Philadelphia Museum of Art's Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Collection

Homegrown collection, international appeal

The couple assembled one of the nation’s leading private collections of contemporary art. Until now, the pieces have been on the walls, floors and lawn of their Philadelphia home and New York City apartment. It is simultaneously encyclopedic and deeply personal.

The couple began collecting art soon after they met as students at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s. She was an art history major; he was a business student at Wharton.

They started buying objects that appealed to them on a gut level, then became friendly with the artists who created those pieces, asked each of them what work made them most proud, and tried to gather as many of those as possible. About half the works date from the past 15 years.

All along, they aimed to establish a collection that would never be sold off piece by piece. They wanted to have a structured, comprehensive grouping of the art of their generation, and wanted it preserved almost the way a museum would gather such treasures.

Eventually, they decided their collection should be deeded to an actual museum. Both are Philadelphians and have worked with the Philadelphia Museum of Art for many years, so the choice was a no brainer.

Katherine Sachs first became involved with the museum when she volunteered to stuff envelopes during the 1970 Van Gogh exhibition. She later worked as a museum guide. Keith Sachs is the former CEO of Saxco International, a distributor of packaging material, and board chair at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design.

Mixed media

What strikes me is the variety of media, forms and subjects in their collection. The exhibition includes video art, photographs and sculpture as well as paintings.

While the extensive group of Jasper Johns paintings is impressive, I am intrigued by some more unusual works. For example: Person Leaning (Persona appoggiata) is a six-foot-tall mirror with a painting of a man on its surface, seemingly leaning against its left edge and gazing across the mirror. As we observe him, of course, we are seeing a reflection of our own image, so the man seems to be looking at us. Michelangelo Pistoletto created this in 1964, using painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel.

Each visitor will admire different pieces, but another favorite of mine is Chaise lilas avec oeufs (Lilac Chair with Eggs). Belgian sculptor Marcel Broodthaers encrusted the seat of a dining room chair with broken eggshells and covered the assemblage with pinkish-white paint. The idea seems to be that we are likely to eat eggs while sitting in a chair; thus, we have an unexpected image of a common everyday custom.

Fire, by Richard Tuttle, blurs the line between painting and sculpture. It is a deceptively simple, irregularly-shaped horizontal plywood form placed on the floor without a pedestal, covered with hot pink acrylic. (The vivid color was possibly to prevent people from accidentally tripping over it.)

Boy With Frog is an eight-foot-tall sculpture by Charles Ray in Renaissance style of a child holding aloft a frog. As a metaphor for the joy of discovery, and a symbol of love for beauty, this is a perfect distillation of the Sachs collection.

Most of what’s here is on loan, pledged as a gift but not to be permanently transferred for many years. I recommend coming to see it now. The art will return to the Sachs’s homes at the end of the summer.