We feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even with that greatness which made the spots on which it rested hallowed and until by our own lives and by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed us we feel that union and relationship of the spirit which we seek.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.