the grand traditions of music, painting and sculpture; he described Pablo Picasso as a "mountebank". Beyond expressionism, he derided the "beatnik, the Existentialist, the juvenile delinquent, the zaniest of abstract art, the weirdest aberrations of the mentally unbalanced, the do-nothing philosophy of Zen Buddhism" as a result of wanton "abuse of liberty and freedom." He had strong opinions against the work of Tennessee Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Willem de Kooning, as well as art dealer Sidney Janis. To support the art that he enjoyed, Hartford built an artists' colony in Rustic Canyon, above the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Buying more than 150 acres in 1948, he hired Lloyd Wright (son of Frank Lloyd Wright) to adapt existing structures and design new ones. When it opened in 1951, it had more than a dozen cottages and a central dining room for distinguished artists, composers and craftspeople who won scholarships for one to six-month retreats. For nearly 15 years, more than 400 colony artists generated international success with exhibitions, concerts, theater performances and Pulitzer Prizes; included among them were composers Ernst Toch, Norma Wendelburg, and Ruth Shaw Wylie, writer and activist Max Eastman, and painter Edward Hopper. Hartford also renovated and opened a theater which he renamed the Huntington Hartford Theater, which opened in 1954. For ten years the Hartford Theater was Los Angeles's premier venue for Broadway-scale productions featuring the stars of the time. Hartford's taste for Los Angeles began to wane, however, after the Los Angeles County Museum of Art rejected an exhibition he proposed. He decided to build his own museum in New York City, the 1964 Gallery of Modern Art on Columbus Circle, declaring that building a museum in Los Angeles was like putting up "a theater in Oklahoma" due to a lack of audience. With the financial commitment to a new museum in New York and tiring of his art colony, he asked local government officials and wealthy patrons to contribute to the colony's support. Lacking what he felt would be sufficient commitment, he shut down the colony in 1965 (he had sold the Huntington Hartford Theater in 1964). Art collection Hartford owned an extensive art collection. In an interview by Edward R. Murrow on his show Person to Person he gave a tour of the collection at his Beekman Place apartment including Rembrandt's "Portrait of a man, half-length, with his arms akimbo", which