Most of us only dream of being able to pick out our favorite pieces of art from museums to display in our homes.

Frank Stella and U.S. Ambassador Thomas S. Foley admire Hans Hofmann's "Yellow Space" (1949), currently on loan at the ambassador's residence.

For the ambassadors and their families sent from the United States to live abroad, however, such a dream is a reality. The Art in Embassies Program, initiated in 1964 under President John F. Kennedy's administration, provides curators who ascertain the ambassador's interests and tastes, then contact museums, galleries, private collectors and individual artists to arrange for works of art to be lent to the program.

Currently the program has 4,500 works with a cumulative value of over $70 million on loan to embassies and U.S. State Department buildings around the world. Artists represented in the program range from the 17th to the 20th century. The program also aims to be as inclusive as possible in the range of media exhibited, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, glass, textiles, photography, video and also larger installations. Its most recent project, overseen by Virginia Shore, the curator of the program, is a new permanent exhibition for the American Chancery in Moscow.

Ambassador Thomas S. Foley, the 25th U.S. ambassador to Japan, has chosen to grace his home in the Akasaka district of Tokyo with Abstract Expressionist art. At a reception and media tour July 5 he presented the collection to guests and members of the press, and announced the publication of "Artists in the Residence," a guide to the artwork on display in the ambassador's residence.

The prominent American artist Frank Stella (b. 1936) was on hand to view this public display of the collection, which includes Stella's own work "Violet to Red Violet," painted in 1967. The collection is representative of the major masters of the school of Abstract Expressionism, including works by Hans Hofmann, Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois, Adolph Gottlieb and Louise Nevelson.

"Avatar," by Isamu Noguchi, 1947, bronze

The Art in Embassies Program "is a wonderful thing," Foley said, "not only for those who have visited our embassies, but for the countries in which the embassies are located. We see what Americans value in terms of their cultural heritage.

"One of the things [the collection] shows," Foley remarked, "is the diversity of the American experience. We are a country that has welcomed artists from various places in the world.

"For example, Josef Albers' paintings reflect the life of a German-born painter who was important to the Bauhaus school."

The collection also bears the personal stamp of the ambassador who chooses it. In Foley's case, the Tokyo collection reflects his interest in modern painting, in particular the work of the Abstract Expressionists and their precursors. This interest dates back to his days as a student at the University of Washington in the 1940s, when he came into contact with the works of Mark Tobey and made his first art purchase, a Tobey lithograph. In addition to Tobey, the ambassador expressed particular interest in including works of Albers, Noguchi and Stella.

The Abstract Expressionist movement developed in New York following the end of World War II. It veered toward nongeometric abstraction, and followed the work of the preceding European modern art movements, including Surrealism, Cubism and Fauvism. Its artists strove to portray their inner psychological feelings through art.

Shore places the movement in an international context: "The development of the Abstract Expressionist movement on several continents represented the first time that, on a wide scale, artists from Japan and the U.S. were creating work based on similar principles and stylistic approaches."

The collection comprises 22 works of art, including paintings, sculptures and glass. The birthplaces of the artists range from the U.S. to Germany, France, Russia and Japan. Some of the artists represented in the collection emigrated to the U.S. immediately before or during World War II. Receiving influences from these various world cultures and their artists, Abstract Expressionism has international roots, but was born in the dynamic milieu of American postwar culture.

"We claim them as a part of the American cultural heritage," Foley proudly noted.

Ambassadors' residences are places where diplomats meet to talk of politics and economics, but they are also showplaces for the culture of the home country of the ambassador. Adjacent to the U.S. embassy, the U.S. ambassador's residence occupies about 64,900 sq. meters, including the residence and garden. The property, purchased from the Japanese government in 1925, was formerly the site of the residence of Prince Hirokuni Ito, which was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923.

