max Bill Among the collectors of Bill’s works in the U.S.A. were Paul and Ellen Hirschland, Nelson A. Rockefeller, Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (whose parents had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design Fallingwater, southeast of Pittsburgh), and Lillian Florsheim—who was not only an avid collector but also an artist in her own right, pivotally influenced by Bill and Jean Arp. Bill knew numerous American and U.S.-based artists personally and studied their work, including Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Fred Sandback, George Rickey, David Hockney, James Lee Byars, Nam June Paik, Fritz Glarner, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, Robert (Bob) Wilson, Donald Judd, and Richard Serra. He also collected works by some of these artists himself. Max and I met the figurative artist David Hockney at the opening of one of his New York shows in 1980. And it was Hockney who informed us that the American artist Shirley Goldfarb, whose portrait Hockney had painted (and about whom I had written a piece) had just died in Paris. We met Fred Sandback in Zurich at the opening of his show at the Annemarie Verna Galerie, on February 24, 1981.
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