Art: A Friend of the Fogg

A collector is known for his judgment. And it is no mean measure that, among those who studied with Harvard’s late Paul J. Sachs, no fewer than 16 became U.S. museum directors and curators.* The son of Samuel Sachs, a founder of the Wall Street firm Goldman, Sachs & Co., the 5-ft.-tall connoisseur started his career as a banker and wore a pearl stickpin. But his purchases were not at all conservative, ranging from Rembrandt to Saul Steinberg, Ben Shahn and Alexander Calder. He bought them all, mainly their graphic works, and used his collection to teach two generations to appreciate art.

Quality was the watchword of Paul Sachs, or “P.J.S.,” as he was known. Recalls Chicago Director Cunningham: “He believed that when you put your money down for a French painting, it should be good enough to hang in the Louvre, a British painting good enough to hang in the National Gallery.” And Sachs frankly believed in educating an elite. This was not so much a belief in art for the few but in art understood sufficiently by an elite to enable them to entice the many.

Anecdotes & Tactics. He was quite willing on occasion to let art overwhelm him. One time after he had acquired a Cézanne, he presented it to his seminar and began to expostulate on its form. Suddenly he stopped, exploded, “My God, just look at it!” This is the sensation one gets while viewing the current memorial exhibit from his collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The memorial could not be better hung nor more appropriately placed: not only was he one of the Modern’s seven founders; he also hand-picked as its first director his pupil, Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Sachs used his graphics as teaching tools. “It is in his drawings that an artist makes his most spontaneous statements,” said Sachs, “and enables us to follow his thought in the very act of creation.” While his students clustered around them in his living room at his Cambridge house, called Shady Hill, he spoke of the humanity that swelled in the lines and shading of the works. “I never finished a lecture,” recalls John Walker, “without wanting to rush out and buy all the prints I could afford and drawings that I couldn’t.”

Despite its informality, Sachs’s course was no pipe. “One of our first assignments was to memorize all the objects in a room at the Fogg,” remembers Curator Lieberman. “And of course we did it.” Sachs liked to teach more by anecdotes than academics. “He talked about all his purchases,” remembers Curator Rousseau, “and gave us a sense of the tactics you have to learn. A museum person has to be fast on his feet—a scholar, a collector, a dealer and a showman all mixed with diplomacy. Sachs was all these things.”

Blueprints of the Mind. Passion stamps the paper that the artists have sketched on. Most of the works in Sachs’s collection are small. A ghostly group of apostles in bistre (a soft soot brown) watch Christ ascend off the paper in the deft dreaminess of the quattrocento hand of Andrea Mantegna. Sachs loved the graphics of Edgar Degas (he owned 21), and one of the best is the 12-in. by 9-in. brush drawing A Young Woman in Street Costume. Despite its smallness, the purity of the girl’s soft profile gives it the monumentality of proud, aloof youth. His Picasso study of a mother and child, making a contrapposto of shoulders and hands, is superlative enough to make the Blue Period of 1904 seem a perfect neighbor to Mantegna’s 15th century touch. For Sachs, it was the exquisite image in itself; nothing else mattered.

As blueprints for the meanderings of the human mind, Sachs’s collection was something not even to be possessed. He gave his private collection to the Fogg for study purposes. Labels never bore his name as lender or donor; the only identification they wore was that they were from “A Friend of the Fogg.” Sachs, upon his death in 1965 at the age of 86, had given 2,690 works to the museum, a bequest by an individual to a teaching collection unequaled in its taste and scope.

* Among them: the late James Rorimer, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Met Curators Theodore Rousseau and Jacob Bean; Museum of Modern Art Curator William Lieberman; Chicago Art Institute Director Charles Cunningham; National Gallery Director John Walker; Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum Director John Coolidge; Fogg Assistant Director Agnes Mongan; Boston Museum of Fine Arts Director Perry Rathbone; Morgan Library’s Curator Felice Stampfle; Toledo Museum Director Otto Wittman.