“When I was born, my dad was starting to do much better in his business,” Diamond says, “and so I had this incredible childhood where I was able to grow up around really amazing modernist pictures, because my dad dealt at home.”

The walls were filled with works by Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, and the dwelling was filled with those artists, who often swung by for visits.

Yet the siren song of St. Marks Place was too loud for the teenage Diamond to ignore.

“Even though it seemed relatively cool to be in an apartment with Rothkos on the wall—and Barnett Newman riding a tricycle around the apartment—being a punk-rock kid, I couldn’t wait to get downtown. It all seemed pretty square,” he says. (Newman was not a tall man; the tricycle belonged to Diamond’s brother.)

Still, Diamond says that his parent’s lives affected his professional trajectory.

“I think the biggest gift I grew up with in that apartment in the El Dorado was that my opinion mattered. That was really, really important,” Diamond says. “It made it seem like, of course I’m in a band with these kids I grew up with, and we want to make rap music because that’s all we listen to. Then of course, we can do that, too.”

Diving In
Hester, for her part, devoted nearly 40 years to old masters, even as she crisscrossed the globe attending avant-garde art music recitals, attending Wagner’s Ring cycles, and meeting artists young and old.

“My mom was a practitioner of what I would call ‘the immersion practice,’” Diamond says. “She was not a dip-her-toe-in-the-water kind of person; it was sink or swim for her.”

There was no lag, he continues, between her initial excitement about old masters and “her literally diving in and learning all she could learn, whether it was going to museums or  talking to academics. She’d collect and continue to refine and upgrade her collection as she went along.”

Among other endeavors, she was the founding president of the Medici Archive Project, a research institution dedicated to studying the 200-year epistolary collection of the Medici grand dukes. She also donated numerous paintings to museums as her collecting evolved.