The current residence, constructed in 1931 by the American architects Van Burren Magonicle of New York and Antonin Raymond of Tokyo, was designed in an eclectic style with Moorish and Oriental influences, following the Hollywood style of the 1930s. As the first structure built by the U.S. government specifically as an ambassador's residence, the building used American materials wherever possible, including American walnut for the walls and Vermont marble for the floors.

Twelve times the size of the average American home, the two-story building has a main entrance with a roof shaped like the crown of the Statue of Liberty in New York, designed to welcome visitors entering the house.

The prime work in the collection, Stella's "Violet to Red Violet" (1967), hangs in the grand foyer under the spiral staircase that ascends to the second floor. Measuring 178 by 178 cm, the work is a series of colors gradated from dark purple to bright red, each set off from the next by white borders.

This attention to segmentation and precision is representative of many of Stella's works from his "concentric" phase of the 1960s, including his early black paintings from 1959-60. Although Stella is not classified as a member of the Abstract Expressionist school, he avidly explored its work while a student at Princeton University.

Stella is considered an influential force behind the establishment of Minimalism as an art movement in the 1960s. Since his sensational debut with his first "black" painting at the age of 23, Stella's style has continued to evolve, influenced in part by his fascination with new materials and techniques; media he has worked in include painting, sculpture, architecture and industrial car design. He is regarded as one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century.

Foley had always dreamed of displaying a Frank Stella painting in his home, but it was not until he became ambassador to Japan that he was able to do so.

Across the room from Stella's work is the painting "Yellow Space," created in 1949 by Stella's spiritual mentor, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966). The two paintings, facing each other, catch the eye of the visitor with their bright colors. "Yellow Space" is a series of abstract shapes including red triangles, black and white squares, and geometric blue and green lines on a sunny yellow background.

Born in Germany, Hans Hofmann was a contemporary of the German Expressionists, French Fauvists and Cubists, mingling in Paris with such artists as Picasso and Matisse. After founding a school of modern art in Munich in 1915, he emigrated to the U.S., establishing art schools in New York and Massachusetts, and paving the way for the introduction of European Modernism to America. It would not be an exaggeration to say that he almost single-handedly provided the impetus for the emergence of Abstract Expressionism.

Mirror-Shadow XXIX, by Louise Nevelson, 1986, wood, painted black

One large wall in the foyer is dominated by the sculpture "Mirror-Shadow XXIX," an assemblage of scraps of wood painted black, done by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988), who studied under Hans Hofmann. Nevelson was born in Russia, and emigrated to the U.S. with her family in 1905. Considered a late bloomer, her name first became widely known to the New York art scene when she was in her late 50s, in 1956, when the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased her "Black Majesty."

Before the 1950s Nevelson worked in stone, wood and terra cotta. She became the first artist in the 1950s to use discarded materials to create large-scale art. The African masks and sculptures she collected were an important source of inspiration. Like other Abstract Expressionists, Nevelson fell in love with African art's emphasis on abstraction over form.

Ambassador Foley shares this interest, and side by side with the pieces of the official collection in the residence is his own private collection of African wooden masks, human and animal-shaped sculptures and clay figures, purchased over a period of 30 years on trips abroad and from the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

The residence also includes three abstract sculptures by the best-known Japanese-American artist, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), lent by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in Mure, Kagawa Prefecture. Noguchi was one of the primary members of the New York art circle of Abstract Expressionists in the 1940s.

"Avatar," at the entrance to the living room, is a tall, bronze sculpture made of four pieces joined together into one form with a system of slots and joints. No nails, rivets or welding are used in the sculpture: Just as Japanese homes built in the traditional style can be dismantled and easily moved, the sculpture can be simply assembled and disassembled.

Commenting on the setting where his art is placed, Stella says that ultimately the artwork "has to make it on its own." Yet in the ambassador's residence, each work of art far surpasses such expectations, creating a dialogue with other works. In the intimate space where Stella's "Violet to Red Violet" and Hofmann's "Yellow Space" face each other, the dialogue is intensified.

The program, Shore says, "turns artists into ambassadors for America."