Paul J. Sachs
New York, 1878 - 1965, Cambridge, Massachusetts
From 1900 to 1915 Sachs led two lives, one as a Wall Street banker and respected member of the New York business community and the other as an art collector and connoisseur. He married Meta Pollack in 1904; they had three children. Every spare moment not devoted to business and his family, he spent visiting art dealers, collectors, and museums in New York City and acquiring works of art. During these years he made several gifts to Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, directed by his mentor Moore.
In 1912 Sachs's interest and generosity came to the attention of the new director of the Fogg, Edward Waldo Forbes, who invited him to join the Fogg's Visiting Committee. In 1913 Sachs became the committee's chair and demonstrated considerable effectiveness in using his New York connections and influence to obtain objects for the Fogg. Forbes, impressed by Sachs's competence, energy, and devotion to the fine arts, offered him the assistant directorship of the Fogg Art Museum in 1915.
Sachs accepted without hesitation, retired from the banking firm, and moved his family to Cambridge. He purchased "Shady Hill," the former home of famed Harvard fine arts professor Charles Eliot Norton. Despite his Jewish origins and "outsider" status, Sachs rapidly established himself as an active participant in Boston's Brahmin culture. Shady Hill became the center of an active fine arts community in Cambridge, as Sachs used his home both as a classroom and as a place to entertain visiting dignitaries from the museum world. During World War I he was in the Ambulance Service of the American Red Cross, serving in France in 1918.
From 1915 until his retirement in 1948, Sachs built an international reputation as a collector and educator but most of all as a museum director. His friends and connections spanned continents, and he influenced a generation of students who went on to shape museum practice in the United States.
Sachs's devotion was first and foremost to the Fogg Art Museum. During the first decade of his partnership with Forbes, the two men succeeded in building a new structure for the museum, which opened in 1927. Besides much more space for the collection, the new building had classrooms and a conservation laboratory. In their tireless efforts on behalf of their alma mater, the "heavenly twins," as Sachs's close associate Agnes Mongan described them, raised money during the 1920s not only to build the museum but also to construct the Harvard Business School.
Central to Sachs's and Forbes's mission was the development of a world-class art collection. In the space of a decade Sachs created an internationally renowned collection of master drawings whose quality attested to his connoisseurship. His drawing collection was bequeathed to Harvard at his death. Through his infectious zeal, other donors and collectors, including Felix Warburg, Grenville Winthrop, and Maurice Wertheim, also gave generously to the Fogg.
In 1917 Sachs accepted the position of assistant professor at Harvard, becoming associate professor in 1922 and full professor in 1927. Teaching went hand-in-hand with administration throughout his tenure. He taught courses in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings and prints until his retirement. His most popular course, however, was Museum Work and Museum Problems, which he established in 1922 to address the practical issues of museum management. He taught this unique course annually to a small group of graduate students as an informal and interactive seminar both in his home and in the Fogg Museum.
It was in the museum course that Sachs extended his influence as museum director and made his greatest mark. In a time when the museum movement in the United States was developing at a rapid pace, institutions were struggling to develop professional leadership and define operating principles. Through the museum course, Sachs worked tirelessly to instruct students in his model of ideal museum management and in principles of connoisseurship. He insisted on the highest standards of quality and on collecting only the best in all fields.
His ideal museum director was part art expert, part scholar, and most of all an effective mediator among the many factions that make up the museum world. His early years in New York had taught him to understand and respect the symbiotic relationships that exist among collectors, dealers, museum personnel, and scholars. He instructed his students in such knowledge and in the practical skills of becoming a museum administrator.
Students described Sachs as a "one-man employment agency," so effective was he in placing them in key museum positions around the country. In 1929 he recommended his most famous protégé, Alfred H. Barr, as first director of the Museum of Modern Art. From his post as founding member of MOMA's board of trustees, Sachs guided his former student in the establishment of America's first museum of modern art. Other students also became directors and curators in major institutions, among them the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Gallery, Washington D.C.; and numerous urban museums around the country. Sachs himself served on boards of trustees of a number of these institutions and played an active role in the American Association of Museums (president, 1932).
During World War II Sachs was a member of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Historic and Artistic Monuments and devoted his time to protecting works of art in occupied countries. He received the French Legion of Honor, and in 1965 a gallery of the Museum of Modern Art devoted to drawings and prints was named in his honor. He died in Cambridge.
Bibliography
Sachs's papers are in the Archives of the Fogg Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass. See the Columbia Oral History Project, N.Y., for a transcribed interview with Sachs conducted by Saul Benison (including letters and commentary). His publications include Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art (1940), coauthored with Agnes Mongan; The Pocket Book of Great Drawings (1951); and Modern Prints and Drawings (1954). For information on his art collection, see Memorial Exhibition: Works of Art from the Collection of Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) (1965). For information on his work as associate director of the Fogg Art Museum see Harvard's Art Museums: 100 Years of Collecting (1996). For his relationship to several of his famous students, see Nicholas Fox Weber, Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened Up America to a New Art, 1928-1943 (1992).
Sally Anne Duncan
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American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
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