Vatican Museum director Fancesco Buranelli recently said that he would like to have a Picasso. This got my imagination going. What artist wouldn’t want a painting in the Vatican? The director was interviewed by La Stampa, but I couldn’t find the full interview anywhere online.
Still curious, I got to reading a 1974 article by Robert Hughes, then TIME’s art editor. 
He says that Pope Paul VI kicked off the Vatican’s twentieth century religious art collection in 1964. Included in the article, some terribly blurry moire patterned pictures of Matisse’s work for the Chapel of the Rosary of Vence. I thought this was interesting too:
The only full-fledged outside organization for getting art into the Vatican is at present the Committee of Religion and Art of America, a tax-exempt body based in the US, whose vice president is an art dealer named Lawrence Fleischman.
Looking further into Lawrence Fleischman, I found an interesting Smithsonian interview from 1994. Fleischman explains how he became an art dealer. He’s serious about art. He’s not a fan of “postcard realism” or abstract expressionism, but he likes Andrew Wyeth and social realism. I’m not familiar with Wyeth yet, but I saw Christina’s World at the Whitney in NY and spent a long time looking at it. Every dry blade of grass in that field is painted individually–not something you can appreciate online.
When Fleischman reads about art, he likes “facts, not a bunch of baloney.” He also mentions John Marin, one of my favorite artists. “When I used to talk to John Marin, who was my friend–he was one of the first to mention I should become a dealer–he would consider himself as a realist, not an abstract person.” The first time I saw his work was in Florida at the Harn. Marin’s landscapes play with a crude touch. They get wild, but somehow his color feels faithful to life.