But the artist can't quite bring himself to stake his entire worth on straightforward, muted, color-field painting.

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My wife allowed me to keep it hung over the mantelpiece after I convinced her it was a Color Field painting.

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After he bought the Calder and the Tomlin, Kirshenbaum wanted a piece by Josef Albers, a German-born Bauhaus artist who pioneered so-called color field painting, in which large blocks of color are spread across a canvas.

FORBES: Feature

"What's interesting now is that the design field is also attached to the art world, " Van der Straeten says, sitting beneath a Jason Martin painting hanging above one of his console tables.

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