Stuart Pivar  Stuart Pivar (born 1930) is an American art collector from Brooklyn, New York known for being one of the founders of the New York Academy of Art along with Andy Warhol. Trained as a scientist, he has long endorsed the study of anatomy and need for artists to acquire technical skills. Pivar grew his fortune in the plastics industry and is also the author of several books. Stuart Pivar was born 1930 in Brooklyn, New York to a father who imported velvet ribbons and a mother known for being "intensely style-conscious". Pivar speaks Yiddish and was brought up in a Jewish family. He began collecting objects at age 7, starting with insects in Central Park, and later bottle caps on Kings Highway at age 8. He spent time at a summer camp in Kingston, New York. Pivar attended Brooklyn Technical High School before going on to earn a B.Sc in chemistry at Hofstra University, graduating in 1951. In 1959, Pivar founded Chemtainer Industries, a business that specialised in bulk-storage plastic containers. As an inventor, he made a large fortune in plastics. While remaining active in the plastics industry, he became an independently wealthy investor and buyer on the art scene. At The Factory in the early 1970s, Pivar met Andy Warhol who became one of his closest longtime friends. With Warhol he would go on regular shopping trips to buy "masterpieces", which could be objects bought anywhere, from a high-end auction house to a fleamarket. After the artist's death in 1987, Pivar recalled that "Andy Warhol loved to buy art. We used to go shopping together for it for a few hours practically every day in the past couple of years." Pivar was a collector of 19th-century academic art at a time when it was unfashionable. A scholar of the work of the sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye, he wrote "The Barye Bronzes: A Catalogue Raisonne" in 1974, a collation of critical commentary on all the sculptor's known works. Pivar endorsed the reintroduction of traditional skills into art school curricula, including the study of human and animal anatomy. With Warhol, he helped to found the New York Academy of Art in 1979, becoming one of its board members. The academy opposed abstract art and promoted traditional skills. According to Eliot Goldfinger, Pivar "strongly supported the acquisition of an anatomical collection of comparative skeletons, related artwork, anatomical models and charts, and the use of dissection as part of the curriculum."