In 1970, four years after they married, the Seattle art collectors Jane Lang Davis and Richard E. Lang bought their first painting together. Attracted by the Abstract Expressionists, they traveled to New York often and picked out singular works to hang on their walls. During the 1970s and 80s, they acquired works by Francis Bacon, Lee Krasner, Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Joan Mitchell, and many more. In an interview of 1981, they said they’d initially planned on a decor with bare walls, spare and elegant, but then decided to allow one painting “over the couch in the living room.” And that, they said, “was the beginning of the urge to have only the unusual.” Nineteen of the Langs’ unusual and important works are now on view in Seattle. —E.C.