Los Angeles art collector Richard Weisman, (above right with Andy Warhol), remembers something his ex-wife said to him once, a comment on his startlingly prescient taste. “She said, ‘I know you’ll take this the wrong way, but you have very common tastes,’” Weisman remembers. “‘But the things that you end up liking everyone seems to like.’” In the end, anyway. Weisman was usually mocked and snobbed for his taste at the time. Back when the impressionists still ruled, he was buying from (then) unknown names like Rothko and Newman.

“Many jokes were made,” he says. “I got laughed at about the Lichtensteins because they looked like cartoons.” Anyone with a lick of art history knows that Weisman, a close friend of Andy Warhol (above left), got the last laugh, as well as a book deal for “Picasso to Pop: The Richard Weisman Collection,” which he is signing at a Consortium for the Advancement of the Arts event Saturday (Feb. 8) at Chasen Galleries in Carytown from 2-5 p.m. On display that afternoon will be original Warhols of Muhammad Ali from Weisman’s collection. — Wayne Melton