“All art has four dimensions,” says John Axelrod. “The three you see, plus the story of how you got it.” If so,the former Boston attorney is quite the story collector. His capacious Back Bay apartment glitters with gems of the Harlem Renaissance and American Art Deco. Axelrod is among the world’s premier collectors of both styles. His home may warrant a catalog worthy of a small museum, but it has a loved, lived-in feel. Antique plastic figurines (Superman, Felix the Cat) on one shelf stare down Ukrainian Cubist sculpture from 1910–11 on another. Little personal items sit atop a stunning Paul Frankl skyscraper cabinet. Lush figural paintings clustered cozily above the bed include two favorites by Paul Cadmus: YMCA Locker Room (1933) and The Shower (1943). Axelrod affectionately recounts the artist’s explanation for The Shower’s vivid, violent sky: The painting depicts Cadmus shut out of his ex-lover’s life, and the sky is meant to echo that frustration—not, as a professor once haplessly asserted, the existential angst of the Second World War. Living with art has taught him not to idolize it. “People ask, what if there was a fire? And I say, I’d grab the dog first and go downstairs. The dog’s living.”

As a rule, Axelrod says, he collects American work from between 1920 and 1950; in practice, he simply buys what he likes. He’s become a scholar of the era—his shelves brim with history books and old exhibition catalogues—but he makes clear his dislike for academic theorizing. “Art history,” he says dismissively, “changes as Russian history used to change.” Asked what it is about the interwar style that appeals to him so, he claims instead to be allergic to the question. Taste in art, he says, is a “chemical” thing, defying systematic analysis, and is necessarily personal; if others share his taste, great, and if not, “they don’t have to live with it.”

Axelrod began buying art while at law school in 1970; collecting has always been more of a vocation for him than lawyering ever was. “John tends to collect in an area before the masses get there,” says dealer Mark Brock of Brock & Co. in Carlisle, Mass. Although he’s made more than his fair share of inspired purchases that have spiked in value, the investment aspect of collecting means little to him. He steers the conversation back to love: “People ask me, should I buy this? And I say, do you love it? If you don’t love it, nothing else matters.” The worst thing for art and collecting, he says, is “those people who buy art as an investment. It gets to be like a disease.”

If it’s for love, part of the thrill of collecting is new conquests; Axelrod says that the piece he likes best is always the last one he’s bought. However, new acquisitions are becoming fewer and fewer. “For what I collect, it’s extremely hard to find good stuff,” he says. “And I already have a lot of the best.”