Audiard.net

“I WAS GRABBING THINGS FROM MY cradle,” says Mitchell (Micky) Wolfson Jr., his way of acknowledging that the urge to collect came first, the rationale behind his astounding collection second. The result of this half-century of grabbing–and an $84 million inheritance–is the stunning Wolfsonian museum in Miami Beach, which houses most of the 100,000 items Wolfson has combed the globe to acquire and which has been welcomed enthusiastically by the art and museum worlds. “It’s an incredibly rich resource,” says Derek Ostergard of the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts in Manhattan. And Dodge Thompson, the National Gallery’s longtime chief of exhibitions, calls it “a valuable and cutting-edge museum.”

What makes Wolfson’s collection unique is his singular taste and interests. He has never coveted the name-brand paintings and sculptures that often adorn the homes of collectors of …

C.C.WANG PLANTS HIMSELF AT precisely the same spot in relation to each Chinese scroll painting we view. Adopting precisely the same physical posture every time, he seems almost to be listening as well as looking. It’s the brushwork that, in each instance, he asks us to absorb. He has repeated this lesson countless times over many decades: the Western tradition may focus on color or composition, but the Chinese tradition looks beneath such externals to the underlying “brushvoice,” as Wang calls it. He knows exactly how to approach the canvas to catch its nuances. This must be, one thinks, the connoisseur’s equivalent of the perfect golfing stance. This man has perfected the art of looking.

C.C. Wang (pronounced Wong), who is 93 this year, is said to have seen more classical Chinese landscape paintings than anyone in history. He’s also …