When Douglas Baxter was growing up on a small Ohio farm in the 1950s, loneliness often led him to seek refuge in visual experiences. "My first and most intense memory was of dust particles caught in sunlight pouring through a window," recalls the current president of Manhattan’s PaceWildenstein gallery. "The beauty of the scene struck me. The image hasn’t left me to this day."

That same appreciation for what the eye beholds has informed his career as well as his personal passions. In his two decades at PaceWildenstein, he has honed his aesthetic preferences and had the rare opportunity to meet the artists who have defined the second half of the 20th century — and to acquire their work for himself. Baxter’s collection, which he keeps in his Manhattan apartment and in his homes in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and Miami Beach, is a showcase of contemporary luminaries, among them Robert Mangold, Joel Shapiro, Jennifer Bartlett, Carl Andre, Keith Sonnier, Fred Wilson, Sol LeWitt, Kiki Smith, Jim Dine, Julian Schnabel, Bridget Riley and Antoni Tapies. While he buys at auctions and galleries like any other collector, Baxter has acquired some pieces as gifts from artists he knew before they became market stars. Still others are even more personal, such as a golden-brown portrait drawing that Alex Katz did of him, which he has hanging above a mid-century French side table by Pierre Chareau in the entrance hall of his Manhattan apartment. "Alex does cartoons, in the Old Master sense of the word," Baxter notes.

Baxter complements his art with exquisite and sometimes quirky furnishings, among them a 19th-century Korean rice chest, 18th-century Chinese cupboards, a Josef Hoffmann chair, a Stickley umbrella stand, a Fornasetti lamp and a bookcase by Le Corbusier. In the same room as the Corbusier is a Korean scholar’s bench that happens to echo the Corbusier’s form. "I love putting things together that are completely different but look alike," says Baxter.

He has a pair of chairs by Adolf Loos, as well as Dutch modernist chairs that he had upholstered in fabric designed by Gregory Evans, David Hockney’s longtime assistant. Baxter credits Mark Kaminski, "a wonderfully gifted architect who died young," with the design of the apartment as a whole, while the bedroom is dominated by a platform bed specially designed for Baxter by Donald Judd. "I asked Don if he would design a bed for me," Baxter recalls. "He did a drawing and I looked at it, and if it had been built to his original specs, it would have practically filled the room. I said, ‘Don, you don’t understand, I live in a nice little penthouse in a prewar building with a bedroom, not in a loft.’ I came back to him with dimensions that would work, and those he cheerfully did."

Perhaps surprisingly for a dealer of blue-chip contemporary art, Baxter is also a passionate collector of pottery. He especially favors rural North Carolina makers such as Jugtown and North State, as well as a little-known Jakarta-born Dutch modernist designer named Piet Groeneveldt, whose works are everywhere in the apartment. "I used to pick those up in flea markets in Holland," he says. As for the North Carolina pieces, says Baxter, "There’s a whole tradition of pottery-making there that goes back to colonial times and went up through moonshine-jug production. In the 1920s and ’30s a Bohemian New York wealthy lady opened a teahouse in the Village and used these pots." Now they’re highly collected, he points out, and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., has a section devoted to them.

Baxter began his art education upon leaving the farm for Oberlin College, where he fortuitously signed up for an art history survey taught by Ellen Johnson, known for her writings on Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg, and famous at Oberlin for her dynamic lectures on modern art. "She was a fantastic teacher," says Baxter. "Even pre-med students left her class in tears after her Van Gogh lecture. She was also very glamorous, living in a Frank Lloyd Wright House she restored in Oberlin and left to the college when she died in the late 1990s. She also left the college her art collection, which included some nice things—an Oldenburg, a Warhol ‘Jackie’—that would now sell for $3 million or $4 million."